Electronic media are not necessarily better for communication of technical details (at least not yet). When I have a question --- say, about the layout of the stack that our compiler uses --- it's faster, easier, and more productive for me to walk eight doors down to the compiler engineer and ask him to draw the stack on his whiteboard. I can ask questions, he can slow down when he sees the confused look on my face, he can speed up when I make that little hand gesture that says "yeah, yeah, I know", et cetera. Body language _can_ be used to expedite and steer a conversation. Verbal communication is faster than electronic communication in part because electronic communication is still mostly _typed_ communication (average of 160 words per minute for speech versus practical maximum of somewhere around 90 wpm for typing). Also, speech does not have the same lag time between bursts as does e-mail.
I am not disputing the claim that e-mail is extremely useful for technical communication; I am disagreeing with the claim that verbal communication is nigh useless.
I disagree with the claim that communication can "really only take place between equals". My manager is excellent at listening to my opinions; he very often gives me free rein to do things the way I see fit and very often takes my input as the final word on a matter on which he has to make a decision. He trusts me and works well with me _because_ I talk with him frequently and keep him up-to-date... not just on what I'm doing but on what I've learned about what each of the engineering groups are doing. Perhaps I can re-interpret the claim about communication between equals such that I agree with it, since the strength of my communication bond with my manager comes from his acknowledgement that he is my superior in a business hierachy but is my peer in terms of intrinsic abilities.
I assert that analysis of a dataset that results from the tracking of communication by e-mail (exclusively) will preferentially give you the "islands" of small engineering groups in the map of communication flow.
When an engineer has a question for someone in his group, the question is usually a short one with a short answer. Furthermore, both engineers will have the necessary context for the question and the answer already, and therefore will not require lots of conversation to establish the context. If the engineers are not in the same room at the time that the question arises, this is the ideal scenario for a quick e-mail exchange (e.g., Q:"Is the default level for GOBHP high or low?" A: "low")
However, if you have a question for someone outside of your group, you probably need to spend a little (or a lot) more time and effort establishing context. Also, you might need to do a little more personal introduction (e.g., "Sorry to bother you, but I work in the XYZ engineering group and we're using your ABC tool to do..."). This is the kind of situation in which people tend to get up from their chairs, walk across the building, and sit down for a ten-minute chat with a fellow employee.
Even beyond missing verbal communication like this, tracking e-mail misses the importance of technical documentation. The study did mention that it tracked what files people downloaded, but I doubt that this really captured the flow of technical documentation, since much information is _still_ exchanged in paper form (gak!).
I am a technical writer for a medium-sized chip manufacturer. I am subscribed to virtually every company-internal technical mailing list. I spend weeks or months in face-to-face (and face-to-whiteboard) conversations with engineers in one group so that I can put as much information as possible into a document that is then made available to the entire company. If I do my job right, then I am acting as a narrow but very-high-singl-to-noise-ratio bridge between the islands of engineering groups. I don't see the Finnish study as capturing this quality of information exchange.
Finally, meetings --- both between boss and subordinate and between larger numbers of engineering peers --- can be opportunities for a huge flow of information between these islands. (Yes, meetings can also be black holes from which no useful work can emerge, but that only seems to be the case around here when one of the non-engineering executives is involved).
In short, I think the Finnish study misrepresents the real situation. At least in my company, we have a pretty open flow of communication between (not just within) engineering groups.
If this is the sort of logic they teach at IMSA, perhaps I should have been motivated "to say something bad".
It seems off-base to criticize my training in logic in response to a passage in which I was speaking about how the tone and disconnected nature of a piece of writing had led me to intuit a connection. Again, it appears that you are trying to use a personal reason and personal means (in this case an ad hominem attack on me) to criticize an entire school. [As to the personal reason, I'm sorry for jumping to what may be an insulting conclusion, but my curiosity begs me to ask: Is this acquaintance who was dismissed from IMSA not you yourself?] Please, if you are going to criticize a system of education, do so on a stronger foundation. I will try to defend the same system from a broad foundation of statistics from a large population. Until such time as I am able to do so, I will at least present a number (larger than 1) of cases in which the system has worked. Most importantly, I will refrain from using attacks against my interlocutor as pieces of my argument. My reasons for continuing in this discussion _are_ personal; the school in question was of great help to me and several friends.
Not that the issue of a minor taking prescription medication should really be the central issue in a discussion of residential gifted education, but since the subject has come up (and has given this thread its title)...
If parents and doctors have determined --- rightly or wrongly --- that a child is to take such medications, and if this child is in the care of residential school staff, the school will be asked by the parents to make sure that the medications are being taken. If the school chooses to not shoulder that responsibility, then the school tells the parents that it can make no such guarantees. The parents can then either accept that the kid may not take the medication _or_ they can yank the kid from the school. In one case I know of, the latter happened. In two, the former happened. I know of no cases in which the school used any enforcement tactics to push pills down someone's throat --- literally or figuratively. Being de facto parents of teenagers is a big burden for a school to carry. Much of the resentment that usually gets foisted onto parents gets passed instead to the school. I know I like my parents more than I would have if they had had to be the strict enforcers and disciplinarians that IMSA's staff was.;-) I _do_ strongly (and irrationally in some cases) dislike many of the staff, even thirteen years later.
I would like to read the details of your acquaintance's dismissal.
One poster said that he would like to see more discussion of how better education makes kids into better people, not just how the kids could eventually get better jobs. Good point. When I get into more depth with people on this topic (more depth than a couple of e-mail messages), this is where I tend to head. Many of the problems intellectually gifted kids have are related to self-image. There are problems with self-esteem being too high and too low, often in the same person, depending on the context. Magnet schools, residential and non-, put these kids around other people of like mind. No longer are you the big fish in the little pond; maybe you're still the biggest, but the difference between you and the local #2 isn't as great. Also, you are no longer likely to be attacked just for being smart. A few years of this can be valuable beyond estimation. IMSA kids seem to become stronger and more socially capable than they would otherwise. [This is exactly the kind of statement I will have to research. For now, it stands as an assertion made from personal observation.] This is my core reason for supporting these schools.
I was encouraged by the first paragraph of your post, which begins to question the criteria for calling IMSA successful. You correctly point out the need for a baseline (or, as you said, "control") against which to measure the success of IMSA alumni. Unfortunately, your second paragraph then goes on to do nothing other than present two pieces of anecdotal evidence, only one of which has any detail. This leads me to think that you do not have any interest in an objective evaluation of the school but, rather, a desire to say something bad. This isn't necessarily wrong, but cloaking the attack with a critique of methodology is misleading and therefore wrong. Luckily, the cloak was feeble enough that no permanent damage is likely to have been done. Note that Dr. Lederman never claimed that he was giving academically defensible statistics.
Such statistics do exist; I don't have the time to find them now, so I will respond with anecdotal evidence. Gifted kids in cities and in wealthy neighborhoods often have adequate access to education. Gifted kids in smaller towns usually do not. I am a graduate of the charter class of IMSA. I live in Seattle and work for a Silicon Valley company's software division. I would not have had the exposure to computers in my home town that I had at IMSA; this early immersion helped me get this job. My best friend at IMSA went to work for the Navy/NSA after dropping out of college. His computer skills attained in high school enabled him to get his crypto-spook job. His home town had 700 people and no computers (and I don't mean just in the school). There is a member of the class of '90 living in Seattle, making a mint with the Evil Empire. He is a college dropout and attributes much of his success to his IMSA education. He, too, came from a small town. IMSA gives gifted kids tools they would not have access to in their home towns. If a kid lives in a town that already has computers and gas chromatograph/mass spectrometers in the schools... that kid might want to stay at home.
Residential, state-funded high schools have a liability problem in that they are dealing with minors and have to accept the role of parents. If your reason for animosity against this school has to do with your acquaintance being booted because he wouldn't take his medication, then you at least need to think about what options such an institution realistically has.
BTW, I had a pretty rough time of it at IMSA. I call it the most valuable three years I ever spent in Hell. I held the record for the most often "restricted" (in-room suspension) student at the time. Nevertheless, I plan on supporting institutions like IMSA verbally and financially until I die.
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Electronic media are not necessarily better for communication of technical details (at least not yet). When I have a question --- say, about the layout of the stack that our compiler uses --- it's faster, easier, and more productive for me to walk eight doors down to the compiler engineer and ask him to draw the stack on his whiteboard. I can ask questions, he can slow down when he sees the confused look on my face, he can speed up when I make that little hand gesture that says "yeah, yeah, I know", et cetera. Body language _can_ be used to expedite and steer a conversation. Verbal communication is faster than electronic communication in part because electronic communication is still mostly _typed_ communication (average of 160 words per minute for speech versus practical maximum of somewhere around 90 wpm for typing). Also, speech does not have the same lag time between bursts as does e-mail.
I am not disputing the claim that e-mail is extremely useful for technical communication; I am disagreeing with the claim that verbal communication is nigh useless.
I disagree with the claim that communication can "really only take place between equals". My manager is excellent at listening to my opinions; he very often gives me free rein to do things the way I see fit and very often takes my input as the final word on a matter on which he has to make a decision. He trusts me and works well with me _because_ I talk with him frequently and keep him up-to-date... not just on what I'm doing but on what I've learned about what each of the engineering groups are doing. Perhaps I can re-interpret the claim about communication between equals such that I agree with it, since the strength of my communication bond with my manager comes from his acknowledgement that he is my superior in a business hierachy but is my peer in terms of intrinsic abilities.
I assert that analysis of a dataset that results from the tracking of communication by e-mail (exclusively) will preferentially give you the "islands" of small engineering groups in the map of communication flow.
When an engineer has a question for someone in his group, the question is usually a short one with a short answer. Furthermore, both engineers will have the necessary context for the question and the answer already, and therefore will not require lots of conversation to establish the context. If the engineers are not in the same room at the time that the question arises, this is the ideal scenario for a quick e-mail exchange (e.g., Q:"Is the default level for GOBHP high or low?" A: "low")
However, if you have a question for someone outside of your group, you probably need to spend a little (or a lot) more time and effort establishing context. Also, you might need to do a little more personal introduction (e.g., "Sorry to bother you, but I work in the XYZ engineering group and we're using your ABC tool to do..."). This is the kind of situation in which people tend to get up from their chairs, walk across the building, and sit down for a ten-minute chat with a fellow employee.
Even beyond missing verbal communication like this, tracking e-mail misses the importance of technical documentation. The study did mention that it tracked what files people downloaded, but I doubt that this really captured the flow of technical documentation, since much information is _still_ exchanged in paper form (gak!).
I am a technical writer for a medium-sized chip manufacturer. I am subscribed to virtually every company-internal technical mailing list. I spend weeks or months in face-to-face (and face-to-whiteboard) conversations with engineers in one group so that I can put as much information as possible into a document that is then made available to the entire company. If I do my job right, then I am acting as a narrow but very-high-singl-to-noise-ratio bridge between the islands of engineering groups. I don't see the Finnish study as capturing this quality of information exchange.
Finally, meetings --- both between boss and subordinate and between larger numbers of engineering peers --- can be opportunities for a huge flow of information between these islands. (Yes, meetings can also be black holes from which no useful work can emerge, but that only seems to be the case around here when one of the non-engineering executives is involved).
In short, I think the Finnish study misrepresents the real situation. At least in my company, we have a pretty open flow of communication between (not just within) engineering groups.
If this is the sort of logic they teach at IMSA, perhaps I should have been motivated "to say something bad".
It seems off-base to criticize my training in logic in response to a passage in which I was speaking about how the tone and disconnected nature of a piece of writing had led me to intuit a connection. Again, it appears that you are trying to use a personal reason and personal means (in this case an ad hominem attack on me) to criticize an entire school. [As to the personal reason, I'm sorry for jumping to what may be an insulting conclusion, but my curiosity begs me to ask: Is this acquaintance who was dismissed from IMSA not you yourself?] Please, if you are going to criticize a system of education, do so on a stronger foundation. I will try to defend the same system from a broad foundation of statistics from a large population. Until such time as I am able to do so, I will at least present a number (larger than 1) of cases in which the system has worked. Most importantly, I will refrain from using attacks against my interlocutor as pieces of my argument. My reasons for continuing in this discussion _are_ personal; the school in question was of great help to me and several friends.
Not that the issue of a minor taking prescription medication should really be the central issue in a discussion of residential gifted education, but since the subject has come up (and has given this thread its title) ...
If parents and doctors have determined --- rightly or wrongly --- that a child is to take such medications, and if this child is in the care of residential school staff, the school will be asked by the parents to make sure that the medications are being taken. If the school chooses to not shoulder that responsibility, then the school tells the parents that it can make no such guarantees. The parents can then either accept that the kid may not take the medication _or_ they can yank the kid from the school. In one case I know of, the latter happened. In two, the former happened. I know of no cases in which the school used any enforcement tactics to push pills down someone's throat --- literally or figuratively. Being de facto parents of teenagers is a big burden for a school to carry. Much of the resentment that usually gets foisted onto parents gets passed instead to the school. I know I like my parents more than I would have if they had had to be the strict enforcers and disciplinarians that IMSA's staff was. ;-) I _do_ strongly (and irrationally in some cases) dislike many of the staff, even thirteen years later.
I would like to read the details of your acquaintance's dismissal.
One poster said that he would like to see more discussion of how better education makes kids into better people, not just how the kids could eventually get better jobs. Good point. When I get into more depth with people on this topic (more depth than a couple of e-mail messages), this is where I tend to head. Many of the problems intellectually gifted kids have are related to self-image. There are problems with self-esteem being too high and too low, often in the same person, depending on the context. Magnet schools, residential and non-, put these kids around other people of like mind. No longer are you the big fish in the little pond; maybe you're still the biggest, but the difference between you and the local #2 isn't as great. Also, you are no longer likely to be attacked just for being smart. A few years of this can be valuable beyond estimation. IMSA kids seem to become stronger and more socially capable than they would otherwise. [This is exactly the kind of statement I will have to research. For now, it stands as an assertion made from personal observation.] This is my core reason for supporting these schools.
I was encouraged by the first paragraph of your post, which begins to question the criteria for calling IMSA successful. You correctly point out the need for a baseline (or, as you said, "control") against which to measure the success of IMSA alumni. Unfortunately, your second paragraph then goes on to do nothing other than present two pieces of anecdotal evidence, only one of which has any detail. This leads me to think that you do not have any interest in an objective evaluation of the school but, rather, a desire to say something bad. This isn't necessarily wrong, but cloaking the attack with a critique of methodology is misleading and therefore wrong. Luckily, the cloak was feeble enough that no permanent damage is likely to have been done. Note that Dr. Lederman never claimed that he was giving academically defensible statistics.
Such statistics do exist; I don't have the time to find them now, so I will respond with anecdotal evidence. Gifted kids in cities and in wealthy neighborhoods often have adequate access to education. Gifted kids in smaller towns usually do not. I am a graduate of the charter class of IMSA. I live in Seattle and work for a Silicon Valley company's software division. I would not have had the exposure to computers in my home town that I had at IMSA; this early immersion helped me get this job. My best friend at IMSA went to work for the Navy/NSA after dropping out of college. His computer skills attained in high school enabled him to get his crypto-spook job. His home town had 700 people and no computers (and I don't mean just in the school). There is a member of the class of '90 living in Seattle, making a mint with the Evil Empire. He is a college dropout and attributes much of his success to his IMSA education. He, too, came from a small town. IMSA gives gifted kids tools they would not have access to in their home towns. If a kid lives in a town that already has computers and gas chromatograph/mass spectrometers in the schools... that kid might want to stay at home.
Residential, state-funded high schools have a liability problem in that they are dealing with minors and have to accept the role of parents. If your reason for animosity against this school has to do with your acquaintance being booted because he wouldn't take his medication, then you at least need to think about what options such an institution realistically has.
BTW, I had a pretty rough time of it at IMSA. I call it the most valuable three years I ever spent in Hell. I held the record for the most often "restricted" (in-room suspension) student at the time. Nevertheless, I plan on supporting institutions like IMSA verbally and financially until I die.
Todd Groner Kopriva