I teach a general education course for my state university system. My students are third year students.
I have to tell them in writing that plagiarism is not allowed.
I have to tell them in writing that they need to attend class.
From an actual student email: "I also want to know if coming into class is a big deal for the sake of importance in missing something big?"
Another student decided to ignore the course URL on the syllabus but remembered I use Moodle, so has spent the last THREE WEEKS wandering aimlessly around moodle.org looking for his class' website.
At least four of them had problems with a login that was their first initial followed by their last name, with their password being the same.
I have students openly either sleeping or surfing porn in class.
Good for you! My mother had the same reputation but they couldn't threaten her because she dotted her i's and crossed her t's (meaning that she documented EVERYTHING) and my district is lucky we didn't sue them. I've been there and know exactly what you are talking about. I applaud you for sticking up for your daughter.
> It makes perfect sense to have a high quality, rapid application > development system available for the iPhone and iPad.
We already have that with Xcode. It's the same rapid application development system that a physicist used in 1990 to create the World Wide Web. A non-programmer was able to create the fucking Web with these tools.
Yes, and one of those web co-creators did it inspired by the Hypercard ancestor of RunRev while the other is a RunRev user today. If it's good enough for them...
No, they will do none of those things, including coming to you for a job. And the nice thing about this language is that they won't be doing those things because they don't have to. Do they have fun? You bet. Do they benefit? Yes, they benefit from being able to create their own solutions. They benefit from increased confidence in using something other than PowerPoint which, when you consider that these students are not ever going to lust about creating their own operating system, is huge. In terms of inventing a new language, subsets of this language have been successfully in use since the mid-1980s. Why natural language and GUI toolbars and widgets? Because normal humans, e.g., nonprogrammers, tend to be visual learners. I once had the opportunity to hear Robert Callaiou, co-inventor of the web (and, incidentally, a Rev user!), speak on the subject and he humorously noted what nearly every study I've read on the subject of teaching programming to novive/nonprogrammers: that learning language is best which contains the fewest curseword characters, because all those funky characters and definitely not normal usage of punctuation can make beginners go cross-eyed.
No, you're trolls because you criticize it without even looking at it and kicking its tires. Some of the people posting here in defense of the product are doing so not because they are paid to do so but rather because, unlike you, we did download it and kick its tires... and we're happy customers.
Which is precisely why the language does matter. languages that depend heavily on properly placed dots/semicolons/curlicue brackets and indenting are simply more difficult to learn. Writing proper pseudocode ends up being sacrificed for these things and, with RevTalk, the pseudocode ends up being pretty close to the real code.
And those who don't know history are doomed to post idiotic shit about it... Pascal just has a more verbose syntax and C has looser type-coercion rules.)
And the reason for this is that Pascal was designed as a teaching language.
It's funny -- do we ever hear engineers complaining that the wheel and fulcrum have already been invented and these noobs don't have to learn how to invent their own, or that they can use modern machinery?!
Do doctors complain about the invention of antibiotics or painkillers?
Do writers complain that we no longer have to rule things out on *parchment* before we write?
Geez... programmers are a grumpy, insular, jealous lot...
Okay, as the person who wrote that tutorial, I'd like to let you in on a few things. First -- I wrote it for my non-CS (third-year university student) majors who, in the course of 16 weeks, were able to use Rev to make interactive multimedia and computer games, and that, far superior to what their CS major colleagues were able to create. Second -- Try that with C++ or Java. Or even Flash. Goodluckwiththat. 16 weeks. Third -- Show me what your typical "geek" does after an introduction to programming in 16 weeks. Oh, and it needs to be cross-plat. Doublegoodluckwiththat. And they need to learn how to use audio editors, video editors, image editors... how to do animation... basic game and interactive system design, and user interface basics, all in the same 16 weeks. Right. Not happening, my friend.
Secondly, in terms of learning to program, you are clearly ignorant. Go through the ACM literature on the subject. Here -- let me help you: http://portal.acm.org/dl.cfm Here's a few references:
Mayer, R. (1981). The Psychology of how novices learn computer programming. ACM Computing Surveys 13(1), 121-142.
Smith, D., Cypher, A. & Schmucker, K. (1996). Making programming easier for children. ACM Interactions 3(5), 58-68.
Bonar, J. & Soloway, E. (1983). Uncovering principles of novice programming. Proceedings of the 10th ACM SIGACT-SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, 10, 10-13.
Green, T. (2001). Instructions and descriptions: some cognitive aspects of programming and similar activities. Proceedings of the working conference on advanced visual interfaces, 21-29.;
Barr, M., Holden, S., Philipps, D. & Greening, T. (1999). An exploration of novice programming errors in an object-oriented environment. SIGCSE Bulletin 31(4), 42-46.
Neal, L. (1989). A system for example-based programming. CHI'89 Proceedings, 63-68.
Guzdial, M. (1995). Centralized mindset: a student problem with object-oriented programming. SIGCSE'95, 182-185.
Ramadhan, H. (1992). An intelligent discovery programming system. Proceedings of the 1992 ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing: technological challenges of the 1990's, 149-159.
Decker, R. and Hirshfield, S. (1990), A Survey Course in Computer Science using Hypercard. Proceedings of the twenty-first ACM-SIGCSE technical symposium on computer science education 22(1), pp. 229-235.
If hearing Stallman talk about wanting to deflower female virgins during an Emacs speech, is the most psychologically scarring thing you've had to deal with in life, then all I can say is that you've had it a lot easier than most.
Wow. Talk about making the author's point. So, I am supposing that you'd be comfortable with replacing "female" with "African-American" and "deflower female virgins" with "n*ggers"?
The point being made is less that so-and-so in the FOSS community is a jerk/exhibits questionable judgement and therefore FOSS is inherently sexist than it is that vocal members of the programming community feel that sexist and/or offensive behaviours are morally defensible.
Or, perhaps, one needs to have been nerdy and suffer from bullying — something girls rarely have to go through...
WTF, Are you kidding me? Seriously? You obviously haven't been -- repeatedly -- the only "girl" in years of math and science classes, surrounded by immature leering little boys who repeatedly make crude sexual jokes and suggestions in your general direction, tolerated by a male teacher whose attitude is "boys will be boys" and "stop being so sensitive." Then, when such behaviours are publicly denounced as uncivil, watch in amazement as otherwise intelligent male humans will leap up to *defend* such behaviour as normative. Do any of these people truly believe that this *should* be the price of admission that women *must* pay in order to join the fraternal order?
Yes, I read your post. But a campus is a smaller version of the world, one that already kinda makes sense to them/has things to report on that they understand. I'm not saying these things CANNOT be done in the absence of a physical campus, only that I think it's BETTER done in the presence of one.
For example, screw up an article on whatever student government voted to do that week and it's really no big deal; screw up an article on something the city council did you might find yourself on the receiving end of a lawsuit by a councilmember. In this manner, the physical campus acts as safety net that catches you when you fall.
Did you do journalism in college? I did (though not as a major) and I cannot begin to imagine how this would work. The idea is that the physical campus is like a microcosm of the surrounding outside world, and you learn to write news, features, opinion and sports by reporting on those things within the microcosm.
Just having them interview professors subtracts so much from that experience (features? sports? opinion?) as does not having any feedback from readers via letters, or being able to hold in your hands a physical newspaper with your byline on it.
I still just can't see it. Ditto for campus radio (in which you operate a real radio station, making decisions about content and what your listening audience wants to hear) and campus television (ditto).
First, there's little data comparing how well people learn from online courses versus in-person courses. There's a lot of unjustified hype surrounding online education.
Well, as to your first assertion, there actually is a fair but emerging body of "evidence" which indicates NSD (no statistical difference). But, guess who's authoring these studies? Yup; lots of pro-Distance Learning types. Think they drink their own kool-aid much? Early studies lauded how helpful students found PowerPoint presentations initially; later studies not so much. So, yeah, I gotta agree with you entirely on our second comment.
Finally, does anybody find this funny that this is coming out of BYU of all places? I mean, really, if BYU goes entirely online, how will they ever monitor their students' sexual and alcohol-consumption habits?
Slashdot Mirror
I teach a general education course for my state university system. My students are third year students.
I have to tell them in writing that plagiarism is not allowed.
I have to tell them in writing that they need to attend class.
From an actual student email: "I also want to know if coming into class is a big deal for the sake of importance in missing something big?"
Another student decided to ignore the course URL on the syllabus but remembered I use Moodle, so has spent the last THREE WEEKS wandering aimlessly around moodle.org looking for his class' website.
At least four of them had problems with a login that was their first initial followed by their last name, with their password being the same.
I have students openly either sleeping or surfing porn in class.
Good for you! My mother had the same reputation but they couldn't threaten her because she dotted her i's and crossed her t's (meaning that she documented EVERYTHING) and my district is lucky we didn't sue them. I've been there and know exactly what you are talking about. I applaud you for sticking up for your daughter.
Runtime Revolution
RunRev CEO:
> It makes perfect sense to have a high quality, rapid application
> development system available for the iPhone and iPad.
We already have that with Xcode. It's the same rapid application development system that a physicist used in 1990 to create the World Wide Web. A non-programmer was able to create the fucking Web with these tools.
Yes, and one of those web co-creators did it inspired by the Hypercard ancestor of RunRev while the other is a RunRev user today. If it's good enough for them...
No, they will do none of those things, including coming to you for a job. And the nice thing about this language is that they won't be doing those things because they don't have to. Do they have fun? You bet. Do they benefit? Yes, they benefit from being able to create their own solutions. They benefit from increased confidence in using something other than PowerPoint which, when you consider that these students are not ever going to lust about creating their own operating system, is huge. In terms of inventing a new language, subsets of this language have been successfully in use since the mid-1980s. Why natural language and GUI toolbars and widgets? Because normal humans, e.g., nonprogrammers, tend to be visual learners. I once had the opportunity to hear Robert Callaiou, co-inventor of the web (and, incidentally, a Rev user!), speak on the subject and he humorously noted what nearly every study I've read on the subject of teaching programming to novive/nonprogrammers: that learning language is best which contains the fewest curseword characters, because all those funky characters and definitely not normal usage of punctuation can make beginners go cross-eyed.
http://www.uoregon.edu/~ftepfer/SchlFacilities/TireSwingTable.html
No, you're trolls because you criticize it without even looking at it and kicking its tires. Some of the people posting here in defense of the product are doing so not because they are paid to do so but rather because, unlike you, we did download it and kick its tires... and we're happy customers.
Which is precisely why the language does matter. languages that depend heavily on properly placed dots/semicolons/curlicue brackets and indenting are simply more difficult to learn. Writing proper pseudocode ends up being sacrificed for these things and, with RevTalk, the pseudocode ends up being pretty close to the real code.
If you were a novice programmer, or taught them, you would know the answer to your question.
And I'm lame for submitting this twice :-/
And those who don't know history are doomed to post idiotic shit about it... Pascal just has a more verbose syntax and C has looser type-coercion rules.)
And the reason for this is that Pascal was designed as a teaching language.
You're on /. and you need an uninstaller? Are you kidding me?
It's funny -- do we ever hear engineers complaining that the wheel and fulcrum have already been invented and these noobs don't have to learn how to invent their own, or that they can use modern machinery?!
Do doctors complain about the invention of antibiotics or painkillers?
Do writers complain that we no longer have to rule things out on *parchment* before we write?
Geez... programmers are a grumpy, insular, jealous lot...
Okay, as the person who wrote that tutorial, I'd like to let you in on a few things. First -- I wrote it for my non-CS (third-year university student) majors who, in the course of 16 weeks, were able to use Rev to make interactive multimedia and computer games, and that, far superior to what their CS major colleagues were able to create. Second -- Try that with C++ or Java. Or even Flash. Goodluckwiththat. 16 weeks. Third -- Show me what your typical "geek" does after an introduction to programming in 16 weeks. Oh, and it needs to be cross-plat. Doublegoodluckwiththat. And they need to learn how to use audio editors, video editors, image editors... how to do animation... basic game and interactive system design, and user interface basics, all in the same 16 weeks. Right. Not happening, my friend.
Secondly, in terms of learning to program, you are clearly ignorant. Go through the ACM literature on the subject. Here -- let me help you: http://portal.acm.org/dl.cfm Here's a few references:
Mayer, R. (1981). The Psychology of how novices learn computer programming. ACM Computing Surveys 13(1), 121-142.
Smith, D., Cypher, A. & Schmucker, K. (1996). Making programming easier for children. ACM Interactions 3(5), 58-68.
Bonar, J. & Soloway, E. (1983). Uncovering principles of novice programming. Proceedings of the 10th ACM SIGACT-SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, 10, 10-13.
Green, T. (2001). Instructions and descriptions: some cognitive aspects of programming and similar activities. Proceedings of the working conference on advanced visual interfaces, 21-29.;
Barr, M., Holden, S., Philipps, D. & Greening, T. (1999). An exploration of novice programming errors in an object-oriented environment. SIGCSE Bulletin 31(4), 42-46.
Neal, L. (1989). A system for example-based programming. CHI'89 Proceedings, 63-68.
Guzdial, M. (1995). Centralized mindset: a student problem with object-oriented programming. SIGCSE'95, 182-185.
Ramadhan, H. (1992). An intelligent discovery programming system. Proceedings of the 1992 ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing: technological challenges of the 1990's, 149-159.
Decker, R. and Hirshfield, S. (1990), A Survey Course in Computer Science using Hypercard. Proceedings of the twenty-first ACM-SIGCSE technical symposium on computer science education 22(1), pp. 229-235.
Well, one of the co-inventors of the www uses it, so, clearly, it's not just for 'dummies'.
What is it about geeks that they want to keep programming a hopelessly remote possibility for 'the rest of us'?
Ya know, 'the rest of us' actually have lives, significant others, etc. We don't all live in our parents' basement with blow-up dolls.
You're a slashdotter and you need an uninstaller? Lame.
Right, but not on the enormously huge scale that's possible with electronic voting machines.
If hearing Stallman talk about wanting to deflower female virgins during an Emacs speech, is the most psychologically scarring thing you've had to deal with in life, then all I can say is that you've had it a lot easier than most.
Wow. Talk about making the author's point. So, I am supposing that you'd be comfortable with replacing "female" with "African-American" and "deflower female virgins" with "n*ggers"?
The point being made is less that so-and-so in the FOSS community is a jerk/exhibits questionable judgement and therefore FOSS is inherently sexist than it is that vocal members of the programming community feel that sexist and/or offensive behaviours are morally defensible.
Why do women have to feel welcome? I'm a white dude and I feel unwelcome everywhere I go. Is that just me?
Why do we need to make them feel not welcome? What interest does that advance?
Or, perhaps, one needs to have been nerdy and suffer from bullying — something girls rarely have to go through...
WTF, Are you kidding me? Seriously? You obviously haven't been -- repeatedly -- the only "girl" in years of math and science classes, surrounded by immature leering little boys who repeatedly make crude sexual jokes and suggestions in your general direction, tolerated by a male teacher whose attitude is "boys will be boys" and "stop being so sensitive." Then, when such behaviours are publicly denounced as uncivil, watch in amazement as otherwise intelligent male humans will leap up to *defend* such behaviour as normative. Do any of these people truly believe that this *should* be the price of admission that women *must* pay in order to join the fraternal order?
Yes, I read your post. But a campus is a smaller version of the world, one that already kinda makes sense to them/has things to report on that they understand. I'm not saying these things CANNOT be done in the absence of a physical campus, only that I think it's BETTER done in the presence of one.
For example, screw up an article on whatever student government voted to do that week and it's really no big deal; screw up an article on something the city council did you might find yourself on the receiving end of a lawsuit by a councilmember. In this manner, the physical campus acts as safety net that catches you when you fall.
The right to privacy is a basic one.
Really? And where would that be?
:-(
Did you do journalism in college? I did (though not as a major) and I cannot begin to imagine how this would work. The idea is that the physical campus is like a microcosm of the surrounding outside world, and you learn to write news, features, opinion and sports by reporting on those things within the microcosm.
Just having them interview professors subtracts so much from that experience (features? sports? opinion?) as does not having any feedback from readers via letters, or being able to hold in your hands a physical newspaper with your byline on it.
I still just can't see it. Ditto for campus radio (in which you operate a real radio station, making decisions about content and what your listening audience wants to hear) and campus television (ditto).
But, how are they going to do this without a physical campus to report on?
First, there's little data comparing how well people learn from online courses versus in-person courses. There's a lot of unjustified hype surrounding online education.
Well, as to your first assertion, there actually is a fair but emerging body of "evidence" which indicates NSD (no statistical difference). But, guess who's authoring these studies? Yup; lots of pro-Distance Learning types. Think they drink their own kool-aid much? Early studies lauded how helpful students found PowerPoint presentations initially; later studies not so much. So, yeah, I gotta agree with you entirely on our second comment.
Finally, does anybody find this funny that this is coming out of BYU of all places? I mean, really, if BYU goes entirely online, how will they ever monitor their students' sexual and alcohol-consumption habits?