I live almost exactly 100 miles away from Chicago in rural Illinois, and I can't even get a cellphone signal at my home without going to the top of the nearest hill let alone wireless internet (our local electric utility said they were working on it 3 years ago). The assumption that the US is covered is BS.
>>The hard data shows far more crimes prevented by guns than caused by them. There's nothing to indicate that this would be any different in schools, and quite literally - we have most massacres occurring at schools. It does not take a genius to see that madmen are incentivized to rampage where they can expect no return fire.
As a university professor who graduated from the UW - Madison I watched in horror as the events in WI unfolded. I would like to note, however, that declining state support for public institutions is not new.
My father-in-law, who also graduated from the UW, worked his way through college in the 50s and 60s on a 10 hour per week work study job. On the other hand I worked my way through college in the 90s by working 40+ hours per week on second and third shift at a company with a decent tuition reimbursement program. Both of us came from relatively poor families that didn't contribute to our education, but we managed to graduate with little debt (my father-in-law graduated debt free; I only racked up $6,000 over the course of my 9 years!)
It seems now our system is designed to produced indentured servants who will have little choice in what they study and where they will work.
Yes, yes, yes. Copyrighted material should be respected. Yada Yada Yada. It's all a very sad (and somewhat humorous) story.
I can't help but wonder how many of you ripping the woman from Cooks Source (as wrong as she was) have songs you did not purchase on your iPods, copied and submitted without proper citation someone else's text in your research papers, etc.
The problem with your argument is many clients (new / small businesses) don't know the value of working WITH a designer. This is kinda like when a person walks into Wal-Mart to buy a socket set. It looks shiny in their toolbox, and they don't know any better until it strips out / twists / breaks when they need to put some real pressure on it.
Wal-Mart has driven countless small local businesses into bankruptcy while making a mint selling this crap.
Personally, I think this means that as design becomes just another commodity you are going to see serious downward pressure on the fees that all but the largest firms can command (think of Dell, HP, etc as the commodity side of that equation and Apple (ironically) as the high end). After all, I read an article about companies outsourcing design to India (I'm looking for the article - I'll post later).
My wife and I homeschool precisely because we were disgusted with both the quality and the direction of the public school in our district. Before making that decision we attended school board meetings, met with our children's teachers, and had private meetings with both the past and present superintendent. While not too surprised what we found was indifference at just about all levels. Both my wife and I are college grads - I majored in the humanities and my wife in the sciences - and neither of us are religious.
Evolution was too controversial, but letting a community church onto school grounds so they could proselytize and pass out bibles to our kids as they got off the bus and walked into the school building was no big deal. Our children were at the top of their classes, but gifted programming was eschewed for individualized learning plans -- a nice idea except all it meant to the teacher was letting our kids finish their work then tutor the other kids. Classrooms of 25 - 30+ kids in 1st grade were not an issue to be concerned about.
What really surprised us were the supportive phone calls we got from teachers after we pulled our kids out. Teachers know things aren't right, but when their job depends upon keeping their mouth shut during these tough times what's a teacher to do?
Now in our second year of homeschooling things are going great. Science and math are an integral part of our homeschooling, our kids have been exploring another language thanks to some decent support materials on DVD and the web, history is as accurate as we can make it, and we don't have to worry about some other parent complaining that the dictionaries in the library define oral sex. As for extra curricular activities our kids are involved in at least one sport every season through the YMCA and YWCA (in our area they're merged). They have friends who they occasionally spend the night with and vice versa. Their bright, inquisitive, social and aren't afraid of science and math (ok - I'm a proud parent too;-).
I wouldn't characterize us as Luddites. Rather, I would say understanding the technology we have a healthy respect and even enthusiasm for its potential but well-informed concern for its liabilities.
This whole thing reminds me of how Walt Disney's passing affected his company.
Basically Disney lost direction, stopped making new animated movies, and hoped that revenues from merchandise and attendance at Disneyland kept the bills paid.
All of this changed of course with Michael Eisner's taking the reins. How did he do it? Aside from his business savvy (something that shouldn't be minimized) he looked back at the way Walt ran the show and continually asked himself what would Walt do.
It didn't last forever, but as everyone mac fan knows the cult of personality around Steve has a basis in the fact that Steve has vision and ruthlessly pursues that vision until it is achieved.
Apple is going to either need someone with a vision and business acuity equal to Jobs, or someone who is able to channel Jobs like Eisner did Disney.;-)
I'm not seeing that in any of the people listed in the article.
Being a professor myself I would point out that in my freshman level classes rarely is the front of the class full.
In my 10 years of teaching I've noticed as the students get older they tend to sit closer. I don't know if it's their sight, hearing, or interest-level, but I like to think it's the last possibility.;-)
Not surprisingly as a group the older students tend to do better than their younger "peers."
1. Get a mac. 2. Assign a password to the root account. 3. Set up at least two limited user accounts;-) 4. Change login screen to show blank fields for username and password 5. Enable File Vault for your preferred account 6. Throw a couple of unimportant files on the desktop and change the background image to a pic of your familty, significant other etc. of the dummy account 7. Boot all of the programs in your dummy account to make sure you don't get any registration screens etc. 8. Install Firefox and set it to clear out your history / cache etc when you quit. 9. If you want to cover the online email issue set up a generic account with a free service provider, then sign up for junk mail from a couple of websites.
If I can figure this out, I'm sure the terrorists can too!
I worked for a fortune 100 company while finishing my degree, and wanted to continue after I graduated. Now admittedly I was a student and as such made some (small) dumb mistakes along the way, but overall I always thought I did a pretty good job (at least I got good reviews and decent raises).
It also just so happened the VP of Human Resources knew my mom and was always happy to give career advice - he even helped me polish my resume and cover letter. While we were talking one time I asked him about applying for a management position after graduation. While it kind of hurt at the time I thought he gave me some good advice. He said sometimes you have to move on to move up. He went on to say that I was a good at what I did and was easy to get along with, but it would be hard for people to forget when I was the new kid learning the ropes. And it helped that he said he too had started with another company in a similar position and had to look elsewhere to get into management.
I took this to mean that I should look for employment elsewhere after graduation. So I did, and fortunately got a decent job.
I've seen it happen to lots of people. They have great skills and work experience, but the companies they work for don't recognize, or value, those skills. In today's workplace where CEOs have no qualms about laying off thousands of employees in order jack the stock price up for their bonuses, you should always keep your resume handy, keep your ear to the ground about openings (network and stay in touch with business associates, classmates, and even your professors), and don't be afraid to apply for jobs elsewhere even if you aren't sure you want them.
I don't see the release of Vista's built-in document format hurting Adobe. Adobe still has their markets cornered with software like Acrobat, and Photoshop, and Illustrator (and now Flash) in the Print world which, realistically, is its one and only cash cow. Besides if Microsoft stays true to its track record by leaving too much of a bad taste in the mouth of the printing world with crap like Publisher, there aren't going to be many designers and industries leaping to make the switch.
I wish I could have gotten to this topic earlier, but oh well.
As a college professor my experience has been that by the time they get to me most of my students no longer read the textbook and try to avoid buying it entirely if they can get away with it. I can't say I'm entirely unsympathetic to this attitude especially given some of the comments above: lecture straight out of the book, high textbook costs, etc. But when they get to me students do have to unlearn bad habits;-).
Admittedly I do teach in a technical field which requires a lot of hands-on instruction. Sure some students could get much of what we do out of a textbook, but textbooks are often lacking in the why we do it (a fact made painfully obvious to me every time I get a new textbook to consider).
So, in an ideal world I could find (I just don't have time at the moment to write - it's on my list though) a textbook that does a good job of integrating the mechanics, theory, and practice of my field. Unfortunately those books are few and far between. Instead what ends up happening is I try to find a book that covers as much of those three facets as possible with the fewest mistakes, then heavily supplement with handouts and lectures those areas that are lacking from the text(s).
Another thing my field allows (and I require of all my students) is attendance and participation in the local professional organization. At the monthly luncheons students can get so much real-world information and slip a foot in the door for future employment by networking at these events - job leads are spread by word of mouth, a good impression can lead to an interview down the line, even scholarship opportunities crop up on a yearly basis. Are these meetings a classroom? You bet! Would it be podcastible?
The MJS series posted within the past week seemed to indicate schools should have been investing their technology dollars in developing efficiencies in staffing and office needs rather than putting all their money into "a computer in every classroom" approach. Now that those moneys are drying up they not only still have bloated bureaucracies that suck vital funds from the classroom, they have an aging IT infrastucture with no way to upgrade and maintain it. If the money were earmarked for administrative upgrades this would be one area where technology could improve the schools.
Also, schools should stop getting conned into buying proprietary software. Most of what kids do on computers in school is surf the Internet and type papers. Why pay Microsoft (or Apple for that matter) for a proprietary system which is going to force them to upgrade or be antiquated every few years. Business may want its employees know how to use MSOffice, but come on - how hard is it to switch from Open Office to MSOffice and Firefox to, well, Firefox:-)?
What do we need to do to improve education in our society is remove the job training aspect of education. It encourages the just-in-time-am-I-ever-going-to-need-to-know-this- because-if-I-can't-measure-it-it-must-not-be-impor tant attitude which kills intellectual curiosity. Our education system is failing us is it was developed to produce workers for an industrialized society. In assembly line fashion we send our children to school where they are trained to move from subject to subject not based upon the natural curiosity all humans have but in response to the ticking of a clock. For most of us the real world doesn't work that way and children are saavy enough to know it's unnatural. Is it really so surprising that by the time they are adults their interest in learning has been stunted?
Photography has always been at its core a technology driven medium. If you look at the history of photography people have regularly switched from older technologies to new - even if that meant inferior image quality (like the switch from daguerrotypes to the positive negative process developed by Talbot - it's still too early; I can't remember the name of the process).
So this notion that "traditional" darkroom-based photography is better (or more "artistic" than digital is absurd.
I'll double check. The Apple sales rep said she had just got the policy the day before, and would read the policy to me "verbatim" (her words). She then went on to suggest I contact our sales rep. Okay.
I called our sales rep, and he said he would see what he could do and call me back. Rather than call me back he simply reinforced what the Apple agent said by faxing me a quote.
Slashdot Mirror
I live almost exactly 100 miles away from Chicago in rural Illinois, and I can't even get a cellphone signal at my home without going to the top of the nearest hill let alone wireless internet (our local electric utility said they were working on it 3 years ago). The assumption that the US is covered is BS.
>>The hard data shows far more crimes prevented by guns than caused by them. There's nothing to indicate that this would be any different in schools, and quite literally - we have most massacres occurring at schools. It does not take a genius to see that madmen are incentivized to rampage where they can expect no return fire.
Bullshit
As a university professor who graduated from the UW - Madison I watched in horror as the events in WI unfolded. I would like to note, however, that declining state support for public institutions is not new.
My father-in-law, who also graduated from the UW, worked his way through college in the 50s and 60s on a 10 hour per week work study job. On the other hand I worked my way through college in the 90s by working 40+ hours per week on second and third shift at a company with a decent tuition reimbursement program. Both of us came from relatively poor families that didn't contribute to our education, but we managed to graduate with little debt (my father-in-law graduated debt free; I only racked up $6,000 over the course of my 9 years!)
It seems now our system is designed to produced indentured servants who will have little choice in what they study and where they will work.
Welcome to Serfdom 2.0!
Thank you – I agree whole-heartedly! We're so self-referential sometimes it's nauseating.
Yes, yes, yes. Copyrighted material should be respected. Yada Yada Yada. It's all a very sad (and somewhat humorous) story.
I can't help but wonder how many of you ripping the woman from Cooks Source (as wrong as she was) have songs you did not purchase on your iPods, copied and submitted without proper citation someone else's text in your research papers, etc.
Bunch of hypocrites. Really.
The problem with your argument is many clients (new / small businesses) don't know the value of working WITH a designer. This is kinda like when a person walks into Wal-Mart to buy a socket set. It looks shiny in their toolbox, and they don't know any better until it strips out / twists / breaks when they need to put some real pressure on it.
Wal-Mart has driven countless small local businesses into bankruptcy while making a mint selling this crap.
Personally, I think this means that as design becomes just another commodity you are going to see serious downward pressure on the fees that all but the largest firms can command (think of Dell, HP, etc as the commodity side of that equation and Apple (ironically) as the high end). After all, I read an article about companies outsourcing design to India (I'm looking for the article - I'll post later).
I second inviolet's post.
My wife and I homeschool precisely because we were disgusted with both the quality and the direction of the public school in our district. Before making that decision we attended school board meetings, met with our children's teachers, and had private meetings with both the past and present superintendent. While not too surprised what we found was indifference at just about all levels. Both my wife and I are college grads - I majored in the humanities and my wife in the sciences - and neither of us are religious.
Evolution was too controversial, but letting a community church onto school grounds so they could proselytize and pass out bibles to our kids as they got off the bus and walked into the school building was no big deal. Our children were at the top of their classes, but gifted programming was eschewed for individualized learning plans -- a nice idea except all it meant to the teacher was letting our kids finish their work then tutor the other kids. Classrooms of 25 - 30+ kids in 1st grade were not an issue to be concerned about.
What really surprised us were the supportive phone calls we got from teachers after we pulled our kids out. Teachers know things aren't right, but when their job depends upon keeping their mouth shut during these tough times what's a teacher to do?
Now in our second year of homeschooling things are going great. Science and math are an integral part of our homeschooling, our kids have been exploring another language thanks to some decent support materials on DVD and the web, history is as accurate as we can make it, and we don't have to worry about some other parent complaining that the dictionaries in the library define oral sex. As for extra curricular activities our kids are involved in at least one sport every season through the YMCA and YWCA (in our area they're merged). They have friends who they occasionally spend the night with and vice versa. Their bright, inquisitive, social and aren't afraid of science and math (ok - I'm a proud parent too ;-).
I wouldn't characterize us as Luddites. Rather, I would say understanding the technology we have a healthy respect and even enthusiasm for its potential but well-informed concern for its liabilities.
This whole thing reminds me of how Walt Disney's passing affected his company.
Basically Disney lost direction, stopped making new animated movies, and hoped that revenues from merchandise and attendance at Disneyland kept the bills paid.
All of this changed of course with Michael Eisner's taking the reins. How did he do it? Aside from his business savvy (something that shouldn't be minimized) he looked back at the way Walt ran the show and continually asked himself what would Walt do.
It didn't last forever, but as everyone mac fan knows the cult of personality around Steve has a basis in the fact that Steve has vision and ruthlessly pursues that vision until it is achieved.
Apple is going to either need someone with a vision and business acuity equal to Jobs, or someone who is able to channel Jobs like Eisner did Disney. ;-)
I'm not seeing that in any of the people listed in the article.
BTW - isn't Steve on Disney's board?
Being a professor myself I would point out that in my freshman level classes rarely is the front of the class full.
In my 10 years of teaching I've noticed as the students get older they tend to sit closer. I don't know if it's their sight, hearing, or interest-level, but I like to think it's the last possibility. ;-)
Not surprisingly as a group the older students tend to do better than their younger "peers."
Hmmmmmmm....
okay I agree, they did do that with some of the money.
They also used that money to:
- overthrow democratically elected governments and supported to the hilt the dictators who took their place
- spy on American citizens
- provide corporate welfare
- suppress information about harmful chemicals in our food containers
1. Get a mac. ;-)
2. Assign a password to the root account.
3. Set up at least two limited user accounts
4. Change login screen to show blank fields for username and password
5. Enable File Vault for your preferred account
6. Throw a couple of unimportant files on the desktop and change the background image to a pic of your familty, significant other etc. of the dummy account
7. Boot all of the programs in your dummy account to make sure you don't get any registration screens etc.
8. Install Firefox and set it to clear out your history / cache etc when you quit.
9. If you want to cover the online email issue set up a generic account with a free service provider, then sign up for junk mail from a couple of websites.
If I can figure this out, I'm sure the terrorists can too!
I worked for a fortune 100 company while finishing my degree, and wanted to continue after I graduated. Now admittedly I was a student and as such made some (small) dumb mistakes along the way, but overall I always thought I did a pretty good job (at least I got good reviews and decent raises).
It also just so happened the VP of Human Resources knew my mom and was always happy to give career advice - he even helped me polish my resume and cover letter. While we were talking one time I asked him about applying for a management position after graduation. While it kind of hurt at the time I thought he gave me some good advice. He said sometimes you have to move on to move up. He went on to say that I was a good at what I did and was easy to get along with, but it would be hard for people to forget when I was the new kid learning the ropes. And it helped that he said he too had started with another company in a similar position and had to look elsewhere to get into management.
I took this to mean that I should look for employment elsewhere after graduation. So I did, and fortunately got a decent job.
I've seen it happen to lots of people. They have great skills and work experience, but the companies they work for don't recognize, or value, those skills. In today's workplace where CEOs have no qualms about laying off thousands of employees in order jack the stock price up for their bonuses, you should always keep your resume handy, keep your ear to the ground about openings (network and stay in touch with business associates, classmates, and even your professors), and don't be afraid to apply for jobs elsewhere even if you aren't sure you want them.
You never know when something better may open up.
I don't see the release of Vista's built-in document format hurting Adobe. Adobe still has their markets cornered with software like Acrobat, and Photoshop, and Illustrator (and now Flash) in the Print world which, realistically, is its one and only cash cow. Besides if Microsoft stays true to its track record by leaving too much of a bad taste in the mouth of the printing world with crap like Publisher, there aren't going to be many designers and industries leaping to make the switch.
I wish I could have gotten to this topic earlier, but oh well.
As a college professor my experience has been that by the time they get to me most of my students no longer read the textbook and try to avoid buying it entirely if they can get away with it. I can't say I'm entirely unsympathetic to this attitude especially given some of the comments above: lecture straight out of the book, high textbook costs, etc. But when they get to me students do have to unlearn bad habits ;-).
Admittedly I do teach in a technical field which requires a lot of hands-on instruction. Sure some students could get much of what we do out of a textbook, but textbooks are often lacking in the why we do it (a fact made painfully obvious to me every time I get a new textbook to consider).
So, in an ideal world I could find (I just don't have time at the moment to write - it's on my list though) a textbook that does a good job of integrating the mechanics, theory, and practice of my field. Unfortunately those books are few and far between. Instead what ends up happening is I try to find a book that covers as much of those three facets as possible with the fewest mistakes, then heavily supplement with handouts and lectures those areas that are lacking from the text(s).
Another thing my field allows (and I require of all my students) is attendance and participation in the local professional organization. At the monthly luncheons students can get so much real-world information and slip a foot in the door for future employment by networking at these events - job leads are spread by word of mouth, a good impression can lead to an interview down the line, even scholarship opportunities crop up on a yearly basis. Are these meetings a classroom? You bet! Would it be podcastible?
HHEELLLLLL NNOOOO!
Screw it all, the old HD TVs aren't even good for making a cool fish tank.
Maybe a boat anchor?
The MJS series posted within the past week seemed to indicate schools should have been investing their technology dollars in developing efficiencies in staffing and office needs rather than putting all their money into "a computer in every classroom" approach. Now that those moneys are drying up they not only still have bloated bureaucracies that suck vital funds from the classroom, they have an aging IT infrastucture with no way to upgrade and maintain it. If the money were earmarked for administrative upgrades this would be one area where technology could improve the schools.
:-)?
Also, schools should stop getting conned into buying proprietary software. Most of what kids do on computers in school is surf the Internet and type papers. Why pay Microsoft (or Apple for that matter) for a proprietary system which is going to force them to upgrade or be antiquated every few years. Business may want its employees know how to use MSOffice, but come on - how hard is it to switch from Open Office to MSOffice and Firefox to, well, Firefox
What do we need to do to improve education in our society is remove the job training aspect of education. It encourages the just-in-time-am-I-ever-going-to-need-to-know-this- because-if-I-can't-measure-it-it-must-not-be-impor tant attitude which kills intellectual curiosity. Our education system is failing us is it was developed to produce workers for an industrialized society. In assembly line fashion we send our children to school where they are trained to move from subject to subject not based upon the natural curiosity all humans have but in response to the ticking of a clock. For most of us the real world doesn't work that way and children are saavy enough to know it's unnatural. Is it really so surprising that by the time they are adults their interest in learning has been stunted?
Photography has always been at its core a technology driven medium. If you look at the history of photography people have regularly switched from older technologies to new - even if that meant inferior image quality (like the switch from daguerrotypes to the positive negative process developed by Talbot - it's still too early; I can't remember the name of the process).
So this notion that "traditional" darkroom-based photography is better (or more "artistic" than digital is absurd.
What matters is the image. Pure and simple.
finally got my login right.
I'll double check. The Apple sales rep said she had just got the policy the day before, and would read the policy to me "verbatim" (her words). She then went on to suggest I contact our sales rep. Okay.
I called our sales rep, and he said he would see what he could do and call me back. Rather than call me back he simply reinforced what the Apple agent said by faxing me a quote.