I am looking for an open source math project to develop educational software that could take a person from basic math (k-8 level) through algebra and on to calculus and beyond. This would be for anyone who needs a little bit more structure than simply reading a text book by themselves can provide but doesn't want to do (or might not be able to afford to do) a formal online course. What I'm thinking of is a program that would do everything from assessing the starting level to suggesting further areas to explore in various applied topics. Something like the best of Stanford's EPGY math courseware without the Math Races (or you could opt in for math drill if you like). I've been looking at commercial versions and not finding anything as user friendly as what I have in mind.
I'm thinking that Python might be a useful starting place...any ideas?
Don't worry, be happy, secure in the knowledge that this only applies to attempted murder.......until the next bill comes along, which makes your virtual life online equivalent to your wetware. Then, deliberate or accidental attempts to change or alter a person's personal information, wherever stored, are equivalent to attempts to rub out the bio version.
Wonder what they'd make of the Info Wars in Paul J. McAuley's Whole Wide World, wherein virii attack processor cooling fans and cause fires and explosions all over the City of London?
It takes a lot of funding to make data more open. For instance, the Murray Center at Radcliffe does an incredible job of making social science data, collected by primary researchers who had the funding, available to other researchers. But it takes lots of moolah to archive the data, make it available to students and researchers, preserve the original docuements, maintain permissions, etc.
In economics, the scientific standard of replicability of results has made people more willing to share their data for that purpose. (Happened much later in econ than in natural and physical sciences) But it is a long way from open source.
I can see it now...a second grader being hauled off in cuffs because she trashed a directory due to inadequate system security on the school lan. What a perfect setup. blame the kids for idiocy on the part of school administrators. no need to train any professionals or hire anyone to do a thorough job...we'll just send the kids to jail if they try anything besides timed typing. That'll teach them. and woe be to the junior tech who knows more than the adults in charge. that will be against the law, by definition!
So why not set the next series at the center of the star fleet universe, the academy? Sure, there is a series of juvie books set there, but this could be better.
You could have old familiar faces pop in for a visit, or study old battles from new approaches, explore the staff and the politics of the place, and figure out what makes a bunch of newly post adolescent representatives of disparate species transform into people who can get along with each other far, far from home? Voyager folks could come home and disperse from there.
I like the fact that there are families and relationships on Voyager and DS9. Much more realistic than to assume that people in space will continue the military monastic (ahem) tradition which ignores primate biology so long as no one gets caught.
The loss of American and Russian astronauts over the years, the loss of
satellites, the loss of space exploration craft. All continue to
generate the "Let's stop it all! The price is too high!"
Gee, we've lost a whole bunch more people to the automobile and liquor industries over the years, and hardly anyone has ever suggested "Let's stop it all!"
Despite my avowed disinterest in most television, I paid to rent "From the Earth to the Moon." I also rented Apollo 13 (the movie, not the left-over hardware). Both showed engineering as seat of the pants problem-solving, emphasis on the solving... geek heroes.
Why not publish the logs? What better way to get kids interested in problems worth solving? It's a short hop from learning about closed systems in space to realizing the whole planet is one, and solving our problems down here.
What no one seems to be suggesting is another point entirely. I don't have cable, by choice. I won't pay for an HDTV tv. Broadcast television is really not compelling at all, to me.
Like big dot coms, the "free broadcast" channels are going to have to figure out a new business model due to dropping advertising revenues (from everything except elections.)
I pay for content when I rent videotapes at my local, non-chain video store. I pay for "free" tv with the time I give up having to sit through commercials for things I won't ever buy. I pay for access to the Internet so that I can read Slashdot, among other things. I "pay" for Slashdot by participating in the community and seeing the banner ads. I won't pay for HDTV.
I don't care about HDTV. I need bifocals, and the definition is lost on me.
Re:There won't be widespread use until....
on
Digital Doctoring
·
· Score: 1
docs have time to learn the tech.
Most docs (unless trained in a program which incorporates such technology) have little time, even if they are so inclined, to keep up with this stuff.
Ask a doctor, who already is spending way too much time figuring out billing codes and writing letters (to insurers) justifying necessary treatment for patients, to spend time figuring out some new gizmo which is still buggy, and you are likely to get it thrown at you.
Anything new has to be non-beta and well along before you offer it widely. I'm betting on the webpad (neo-newton thoug it may be) to gain wider acceptance in the medical world before the PDA does.
My favorite doc had to spend three separate days waiting for the cable people to install his cable modem service at home (three trucks! four techs! three days!. Go figure. I'm not sure why he persisted, but he did. And he has persisted through winblows failures, hard disk death, and emoticons; but most wouldn't.
Adding video and sound will even more severely limit the membership of this so-called VC to those who can afford the bandwidth and hardware...mostly people well ensconced in the corporate world and lifestyle, or students on their way there.
And does anyone really think being able to see what other people look like will INCREASE the size of the community, or will it make it even more self-selecting?
My public library provides fantastic computer access to any and all who walk in, including people who have nowhere else to go. It's a great service and there is no other public place that provides access for free, here.
Most censorware providers advertise taking care of the problem of "damaging" email as well as web content. This means incoming and outgoing email. If your only access to email is via a public library computer and a Web-based free email service, which gets blocked by the censorware, what does that do to your free speech?
I'm waiting for my cardboard solar arrays from the Module of the Month Club to arrive, so I can play with the pulleys and fix the things like the astronauts did! Then I will hang it over my cube, along with the other modules.
Still not convinced? I am 41. An old fossil in this industry but I can still quickly adapt to any technology that is current. While interviewing job candidates, I've found many of them have very narrow specific skills. This may be good if that particilar skill is still in demand, but once it's considered old (witness Microsoft dismissing Java for C# and.NET), you need expensive and time-consuming retraining.
Yes, darling, time to depreciate the intellectual capital of the firm again....what say we mark it down about a half billion? (hmmm, 10,000 programmers at say $50,000 a pop....add up fast, these little forced changes, don't they?)
There is a fairly-active mailing list on using Python in education at python.org/sigs/edu-sig. Jeffrey Elkner, author of the article mentioned in the intro to this topic, is a participant there. You will find lots of other resources and very helpful folks.
My son discovered the DOS command prompt a while back, and taught himself to write.bat files, which are great for playing tricks on mom or customizing logout messages for the grandparents. That was a great intro to the whole directory structure behind Windows, and it was not long from there to Partition Magic and his first Linux distro. This amazing young man reads all the Linux mags we can find, and is now talking about building a Linux screamer for cheap. Age = 11.
Python is great. I found it while looking for a modern day version of Logo, introduced him to it, and away he went. (Yes, I know Logo still exists in more modern form, but the educational system support for it is no longer there, nor is it easy or cheap to find.)
Since NO ONE in his school was providing any help, we reached out to our local PC Users Group as well as to the SLUG on the local University campus. Both groups have been terrific, but the SLUG guys (almost all are guys) have gone above and beyond. Check out any local installfest and I am sure you will find the same kind of enthusiasm when they recognize a junior "one of their own" in your proto-programmer.
By the way, I picked up a copy of Compton Learning's Programming Made Easy, which purports to teach something called "Truck", Basic, C, and Java. Don't waste a penny on it. Beyond Truck, it is mostly multiple choice questions about what various bits of the language would look like. It does a bit of introduction to basic concepts, and not much beyond. It will turn off most kids in about five minutes. (It is aimed at ages 16 and up. I am "up", and it is sure not aimed at me.)
I have an idea. Let's start a revolution. Have each LUG adopt a local school. Have people gather up basement doorstoppers (say, old 486s), sponsor an installfest (have a ready source of old spare parts, and teach anyone interested (students, parents, teachers) how to get started in Linux. (A network card and connection will get around the old peripherals problem. Or use one of the tiny Linux distributions.) And/or do the same thing for Python. Agree to provide support. Meet one night a month in the school pc lab. There are bound to be a handful of kids who would be interested, in any school, and some of their parents. This could be done for little more than the investment of time. Let the wild rumpus begin!
And furthermore, you can now print your own designs on silk with just about any decent wide-format inkjet printer, using a little RIP software to translate, so you could actually design the fabric, print it yourself, and then use the Gameboy-Singer to sew it up. (Look at what Jacquard is doing for an example.) Now if only they'd come up with something cheap to cut out the pieces in the correct shapes for sewing.
Of course, I also see this as a way to solve the CS gender gap, that is, if anyone sewed any more. In the urban technostate, we've lost most of those homesteading skills beyond gardening.
Wasn't the whole point of internet commerce supposed to be the disintermediation that cuts out the middleman's charge and replaces it with cheaper infrastructure and software? This AT&T idea is reintermediation at its worst. For the mom and pop e-shop, already paying for hosting, this is nothing but a new tax, and the current election demonstrates how unpopular that would be.
To see what's really going on with AT&T, you have to understand that there are two big paradigms in corporate America.
One is, make the kind of return that those Internet IPOs made to investors before the bubbles burst. Since that was all smoke and mirrors, we know that it is not possible to make such a return based on actual earnings.
Failing that, look good in an Economic Value Added analysis, an idea trademarked by SternStewart & Co. Run this on AT&T and you will see why they are in need of new revenue sources. Don't try it unless you are fluent in balance sheet and income statement, as well as having a passing acquaintance with the fine print in the notes to financial reports.
In fact, the technique is so widely used, you should learn how to calculate it anyway if you want to understand what is going on in the markets today.
Ocean Barb
This paper is one of the first things I've written about the ideology of ease. I hope I'll be able to grow the material here (and lots that isn't here) into a dissertation in the next few years
I sure hope his dissertation committee won't let him keep the "easy women" metaphor when it comes to the dissertation.
No, this is a clear case of why techies give themselves a bad rap.
Office workers who first used desktop computing were the same ones who used the old typewriters, the same ones who made the environmental switch from manual to electric (IBM Selectronic, in fact, was the standard).
But the early machines, like the Displaywriter and the Wang, actually made few changes from the selectronic sensibility. It wasn't until Word Star and the other early WP programs came along, name brands for software as opposed to name brands for hardware, that changes in the environment had a critical impact on the user's ability to do their job.
A change from NT to Windows 2000 generally means not just upgrades to the OS, but also loss of backwards-compatibility and the loss of many little settings that the user has grown comfortable with, since the IT types are usually ghosting a new "standard set-up" when doing such a mass install. So all the little short-cuts, formatting changes, preferred email editor, etc. are lost along with the old environment.
In the old days, we used to train the whole staff whenever we got a new copier. That "we" applied to a lot of different places. Now, we just expect the user to adapt to the new environment without a blink. And, we often lock down their ability to make the system tweaks so they get the old shortcuts back. If they know where to find them.
The loss to industry around the world every time Windows goes thru a new generation is staggering, in terms of lost productivity, lost files, need to convert, loss of transparency, etc. And we never count the training costs or lost productivity in the cost of the upgrade.
In the case of the article which started all this, it sounds like no one ever bothers to explain to the students how to use Windows Explorer, which is actually a pretty neat little way to handle a directory structure, and when you learn to use it, you can change your default directories on all of those software packages to put the files wherever you please. (Probably the generic system stuff is considered to be not in the province of any particular course, and so it never gets taught.) TFMs used to say "Check with your system administrator for specifics of your particular operating environment," but that seems to have gone out the window along with training for upgrades.
And furthermore, a file is no longer a file, it is a particular instance of a particular type of file, and so a.doc file is not the same thing as a.xls file. Why should the user be expected to look at them all as generic files if they never used a command line editor?
BUt I'll agree that so called ease of use is often just the opposite for anyone who learned a previous version. Example: anyone who grew up on Lotus graphing lost lots of functionality with a switch to Excel when they lost the visibility of custom settings that Lotus had. In Excel these days, you have to go into VB to make some of the kinds of tweaks that used to be simply made by the Lotus app.
Ocean Barb, been there, done that, and the t-shirt's so old its got holes in it
All those equilibria are based on the assumption that everything else stays the same, i.e. Ceteris paribus. And technology is one of those things that are assumed to stay the same. When technology changes, all bets are off. Besides which, the whole production cycle has been sped up by technology, so that the short run position in which such equilibria occur is around for a heck of a lot less time than in the old days (econ-theory-wise).
I think that the quote from the article makes it sound more like a zero-sum game, in which you can't win unless someone else loses by the same amount.
Nah, what I was hoping for was something less formal than "trainer" type courses and fancy slides. Brownbagging while learning a few little tricks. Sometimes just how to solve a particular problem, which could lead to a more elegant way to do the same thing, which could lead to a related problem. IT folks who aren't natural "trainers" can wax quite eloquently on a topic near to their hearts. I'd rather learn in small chunks from people who are actually doing the work, in our shared environment, so we have a common context in which to trade these ideas. It would be a TRUE lifelong learning opportunity, instead of some business park MBA/MSIS in a box.
If there was really a shortage, they would be teaching C++, Perl, XML, Java, Fusion or whatever during lunch to anyone who is interested in learning. Instead, they limit those "advanced" courses to employees who already are in IT jobs.
People have been conducting international trade electronically via Telex and TWX for a half century, at least. That means:
making contracts,
handling customs matters,
transferring funds,
making shipping arrangements,
brokering transportation,
agreeing to exchange rates, etc.
A Telex machine involved typing words and numbers into a keyboard for digital encoding and decoding and transmission of messages. In fact, I believe that various postal systems around the world, as "trusted third parties" were the first non-commercial services, besides Western Union and the AT&T, to offer similar services. There is nothing unique or original in this idea. In fact, I worked for a shipping company in the mid-80s that was already using IBM p.c.s for the same purposes.
The idea that a patent could be issued on this so-called business method is completely ludicrous.
Slashdot Mirror
I am looking for an open source math project to develop educational software that could take a person from basic math (k-8 level) through algebra and on to calculus and beyond. This would be for anyone who needs a little bit more structure than simply reading a text book by themselves can provide but doesn't want to do (or might not be able to afford to do) a formal online course. What I'm thinking of is a program that would do everything from assessing the starting level to suggesting further areas to explore in various applied topics. Something like the best of Stanford's EPGY math courseware without the Math Races (or you could opt in for math drill if you like). I've been looking at commercial versions and not finding anything as user friendly as what I have in mind.
I'm thinking that Python might be a useful starting place...any ideas?
Dover Publications still publishes a few of these for incredibly low prices.
Don't worry, be happy, secure in the knowledge that this only applies to attempted murder. ......until the next bill comes along, which makes your virtual life online equivalent to your wetware. Then, deliberate or accidental attempts to change or alter a person's personal information, wherever stored, are equivalent to attempts to rub out the bio version.
Wonder what they'd make of the Info Wars in Paul J. McAuley's Whole Wide World, wherein virii attack processor cooling fans and cause fires and explosions all over the City of London?
In economics, the scientific standard of replicability of results has made people more willing to share their data for that purpose. (Happened much later in econ than in natural and physical sciences) But it is a long way from open source.
So how do we pay for it?
I can see it now...a second grader being hauled off in cuffs because she trashed a directory due to inadequate system security on the school lan. What a perfect setup. blame the kids for idiocy on the part of school administrators. no need to train any professionals or hire anyone to do a thorough job...we'll just send the kids to jail if they try anything besides timed typing. That'll teach them. and woe be to the junior tech who knows more than the adults in charge. that will be against the law, by definition!
You could have old familiar faces pop in for a visit, or study old battles from new approaches, explore the staff and the politics of the place, and figure out what makes a bunch of newly post adolescent representatives of disparate species transform into people who can get along with each other far, far from home? Voyager folks could come home and disperse from there.
I like the fact that there are families and relationships on Voyager and DS9. Much more realistic than to assume that people in space will continue the military monastic (ahem) tradition which ignores primate biology so long as no one gets caught.
Bone density picks up a little....
everything else falls even faster.
Thanks, fellas.
Gee, we've lost a whole bunch more people to the automobile and liquor industries over the years, and hardly anyone has ever suggested "Let's stop it all!"
Despite my avowed disinterest in most television, I paid to rent "From the Earth to the Moon." I also rented Apollo 13 (the movie, not the left-over hardware). Both showed engineering as seat of the pants problem-solving, emphasis on the solving... geek heroes.
Why not publish the logs? What better way to get kids interested in problems worth solving? It's a short hop from learning about closed systems in space to realizing the whole planet is one, and solving our problems down here.
Like big dot coms, the "free broadcast" channels are going to have to figure out a new business model due to dropping advertising revenues (from everything except elections.)
I pay for content when I rent videotapes at my local, non-chain video store. I pay for "free" tv with the time I give up having to sit through commercials for things I won't ever buy. I pay for access to the Internet so that I can read Slashdot, among other things. I "pay" for Slashdot by participating in the community and seeing the banner ads. I won't pay for HDTV.
I don't care about HDTV. I need bifocals, and the definition is lost on me.
Ask a doctor, who already is spending way too much time figuring out billing codes and writing letters (to insurers) justifying necessary treatment for patients, to spend time figuring out some new gizmo which is still buggy, and you are likely to get it thrown at you.
Anything new has to be non-beta and well along before you offer it widely. I'm betting on the webpad (neo-newton thoug it may be) to gain wider acceptance in the medical world before the PDA does.
My favorite doc had to spend three separate days waiting for the cable people to install his cable modem service at home (three trucks! four techs! three days!. Go figure. I'm not sure why he persisted, but he did. And he has persisted through winblows failures, hard disk death, and emoticons; but most wouldn't.
Even as we sleep, the boys and girls at MIT are probably working on a leggy eggy with do-co-motion.
And does anyone really think being able to see what other people look like will INCREASE the size of the community, or will it make it even more self-selecting?
Most censorware providers advertise taking care of the problem of "damaging" email as well as web content. This means incoming and outgoing email. If your only access to email is via a public library computer and a Web-based free email service, which gets blocked by the censorware, what does that do to your free speech?
Next month, science lab! Eeeeehaaaaa!
Guess this gives a whole new meaning to the phrase web monkey .
Yes, darling, time to depreciate the intellectual capital of the firm again....what say we mark it down about a half billion? (hmmm, 10,000 programmers at say $50,000 a pop....add up fast, these little forced changes, don't they?)
My son discovered the DOS command prompt a while back, and taught himself to write .bat files, which are great for playing tricks on mom or customizing logout messages for the grandparents. That was a great intro to the whole directory structure behind Windows, and it was not long from there to Partition Magic and his first Linux distro. This amazing young man reads all the Linux mags we can find, and is now talking about building a Linux screamer for cheap. Age = 11.
Python is great. I found it while looking for a modern day version of Logo, introduced him to it, and away he went. (Yes, I know Logo still exists in more modern form, but the educational system support for it is no longer there, nor is it easy or cheap to find.)
Since NO ONE in his school was providing any help, we reached out to our local PC Users Group as well as to the SLUG on the local University campus. Both groups have been terrific, but the SLUG guys (almost all are guys) have gone above and beyond. Check out any local installfest and I am sure you will find the same kind of enthusiasm when they recognize a junior "one of their own" in your proto-programmer.
By the way, I picked up a copy of Compton Learning's Programming Made Easy, which purports to teach something called "Truck", Basic, C, and Java. Don't waste a penny on it. Beyond Truck, it is mostly multiple choice questions about what various bits of the language would look like. It does a bit of introduction to basic concepts, and not much beyond. It will turn off most kids in about five minutes. (It is aimed at ages 16 and up. I am "up", and it is sure not aimed at me.)
I have an idea. Let's start a revolution. Have each LUG adopt a local school. Have people gather up basement doorstoppers (say, old 486s), sponsor an installfest (have a ready source of old spare parts, and teach anyone interested (students, parents, teachers) how to get started in Linux. (A network card and connection will get around the old peripherals problem. Or use one of the tiny Linux distributions.) And/or do the same thing for Python. Agree to provide support. Meet one night a month in the school pc lab. There are bound to be a handful of kids who would be interested, in any school, and some of their parents. This could be done for little more than the investment of time. Let the wild rumpus begin!
Of course, I also see this as a way to solve the CS gender gap, that is, if anyone sewed any more. In the urban technostate, we've lost most of those homesteading skills beyond gardening.
To see what's really going on with AT&T, you have to understand that there are two big paradigms in corporate America.
One is, make the kind of return that those Internet IPOs made to investors before the bubbles burst. Since that was all smoke and mirrors, we know that it is not possible to make such a return based on actual earnings.
Failing that, look good in an Economic Value Added analysis, an idea trademarked by SternStewart & Co. Run this on AT&T and you will see why they are in need of new revenue sources. Don't try it unless you are fluent in balance sheet and income statement, as well as having a passing acquaintance with the fine print in the notes to financial reports.
In fact, the technique is so widely used, you should learn how to calculate it anyway if you want to understand what is going on in the markets today. Ocean Barb
I sure hope his dissertation committee won't let him keep the "easy women" metaphor when it comes to the dissertation.
Office workers who first used desktop computing were the same ones who used the old typewriters, the same ones who made the environmental switch from manual to electric (IBM Selectronic, in fact, was the standard).
But the early machines, like the Displaywriter and the Wang, actually made few changes from the selectronic sensibility. It wasn't until Word Star and the other early WP programs came along, name brands for software as opposed to name brands for hardware, that changes in the environment had a critical impact on the user's ability to do their job.
A change from NT to Windows 2000 generally means not just upgrades to the OS, but also loss of backwards-compatibility and the loss of many little settings that the user has grown comfortable with, since the IT types are usually ghosting a new "standard set-up" when doing such a mass install. So all the little short-cuts, formatting changes, preferred email editor, etc. are lost along with the old environment.
In the old days, we used to train the whole staff whenever we got a new copier. That "we" applied to a lot of different places. Now, we just expect the user to adapt to the new environment without a blink. And, we often lock down their ability to make the system tweaks so they get the old shortcuts back. If they know where to find them.
The loss to industry around the world every time Windows goes thru a new generation is staggering, in terms of lost productivity, lost files, need to convert, loss of transparency, etc. And we never count the training costs or lost productivity in the cost of the upgrade.
In the case of the article which started all this, it sounds like no one ever bothers to explain to the students how to use Windows Explorer, which is actually a pretty neat little way to handle a directory structure, and when you learn to use it, you can change your default directories on all of those software packages to put the files wherever you please. (Probably the generic system stuff is considered to be not in the province of any particular course, and so it never gets taught.) TFMs used to say "Check with your system administrator for specifics of your particular operating environment," but that seems to have gone out the window along with training for upgrades.
And furthermore, a file is no longer a file, it is a particular instance of a particular type of file, and so a .doc file is not the same thing as a .xls file. Why should the user be expected to look at them all as generic files if they never used a command line editor?
BUt I'll agree that so called ease of use is often just the opposite for anyone who learned a previous version. Example: anyone who grew up on Lotus graphing lost lots of functionality with a switch to Excel when they lost the visibility of custom settings that Lotus had. In Excel these days, you have to go into VB to make some of the kinds of tweaks that used to be simply made by the Lotus app.
Ocean Barb, been there, done that, and the t-shirt's so old its got holes in it
I think that the quote from the article makes it sound more like a zero-sum game, in which you can't win unless someone else loses by the same amount.
Nah, what I was hoping for was something less formal than "trainer" type courses and fancy slides. Brownbagging while learning a few little tricks. Sometimes just how to solve a particular problem, which could lead to a more elegant way to do the same thing, which could lead to a related problem. IT folks who aren't natural "trainers" can wax quite eloquently on a topic near to their hearts. I'd rather learn in small chunks from people who are actually doing the work, in our shared environment, so we have a common context in which to trade these ideas. It would be a TRUE lifelong learning opportunity, instead of some business park MBA/MSIS in a box.
If there was really a shortage, they would be teaching C++, Perl, XML, Java, Fusion or whatever during lunch to anyone who is interested in learning. Instead, they limit those "advanced" courses to employees who already are in IT jobs.
- making contracts,
- handling customs matters,
- transferring funds,
- making shipping arrangements,
- brokering transportation,
- agreeing to exchange rates, etc.
A Telex machine involved typing words and numbers into a keyboard for digital encoding and decoding and transmission of messages. In fact, I believe that various postal systems around the world, as "trusted third parties" were the first non-commercial services, besides Western Union and the AT&T, to offer similar services. There is nothing unique or original in this idea. In fact, I worked for a shipping company in the mid-80s that was already using IBM p.c.s for the same purposes.The idea that a patent could be issued on this so-called business method is completely ludicrous.
Sign me,
been there, done that
Ocean Barb