Likely what drags US education down is the underlying notion that things must be ‘fun’ for children to do them. Most of the highest-achieving education systems are significantly less technology- and fun-orientated than the US system. And you can hardly argue that the young adults who emerge from these systems are psychologically scarred by the lack of ‘entertainment’.
Oh, and regarding note-taking: I’d argue that there’s a strong distinction between the need to record notes and the ability to use those notations in an ‘active’ or ‘computable’ form. Until very recently there was no ‘self-computing’ notation at all simply because everything had to be processed by a human. The idea that a notation should be machine-readable is obviously a fairly recent one (whether by ‘recent’ you imply either Turing or Leibnitz is fairly irrelevant in the grand scale of things). Arguing that notation must be machine-readable and ‘standard’ is somewhat inconsistent.
Standard mathematical notation is wildly inconsistent already (witness the confusion that arises when students first encounter subscripts and ‘powers’ in tensor notation); I don’t see any reason why this inconsistent ad-hoc hodgepodge should be protected to the extent of impeding further advancement.
Usually (though not necessarily) it makes students dependent on mysterious ‘black boxes’ and engenders them to become dependent on one implementation and it’s quirks. Technology should only be introduced gradually to provide ‘shortcuts’ for that which is already understood but tedious to perform.
And never, ever, should we promote reliance on technology. If we provide students with tablets and on-screen keyboards and spellcheckers, are we going to exempt them from having illegible handwriting and awful orthography when we examine them? Or are we going to examine them on tablets, allowing millennia of calligraphy and writing skills to be lost?
People, we’re technologists. It’s fine for us to love gadgets. It’s harmful for us to try to use technology to solve every single problem - particularly problems that either don’t exist or have arisen precisely because of technology.
Most of the most proficient education systems are significantly lower-technology than the current US system. I think that is no coincidence.
I hadn’t realised (and don’t quite accept) that I am unusually ‘flexible’ in using text-mode mathematical entry. Indeed I think you’ll find that if you consider the sum total of programmers and spreadsheet users most non-academic users of mathematics are already using non-traditional notations for mathematics (though, I do readily admit, spreadsheet formulas and program statements are not terribly convenient for deriving symbolic statements).
Notations do change, have changed, and will change again - consider for example the switch from Roman to Arabic numerals. That brought a huge boost in convenience, sufficient to promote the adoption of the unfamiliar new notation.
Anyway, it is education that we are talking about here. Quite distinct from the fact that I do not believe adding more technology to the mix is the solution to a (non-existent) problem, I think you’ll agree that since education teaches ex nihilo, we can easily teach new learners whatever new notation we please, and it will be accepted by them as the norm. Provided they are sufficiently acquainted with the old notation to translate from it (and into it) if and when the need arises, there is no disconnect in their experience.
Let’s remember that all those figures in history (both recent and remote) whom we admire were educated the old way: by one-on-one contact between educators and children. Tech industry’s drive to replace that quintessentially human bond with mechanistic devices strikes me as fundamentally misguided.
Wanting better technology is fine. However the best technology for dealing with people (particularly kids) is still other people.
It seems like we’re on the verge of institutionalising autism.
I don’t really agree with that I’ve been using the full gamut of Computer Algebra Systems (CAS) ranging from Macysma to Mathematica to HP Prime for years, and I find text-only entry to be very comfortable. Mathematica even has photoshop-style palettes if you wish to choose familiar notations.
Don’t confuse mathematics with mathematics notation. The latter is totally arbitrary and can easily be replaced, most obviously by the various prefix notations common in CASes ( Integrate[x^2,x,a,b] , for example).
The future of education is human teachers teaching human kids.
Please stop using prospective educational uses to justify technolust. There’s no harm in wanting better gadgets, but there is harm in fixing things that aren’t broken.
The best thinkers in history were educated by people. I see absolutely no reason to replace competent, compassionate humans with impersonal and inflexible machines.
Based on my limited understanding, proving P = NP would not necessarily and automatically provide a manner of constructing reductions. It might. But there are proofs in computation theory that demonstrate limit complexities but do not provide the algorithms that might implement them, nor do they (currently, visibly) provide any indication of how that algorithm may be arrived at.
Besides, proving P = NP would have a vast number of consequences that would echo across mathematics and the more fundamental sciences. To harp upon the security implications is as short-sighted as fretting that all-out thermonuclear war would negatively affect the postal delivery service.
I have to agree. They’re just adding clutter and backporting annoying eye-candy. OS X used to be a dependable, solid OS that was a pleasure to work with. Now they’re curtailing users’ ability to run stuff, abstracting the filesystem, adding eye-candy that causes clutter, and reducing computers to some kind of network appliance cum social experience. Apple’s design has always been noted for it’s minimalism. How is it that their software development is headed in the opposite direction? It’s becoming clunky.
Yes, Leopard (on G5) and Snow Leopard (on Intel) have been their high-water marks so far. I fear they’re going gaga over social networking and consumer electronics.
I’m a heavy numerical user and I prefer using elegant-looking NUMBERS compared to cluttered EXCEL. Then I feed everything into Risk Engine (a Mac app) for Montecarlo analysis.
Perfectly enviable workflow with essentially no tradeoffs, and largely invisible as far as those whom I exchange worksheets with are concerned. (They send and receive standard.xls files, how they get processed my end is my business.)
I have a desktop, a server, a NAS, an audio streamer connected to my stereo, a pair of AppleTVs, and a pair of Ethernet-sporting flat-panel LCDs all wired with 1000baseT ethernet.
However, wherever possible, I’ve also configured the same devices to use WiFi if for some reason the cable comes out, so that, for example, the video stream does not fail if somebody trips over the AppleTV’s ethernet connection and yanks it out of the jack.
Then there’s the incriminated iPhone4, an iPad2 and a MacBookAir exclusively on WiFi.
I for one was hugely disappointed that Apple’s latest iPhone refresh (iPhone 4S) did not address 5GHz WiFi connectivity. The iPhone 4 has supported 802.11n since it was released last year, but, unlike the iPad, it does not support the 5GHz band, constraining use to the already oversubscribed 2.4 GHz band.
The end-result is silly: for example, I’m running a 5GHz 802.11n network for all my devices at home, but I’m broadcasting an extra 2.4GHz signal for the sole benefit of my iPhone 4. I hoped Apple would address this obvious shortcoming but obviously they didn’t. Sad.
And the Soviet Union adopted a teleprinter encryption system loosely based on the Lorentz (Tunny) and Siemens Geheimschrieber. Needless to say, the Soviets wouldn’t have adopted that kind of technology if they had known it had already been broken during the war, and thus what was (presumably) a huge insight into the USSR’s secrets would have been lost.
If no hint was given that those cipher systems had been broken, it could be plausibly hoped that other nations would adopt similar systems after the surrender of Nazi Germany, considering them secure. Sure enough, the Soviet Union soon cobbled together a similar system, probably inspired by captured equipment. One can only imagine the frisson of glee that ran through the cryptanalysts when they discovered they could re-apply techniques and breaks they had already honed against the Germans.
Yes... and doesn’t it amuse you that somewhere in their ranks, there’s a marketer stewing in anger that his dire warnings of the effect this might have on Mickey Mouse sales in Saudi Arabia have gone unheeded?
Slashdot Mirror
Likely what drags US education down is the underlying notion that things must be ‘fun’ for children to do them. Most of the highest-achieving education systems are significantly less technology- and fun-orientated than the US system. And you can hardly argue that the young adults who emerge from these systems are psychologically scarred by the lack of ‘entertainment’.
Oh, and regarding note-taking: I’d argue that there’s a strong distinction between the need to record notes and the ability to use those notations in an ‘active’ or ‘computable’ form. Until very recently there was no ‘self-computing’ notation at all simply because everything had to be processed by a human. The idea that a notation should be machine-readable is obviously a fairly recent one (whether by ‘recent’ you imply either Turing or Leibnitz is fairly irrelevant in the grand scale of things). Arguing that notation must be machine-readable and ‘standard’ is somewhat inconsistent.
Standard mathematical notation is wildly inconsistent already (witness the confusion that arises when students first encounter subscripts and ‘powers’ in tensor notation); I don’t see any reason why this inconsistent ad-hoc hodgepodge should be protected to the extent of impeding further advancement.
I disagree.
Usually (though not necessarily) it makes students dependent on mysterious ‘black boxes’ and engenders them to become dependent on one implementation and it’s quirks. Technology should only be introduced gradually to provide ‘shortcuts’ for that which is already understood but tedious to perform.
And never, ever, should we promote reliance on technology. If we provide students with tablets and on-screen keyboards and spellcheckers, are we going to exempt them from having illegible handwriting and awful orthography when we examine them? Or are we going to examine them on tablets, allowing millennia of calligraphy and writing skills to be lost?
People, we’re technologists. It’s fine for us to love gadgets. It’s harmful for us to try to use technology to solve every single problem - particularly problems that either don’t exist or have arisen precisely because of technology.
Most of the most proficient education systems are significantly lower-technology than the current US system. I think that is no coincidence.
I hadn’t realised (and don’t quite accept) that I am unusually ‘flexible’ in using text-mode mathematical entry. Indeed I think you’ll find that if you consider the sum total of programmers and spreadsheet users most non-academic users of mathematics are already using non-traditional notations for mathematics (though, I do readily admit, spreadsheet formulas and program statements are not terribly convenient for deriving symbolic statements).
Notations do change, have changed, and will change again - consider for example the switch from Roman to Arabic numerals. That brought a huge boost in convenience, sufficient to promote the adoption of the unfamiliar new notation.
Anyway, it is education that we are talking about here. Quite distinct from the fact that I do not believe adding more technology to the mix is the solution to a (non-existent) problem, I think you’ll agree that since education teaches ex nihilo, we can easily teach new learners whatever new notation we please, and it will be accepted by them as the norm. Provided they are sufficiently acquainted with the old notation to translate from it (and into it) if and when the need arises, there is no disconnect in their experience.
I absolutely agree.
Let’s remember that all those figures in history (both recent and remote) whom we admire were educated the old way: by one-on-one contact between educators and children. Tech industry’s drive to replace that quintessentially human bond with mechanistic devices strikes me as fundamentally misguided.
Wanting better technology is fine. However the best technology for dealing with people (particularly kids) is still other people.
It seems like we’re on the verge of institutionalising autism.
I don’t really agree with that I’ve been using the full gamut of Computer Algebra Systems (CAS) ranging from Macysma to Mathematica to HP Prime for years, and I find text-only entry to be very comfortable. Mathematica even has photoshop-style palettes if you wish to choose familiar notations.
Don’t confuse mathematics with mathematics notation. The latter is totally arbitrary and can easily be replaced, most obviously by the various prefix notations common in CASes ( Integrate[x^2,x,a,b] , for example).
The future of education is human teachers teaching human kids.
Please stop using prospective educational uses to justify technolust. There’s no harm in wanting better gadgets, but there is harm in fixing things that aren’t broken.
The best thinkers in history were educated by people. I see absolutely no reason to replace competent, compassionate humans with impersonal and inflexible machines.
This reminds me of a time when an online translation tool mistranslated ‘condone’ as ‘condemn’.
Based on my limited understanding, proving P = NP would not necessarily and automatically provide a manner of constructing reductions. It might. But there are proofs in computation theory that demonstrate limit complexities but do not provide the algorithms that might implement them, nor do they (currently, visibly) provide any indication of how that algorithm may be arrived at.
Besides, proving P = NP would have a vast number of consequences that would echo across mathematics and the more fundamental sciences. To harp upon the security implications is as short-sighted as fretting that all-out thermonuclear war would negatively affect the postal delivery service.
I wish I could mod you up.
In at least an infinite subset of the infinite number of universes it straddles, yes - but most likely not this one.
I have to agree. They’re just adding clutter and backporting annoying eye-candy. OS X used to be a dependable, solid OS that was a pleasure to work with. Now they’re curtailing users’ ability to run stuff, abstracting the filesystem, adding eye-candy that causes clutter, and reducing computers to some kind of network appliance cum social experience. Apple’s design has always been noted for it’s minimalism. How is it that their software development is headed in the opposite direction? It’s becoming clunky.
Yes, Leopard (on G5) and Snow Leopard (on Intel) have been their high-water marks so far. I fear they’re going gaga over social networking and consumer electronics.
OS X 10.8 “Hello Kitty"
Finally a slashdot article that doesn’t go *WHOOSH* over my head.
I’m a heavy numerical user and I prefer using elegant-looking NUMBERS compared to cluttered EXCEL. Then I feed everything into Risk Engine (a Mac app) for Montecarlo analysis.
Perfectly enviable workflow with essentially no tradeoffs, and largely invisible as far as those whom I exchange worksheets with are concerned. (They send and receive standard .xls files, how they get processed my end is my business.)
I have a desktop, a server, a NAS, an audio streamer connected to my stereo, a pair of AppleTVs, and a pair of Ethernet-sporting flat-panel LCDs all wired with 1000baseT ethernet.
However, wherever possible, I’ve also configured the same devices to use WiFi if for some reason the cable comes out, so that, for example, the video stream does not fail if somebody trips over the AppleTV’s ethernet connection and yanks it out of the jack.
Then there’s the incriminated iPhone4, an iPad2 and a MacBookAir exclusively on WiFi.
Granted.
The greatest disappointment of all? That they somehow engineered a desire for it into me.
I for one was hugely disappointed that Apple’s latest iPhone refresh (iPhone 4S) did not address 5GHz WiFi connectivity. The iPhone 4 has supported 802.11n since it was released last year, but, unlike the iPad, it does not support the 5GHz band, constraining use to the already oversubscribed 2.4 GHz band.
The end-result is silly: for example, I’m running a 5GHz 802.11n network for all my devices at home, but I’m broadcasting an extra 2.4GHz signal for the sole benefit of my iPhone 4. I hoped Apple would address this obvious shortcoming but obviously they didn’t. Sad.
That’s rude. I’m Italian and I hate the situation.
And yes, I hate this fool’s proposal too.
I wonder what country you herald from? What’s your country’s worst historical figure? How about I compare you to that person?
It’s simple: because it’s difficult... just because they almost couldn’t.
I went this year on 10 April and the guide was brilliant. He even answered some of the finer points of Dilly Knox’s diagonal board.
And the Soviet Union adopted a teleprinter encryption system loosely based on the Lorentz (Tunny) and Siemens Geheimschrieber. Needless to say, the Soviets wouldn’t have adopted that kind of technology if they had known it had already been broken during the war, and thus what was (presumably) a huge insight into the USSR’s secrets would have been lost.
If no hint was given that those cipher systems had been broken, it could be plausibly hoped that other nations would adopt similar systems after the surrender of Nazi Germany, considering them secure. Sure enough, the Soviet Union soon cobbled together a similar system, probably inspired by captured equipment. One can only imagine the frisson of glee that ran through the cryptanalysts when they discovered they could re-apply techniques and breaks they had already honed against the Germans.
So, on the whole, it made absolute sense.
I’ve read much the same. Maybe we read Neal Stephenson’s “In The Beginning Was The Command Line” or something like that? Might that be it?
Yes... and doesn’t it amuse you that somewhere in their ranks, there’s a marketer stewing in anger that his dire warnings of the effect this might have on Mickey Mouse sales in Saudi Arabia have gone unheeded?