Cost overruns can be a sign of severe mismanagement. They can also be a sign that the project faced great uncertainties from the get-go. Uncertainties like, how much will it cost to acquire technology X in 30 months? How many developer hours will it take to write the mirror controller software? What will the cost of putting this sucker in orbit be come 2015? You can only make educated guesses.
We're talking about a piece of genuine cutting edge technology here. Nobody has ever built anything like it. Managing a multi-billion dollar project isn't rocket science; it's harder than rocket science. Clearly, they made some avoidable mistakes. They're in the report. But overruns do happen to even the best managers, especially in big, cutting edge projects.
When you're depressed, it's really hard to refrain from indulging in behaviors that you know aren't particularly healthy or in your long term interests. Your mind demands the small bit of relief that comes from eating unhealthy food, smoking a cigarette, hitting Battle.net and pwning some poor n00b. In all cases, you may realize that the behavior is going to cause problems down the road, but because you're depressed, it's hard to care.
So it makes sense to me that antidepressants might be effective in breaking such a variety of bad habits.
I'm not seeing the irony. Is it "ironic" because unions don't want people going outside the union and striking their own deals with employers? That's not irony, that's basic game theory.
By your reasoning, corporations have incentives to drive down wages for private gain, even at the expense of a robust middle class. Therefore, "for that massive conflict of interest alone," all corporations should be disbanded.
I hate how this discussion has devolved into a union-busting free-for-all. I think that the statistical analysis is more robust than I'd initially guessed, and that it does say something about the teachers involved. But because so many people are committed to the idea that the problem in education can be boiled down to 'bad educators and the greedy unions who protect them,' we can't really have a discussion about what (if anything) the high-performing teachers could teach the lower-performing ones.
Imagine two scenarios. In both, the administrators say they want to run these analyses on the teachers in their district.
Scenario A: "When the results come back, we're firing the fifty worst teachers on the list."
Scenario B: "We'll use the results to help identify star teachers and spread their methodologies."
I'm not naive enough to think that the unions are going to be quick to embrace change, but it's obvious that there would be much less resistance in the second scenario. From the story, at least, it seems like the teachers want to know what the numbers say about their effectiveness. But there's going to be a rush to fire dozens of teachers, many of whom probably love their profession, are committed to their kids, and would be eager to be shown better techniques. That's sad.
You're doing exactly what the Union predicted people would do: interpret this data as a strictly ordered ranking of teacher quality.
Now, it's possible that people will take a long, thoughtful look at the data, consider that there may be confounding factors in play, and weigh that heavily in mind as they go about deciding which teachers will be drummed out of their professions. But I'm losing faith in the ability of the American people to have a reasoned discussion about anything, thanks in great part to people exactly like yourself.
By your logic, things should be much better now that the bast majority of workers are on their own.
And quite possibly they would have been, we'll never know for sure. The rise of China's manufacturing economy at the same time...
You make it sound as though the two things were unrelated. With the rise of cheap manufacturing and shipping, unions lost much of the leverage they once had to protect workers. Their rallying cry went from, "Give us a raise or we shut down the factory!" to "Give us a raise or... or... we'll cave! Please, please don't send our factory to China!"
The Republican party's war on unions, though anti-middle-class and anti-American, only accelerated an inevitable trend. Once manufacturers found they could leave all their labor problems an ocean away, the days of most unions were numbered.
Do you really think that we can scrap government and not end up virtual slaves to corporations? Read up on the history of the labor movement, then explain why, under your enlightened plan, I should not expect to end up chained to some factory floor with no air conditioning, bathroom breaks, or fire escape.
Well said. One caveat, though. The metrics are somewhat calibrated to limit the randomness of student assignments, by making it sensitive to the relative positions of the students. If you get a poor student, but manage to move him from the 37th percentile to the 44th, it actually looks good for you. So the worst student you can get would be one who is already in the 99th percentile, since they have nowhere to go but down.
Nonetheless, you're absolutely right. It's dangerous to make big assumptions about what these numbers actually signify.
In my school, the teacher who always won the popularity votes (I'm not sure why we even had those) was one who basically acted like one of the cheerleaders. She was always trying to be friends with the most popular kids in school, and was adept enough at it that it wasn't completely sad.
School is a big popularity contest, and teachers sometimes have to play too, if only to feel like somebody appreciates their efforts.
>> LAUSD officials spent $3.5 million in the last 10 years "trying to fire just seven of the district's 33,000 teachers for poor classroom performance
That sounds like a damning statistic, but is it really? Court cases are expensive. I can imagine the seven most expensive cases averaging half a million each.
Really, it says absolutely nothing about how hard it is to fire a teacher. All it says is that, if they feel the teacher is being railroaded by the administrators, they can really go to bat for them.
I'm sure that far, far more than seven teachers have been removed for poor performance in the last ten years, and that in at least some of the cases, the teachers union didn't lift a finger to stop them. The line that the unions make it impossible to fire teachers is just that: a line.
On an unrelated note, if you want to "post anonymously," there's a little box you have to check, Mister GTO.
I don't think "discipline" is the driving factor in educational achievement. Yes, there needs to be a minimum threshold of classroom control in order to make the lesson happen. But beyond that? I don't believe students will learn well from a teacher who terrifies them.
Not that this is merely my opinion. There are good studies showing that stress diminishes your capacity for creative thinking.
Parental involvement is crucial, I'll grant you. And it's true that parents can be blind to their child's failings. But let's step back a few feet. Over the last thirty years (interesting choice of timeframe), wages have been basically stagnant for most workers, while the benefits of a more productive economy have been siphoned off by the few at the top. We've become a much more socially stratified, status-conscious, success-oriented society as a result. Within such a society, I would argue that parents will spend more time working and be less involved in their kids' schooling.
She'll also tend to develop a very thin skin about her kids, sort of the way you're more likely to play the lotto if it's difficult for you to imagine earning your way to a better life. Sure, she may get little respect in her own life. But she can still hold out hopes for little Davey. She just knows that he's smart, talented, good looking, and that other people will recognize how amazing he is, and recognize that -- despite all the struggles in her life -- she's a good mom.
Then they get called in for a meeting with a teacher whom they've had little contact with. She explains that he's not learning as quickly as he should, that he's acting out in class, that he's fighting with other kids. The parent's pride is wounded, and in a move straight out of Cognitive Dissonance 101, they try to find some way to make it someone else's fault. The kids must be picking on him. The teacher must be teaching poorly. Anything.
Of course, the teacher is offended at the insinuation that he's a crappy teacher who can't control his own class. He likes Davey, and has done everything in his power to help him. Isn't that what this whole stupid meeting was about? More likely than not, it's going to escalate into something memorably ugly.
The mom's behavior is wrong, yes. But it's hardly unexpected. If she were working fewer hours, if the family were earning wages that brought their lifestyle more in line with the typical middle class life, if she felt important and respected in her workplace, then maybe she wouldn't need to protect her ego so carefully. Maybe then she and the teacher could sit down and figure out a solution together.
But because she is essentially a wage slave, because her life is full of struggle and disappointment, because we've built an economy designed to make her life suck for the benefit of the owning class, and because the only society sees fit to give her is, "your kid needs to do really well in school, so he can get more out of life than you did," it's really hard for her to get out of survival mode.
In short, I blame thirty years of union-busting, cheap labor conservatism for the sorry state of education, as well as for the state of our country as a whole.
Interestingly, industrialized countries with less income inequality also tend to have better educational outcomes as well. Read The Spirit Level for the full treatment of the argument.
Which is why worker-owned cooperatives are a great idea. If a line worker has a good idea to make things more efficient, he's not going to keep it to himself for fear of making himself or some of his co-workers obsolete.
That's only true if the scores themselves show teachers for "what they are." Everybody should already understand that test scores only give a moderate amount of insight into a student's actual abilities. Many of those teachers in the lower rankings could in fact be crappy teachers. But there may also be teachers who, despite their poor performance, contribute to the education of children in other ways. They may be spending time getting the students to think creatively, or helping them to gain social skills, or arranging field trips.
Maybe the students lost some ground in math, but because the teacher wanted to take some material slower because he detected that some of the kids had developed severe math phobia. Maybe another teacher could have eked a few more points on the reading test had she sacrificed her fourth graders' production of Hamlet.*
We've already seen what happens when you put undue focus on students' performance on a specific set of tests. First thing to go? Anything not on the test. We don't measure art talent, so *poof*, it's gone. We don't measure musical ability, so what are all these expensive instruments doing cluttering the school? Gone!
Teaching becomes more stale and formulaic, which drives good people out of the profession. Students become bored and disinterested, which drives teachers and students alike out of the system.
Now these internal benchmarks have just been released to a public which is sure to treat them as a robust measure of teacher quality. Maybe it will clear out some driftwood. But if they overreact to the public, a lot of good teachers are going to get caught up as well.
* Hmm... Maybe 'A Midsummer Night's Dream.' Hamlet's pretty intense.
>> The market value for a kindergarten teacher is not in any way related to the present value of the additional income earned by the students of a good kindergarten teacher compared to a bad one.
That's precisely the problem with the "unplanned economy." If I could go out right now and do something that would create millions dollars of "value," but there was no mechanism for getting any of that value back into my pocket, then it very likely wouldn't happen. But if I can take a thing that should have a high future value and destroy it in such a way that I can funnel some of it into my own pocket, it probably will happen.
In this example, if the statistic is true, then a managed economy would look at the situation and say, "Okay, we don't actually need to pay kindergarten teachers $320K to get outstanding teachers for every student. But the benefits are so great that society as a whole would come out ahead if we were to pay, say, $100K."
In an unplanned economy, that supposedly optimal pay rate won't be reached unless the individuals paying the teachers salaries can get the kindergarteners to sign contracts bequeathing a fraction of their expected future earnings to their benefactors. Sounds exactly like the maximal freedom utopia the libertarians promised us.
I do hate it. It teases me but doesn't deliver on the meat. It's a million quiche appetizers being force-fed intravenously without ever sitting down for a steak.
Most of the tweets I see contain 1) a link, and 2) a brief explanation of why I might find it interesting. If you don't want to follow the link, well, enjoy some more quiche.
I'm still waiting for a reply for where justify that Twitter is more powerful than the telephone.
Two reasons:
1) Many-to-many > one-to-one
2) You don't get charged international rates to hear from Bangalore.
I'm a big fan of online education, but I find your cynicism well founded. And yes, Pawlenty sucks.
I think we need to rethink education. The United States, at least, has decided that a bachelors degree is a prerequisite for a middle class life. Lots of people have spent years of their life and gone tens of thousands of dollars into debt, only to come out and get a job that could be done as well by a high school grad with a twelve week job skill course under their belt. Meanwhile, there are hundreds of millions of people out there who don't have the education that equips them to be an "informed citizenry."
Nobody's going to pay tens of thousands in tuition to become "well rounded" or to learn the material needed to participate creditably in public life. So we seem to have this idea that we can hold the degree out as a +3 wallet upgrade, and sneak in things like scientific literacy through the backdoor.
It's ridiculous. A liberal arts education and job training are two very different things.
My only hope for the class divide you mention is that eventually evaluation software may get so good that incompetents cannot hide behind a piece of prestigious paper.
The best education will always be one-on-one tutoring from an expert in the field who has spent years practicing the art of helping students understand the material, followed by practical lab work where the student gets to use the latest and greatest equipment to do experiments that are custom tailored to their own passions and interests.
Does that describe your education? Mine neither. If money were no object, that's the sort of education you'd choose.
But we live in a highly resource-constrained world. So we cram students into classrooms where one teacher tries to cram the same idea into fifty or three hundred students, followed by cookie-cutter assignments that are designed primarily to be easy to grade. If anything, I think the future of automated education will be more personalized instruction than students receive today.
I think I see your problem. The surest path to a 4.0 is to study exactly what you're told in exactly the way you're told to. Students with more middling grades might get distracted by interesting information that's not on the test, or underperform on one assignment because they find another assignment particularly interesting. Spending too much focus on G' (your GPA) can only detract from the G (actual learning) for which G' is but a proxy.
Self-education may be possible, but accredited self-education is not. Receiving accreditation for your work is a huge motivator. Then again, so is knowing that you paid over $1000 for the class you're currently taking.
I think a lot of the perceived value of formal instruction comes from the gold-plated pricetag. I mean, imagine what could really be done with a serious attempt at free online education. You could watch the lectures online, read the books online, hang out in chat rooms with people who are currently reading the same material that you are, take tests online. For a relatively small fee, you could get feedback from a human being. The technology available for collaborating online will only get better as time goes on.
The big downsides are the lack of deadlines, and the fact that when you get something for free you tend to undervalue it.
Also, without the involvement of big money, businesses are going to find it hard to take a degree from educatemepedia.ru seriously. And let's face it, probably half or more of the degrees colleges hand out are to students whose primary goal was to get that piece of paper that says "YOU CAN HAZ MIDDUL CLAS LIEF NAO."
Slashdot Mirror
Cost overruns can be a sign of severe mismanagement. They can also be a sign that the project faced great uncertainties from the get-go. Uncertainties like, how much will it cost to acquire technology X in 30 months? How many developer hours will it take to write the mirror controller software? What will the cost of putting this sucker in orbit be come 2015? You can only make educated guesses.
We're talking about a piece of genuine cutting edge technology here. Nobody has ever built anything like it. Managing a multi-billion dollar project isn't rocket science; it's harder than rocket science. Clearly, they made some avoidable mistakes. They're in the report. But overruns do happen to even the best managers, especially in big, cutting edge projects.
They're headed in that direction. The FF4 beta has a separate process for plugins, and eventually each tab will have its own process.
Bit.ly, at least, has promised archive.org a full dump of their database in the event that they go out of business. IIRC, YMMV.
True enough. But I don't think it's just that.
When you're depressed, it's really hard to refrain from indulging in behaviors that you know aren't particularly healthy or in your long term interests. Your mind demands the small bit of relief that comes from eating unhealthy food, smoking a cigarette, hitting Battle.net and pwning some poor n00b. In all cases, you may realize that the behavior is going to cause problems down the road, but because you're depressed, it's hard to care.
So it makes sense to me that antidepressants might be effective in breaking such a variety of bad habits.
I'm not seeing the irony. Is it "ironic" because unions don't want people going outside the union and striking their own deals with employers? That's not irony, that's basic game theory.
By your reasoning, corporations have incentives to drive down wages for private gain, even at the expense of a robust middle class. Therefore, "for that massive conflict of interest alone," all corporations should be disbanded.
I hate how this discussion has devolved into a union-busting free-for-all. I think that the statistical analysis is more robust than I'd initially guessed, and that it does say something about the teachers involved. But because so many people are committed to the idea that the problem in education can be boiled down to 'bad educators and the greedy unions who protect them,' we can't really have a discussion about what (if anything) the high-performing teachers could teach the lower-performing ones.
Imagine two scenarios. In both, the administrators say they want to run these analyses on the teachers in their district.
Scenario A: "When the results come back, we're firing the fifty worst teachers on the list."
Scenario B: "We'll use the results to help identify star teachers and spread their methodologies."
I'm not naive enough to think that the unions are going to be quick to embrace change, but it's obvious that there would be much less resistance in the second scenario. From the story, at least, it seems like the teachers want to know what the numbers say about their effectiveness. But there's going to be a rush to fire dozens of teachers, many of whom probably love their profession, are committed to their kids, and would be eager to be shown better techniques. That's sad.
You're doing exactly what the Union predicted people would do: interpret this data as a strictly ordered ranking of teacher quality.
Now, it's possible that people will take a long, thoughtful look at the data, consider that there may be confounding factors in play, and weigh that heavily in mind as they go about deciding which teachers will be drummed out of their professions. But I'm losing faith in the ability of the American people to have a reasoned discussion about anything, thanks in great part to people exactly like yourself.
You make it sound as though the two things were unrelated. With the rise of cheap manufacturing and shipping, unions lost much of the leverage they once had to protect workers. Their rallying cry went from, "Give us a raise or we shut down the factory!" to "Give us a raise or... or... we'll cave! Please, please don't send our factory to China!"
The Republican party's war on unions, though anti-middle-class and anti-American, only accelerated an inevitable trend. Once manufacturers found they could leave all their labor problems an ocean away, the days of most unions were numbered.
Do you really think that we can scrap government and not end up virtual slaves to corporations? Read up on the history of the labor movement, then explain why, under your enlightened plan, I should not expect to end up chained to some factory floor with no air conditioning, bathroom breaks, or fire escape.
Well said. One caveat, though. The metrics are somewhat calibrated to limit the randomness of student assignments, by making it sensitive to the relative positions of the students. If you get a poor student, but manage to move him from the 37th percentile to the 44th, it actually looks good for you. So the worst student you can get would be one who is already in the 99th percentile, since they have nowhere to go but down.
Nonetheless, you're absolutely right. It's dangerous to make big assumptions about what these numbers actually signify.
Of course you wouldn't. Employers never believe their employees should.
In my school, the teacher who always won the popularity votes (I'm not sure why we even had those) was one who basically acted like one of the cheerleaders. She was always trying to be friends with the most popular kids in school, and was adept enough at it that it wasn't completely sad.
School is a big popularity contest, and teachers sometimes have to play too, if only to feel like somebody appreciates their efforts.
>> LAUSD officials spent $3.5 million in the last 10 years "trying to fire just seven of the district's 33,000 teachers for poor classroom performance
That sounds like a damning statistic, but is it really? Court cases are expensive. I can imagine the seven most expensive cases averaging half a million each.
Really, it says absolutely nothing about how hard it is to fire a teacher. All it says is that, if they feel the teacher is being railroaded by the administrators, they can really go to bat for them.
I'm sure that far, far more than seven teachers have been removed for poor performance in the last ten years, and that in at least some of the cases, the teachers union didn't lift a finger to stop them. The line that the unions make it impossible to fire teachers is just that: a line.
On an unrelated note, if you want to "post anonymously," there's a little box you have to check, Mister GTO.
I don't think "discipline" is the driving factor in educational achievement. Yes, there needs to be a minimum threshold of classroom control in order to make the lesson happen. But beyond that? I don't believe students will learn well from a teacher who terrifies them.
Not that this is merely my opinion. There are good studies showing that stress diminishes your capacity for creative thinking.
Parental involvement is crucial, I'll grant you. And it's true that parents can be blind to their child's failings. But let's step back a few feet. Over the last thirty years (interesting choice of timeframe), wages have been basically stagnant for most workers, while the benefits of a more productive economy have been siphoned off by the few at the top. We've become a much more socially stratified, status-conscious, success-oriented society as a result. Within such a society, I would argue that parents will spend more time working and be less involved in their kids' schooling.
She'll also tend to develop a very thin skin about her kids, sort of the way you're more likely to play the lotto if it's difficult for you to imagine earning your way to a better life. Sure, she may get little respect in her own life. But she can still hold out hopes for little Davey. She just knows that he's smart, talented, good looking, and that other people will recognize how amazing he is, and recognize that -- despite all the struggles in her life -- she's a good mom.
Then they get called in for a meeting with a teacher whom they've had little contact with. She explains that he's not learning as quickly as he should, that he's acting out in class, that he's fighting with other kids. The parent's pride is wounded, and in a move straight out of Cognitive Dissonance 101, they try to find some way to make it someone else's fault. The kids must be picking on him. The teacher must be teaching poorly. Anything.
Of course, the teacher is offended at the insinuation that he's a crappy teacher who can't control his own class. He likes Davey, and has done everything in his power to help him. Isn't that what this whole stupid meeting was about? More likely than not, it's going to escalate into something memorably ugly.
The mom's behavior is wrong, yes. But it's hardly unexpected. If she were working fewer hours, if the family were earning wages that brought their lifestyle more in line with the typical middle class life, if she felt important and respected in her workplace, then maybe she wouldn't need to protect her ego so carefully. Maybe then she and the teacher could sit down and figure out a solution together.
But because she is essentially a wage slave, because her life is full of struggle and disappointment, because we've built an economy designed to make her life suck for the benefit of the owning class, and because the only society sees fit to give her is, "your kid needs to do really well in school, so he can get more out of life than you did," it's really hard for her to get out of survival mode.
In short, I blame thirty years of union-busting, cheap labor conservatism for the sorry state of education, as well as for the state of our country as a whole.
Interestingly, industrialized countries with less income inequality also tend to have better educational outcomes as well. Read The Spirit Level for the full treatment of the argument.
Which is why worker-owned cooperatives are a great idea. If a line worker has a good idea to make things more efficient, he's not going to keep it to himself for fear of making himself or some of his co-workers obsolete.
That's only true if the scores themselves show teachers for "what they are." Everybody should already understand that test scores only give a moderate amount of insight into a student's actual abilities. Many of those teachers in the lower rankings could in fact be crappy teachers. But there may also be teachers who, despite their poor performance, contribute to the education of children in other ways. They may be spending time getting the students to think creatively, or helping them to gain social skills, or arranging field trips.
Maybe the students lost some ground in math, but because the teacher wanted to take some material slower because he detected that some of the kids had developed severe math phobia. Maybe another teacher could have eked a few more points on the reading test had she sacrificed her fourth graders' production of Hamlet.*
We've already seen what happens when you put undue focus on students' performance on a specific set of tests. First thing to go? Anything not on the test. We don't measure art talent, so *poof*, it's gone. We don't measure musical ability, so what are all these expensive instruments doing cluttering the school? Gone!
Teaching becomes more stale and formulaic, which drives good people out of the profession. Students become bored and disinterested, which drives teachers and students alike out of the system.
Now these internal benchmarks have just been released to a public which is sure to treat them as a robust measure of teacher quality. Maybe it will clear out some driftwood. But if they overreact to the public, a lot of good teachers are going to get caught up as well.
* Hmm... Maybe 'A Midsummer Night's Dream.' Hamlet's pretty intense.
>> The market value for a kindergarten teacher is not in any way related to the present value of the additional income earned by the students of a good kindergarten teacher compared to a bad one.
That's precisely the problem with the "unplanned economy." If I could go out right now and do something that would create millions dollars of "value," but there was no mechanism for getting any of that value back into my pocket, then it very likely wouldn't happen. But if I can take a thing that should have a high future value and destroy it in such a way that I can funnel some of it into my own pocket, it probably will happen.
In this example, if the statistic is true, then a managed economy would look at the situation and say, "Okay, we don't actually need to pay kindergarten teachers $320K to get outstanding teachers for every student. But the benefits are so great that society as a whole would come out ahead if we were to pay, say, $100K."
In an unplanned economy, that supposedly optimal pay rate won't be reached unless the individuals paying the teachers salaries can get the kindergarteners to sign contracts bequeathing a fraction of their expected future earnings to their benefactors. Sounds exactly like the maximal freedom utopia the libertarians promised us.
Most of the tweets I see contain 1) a link, and 2) a brief explanation of why I might find it interesting. If you don't want to follow the link, well, enjoy some more quiche.
Two reasons:
1) Many-to-many > one-to-one
2) You don't get charged international rates to hear from Bangalore.
Technically, I believe that The Architects use 512 bit AES encryption.
I'm a big fan of online education, but I find your cynicism well founded. And yes, Pawlenty sucks.
I think we need to rethink education. The United States, at least, has decided that a bachelors degree is a prerequisite for a middle class life. Lots of people have spent years of their life and gone tens of thousands of dollars into debt, only to come out and get a job that could be done as well by a high school grad with a twelve week job skill course under their belt. Meanwhile, there are hundreds of millions of people out there who don't have the education that equips them to be an "informed citizenry."
Nobody's going to pay tens of thousands in tuition to become "well rounded" or to learn the material needed to participate creditably in public life. So we seem to have this idea that we can hold the degree out as a +3 wallet upgrade, and sneak in things like scientific literacy through the backdoor.
It's ridiculous. A liberal arts education and job training are two very different things.
My only hope for the class divide you mention is that eventually evaluation software may get so good that incompetents cannot hide behind a piece of prestigious paper.
The best education will always be one-on-one tutoring from an expert in the field who has spent years practicing the art of helping students understand the material, followed by practical lab work where the student gets to use the latest and greatest equipment to do experiments that are custom tailored to their own passions and interests.
Does that describe your education? Mine neither. If money were no object, that's the sort of education you'd choose.
But we live in a highly resource-constrained world. So we cram students into classrooms where one teacher tries to cram the same idea into fifty or three hundred students, followed by cookie-cutter assignments that are designed primarily to be easy to grade. If anything, I think the future of automated education will be more personalized instruction than students receive today.
I think I see your problem. The surest path to a 4.0 is to study exactly what you're told in exactly the way you're told to. Students with more middling grades might get distracted by interesting information that's not on the test, or underperform on one assignment because they find another assignment particularly interesting. Spending too much focus on G' (your GPA) can only detract from the G (actual learning) for which G' is but a proxy.
Self-education may be possible, but accredited self-education is not. Receiving accreditation for your work is a huge motivator. Then again, so is knowing that you paid over $1000 for the class you're currently taking.
I think a lot of the perceived value of formal instruction comes from the gold-plated pricetag. I mean, imagine what could really be done with a serious attempt at free online education. You could watch the lectures online, read the books online, hang out in chat rooms with people who are currently reading the same material that you are, take tests online. For a relatively small fee, you could get feedback from a human being. The technology available for collaborating online will only get better as time goes on.
The big downsides are the lack of deadlines, and the fact that when you get something for free you tend to undervalue it.
Also, without the involvement of big money, businesses are going to find it hard to take a degree from educatemepedia.ru seriously. And let's face it, probably half or more of the degrees colleges hand out are to students whose primary goal was to get that piece of paper that says "YOU CAN HAZ MIDDUL CLAS LIEF NAO."
The message is there, but the decryption key is hiding out somewhere in e.
The circle is not the message itself. The circle is the first real proof that a message may be there.