No, the laptops are meant to REPLACE the teachers
on
Technology and Society
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· Score: 1
Teachers are IMHO a bunch of whiney, overpaid babysitters who, like most middle management, are scared that the Internet is taking away their advantage as hoarders of knowledge. They mean well and are perhaps even convinced that they are in it for the love of learning, the good of our children, etc. etc. But the truth is, they are part of a top-down industrial model for education. Giving the kids laptops means they will be able to connect directly to a decentralized model of many publishers and many subscribers, making the teacher's present role obsolete.
This doesn't mean we don't need teachers. What it means is that they (and their powerful unions) need to stop whining and get ON with it. Figure out how to be coaches in student-centered learning instead of trying to stay atop their pedestals as dispensers of wisdom. The world has the wisdom, the best they can do is help people filter it in useful ways.
I know/. is not fond of the folks in Redmond, but M$ has been developing a leaderless team model over the past six years that may be worth taking a look at. Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) has a team model that gives each member a key responsibility and holds them accountable for it, but there's no one boss of the whole deal. You can read about it in this Word document.
What if the person who had a new project idea advertised it in newsgroups and/. etc and asked for volunteers for the six key positions in the model? If they couldn't get enough takers, maybe the idea isn't so hot. When they get enough, that team would become the nucleus to get the first rev out. After that, the normal OSS process could take over.
I'm actually quite embarassed, I edited my post to change first-draft "ugly" to "unpopular" because your point was exactly what I was getting at. Didn't take for some reason, and I was shocked when it posted. I understand what you're saying, drinkypoo, and agree with it. (blush)
I'm not impressed that the CIO's in the article are using Open Source Software as a lever against the CSS companies.
Isn't that a little like making a date for the prom with the ugly girl, knowing full well that once you've made the cheerleader jealous, she'll go with you after all? Nobody cares about the ugly girl, she's just being used. And she'll be dumped in the end.
Seems to me this is the wrong reason to be considering open source. The CIO's want a brand name (cheerleader) and if they have to date OSS to get her, they will. But where does that leave OSS in the end?
Remember HAL's last comment before being destroyed in 2010: "Will I dream?" Earlier in the movie, the arrogant Dr. Chandra told HAL's counterpart SAL9000: "Of course you will. All sentient beings dream. Perhaps you will dream of HAL, as I often do."
Seriously, back in the early 70's I was working for some Ph.D. types whose goal was to mimic the human brain in a computer. I almost got fired for asking if that meant the computer would have to be offline 8 hours a night to dream, so it could reorganize its thoughts the way our brains apparently do during sleep.
When the country was founded, there was a HUGE debate over whether "we, the people" could be trusted to govern ourselves. Those who favored democracy felt we did; those who wanted to create a mini-Great Britain didn't. So in the end, we got a balancing act in which we democratically elect representatives, in whom we trust to do the right thing. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't, but that's besides the point. The point is, we have a hybrid system on purpose.
So in the wake of 9/11 we can expect the balance to be reopened for debate. The question is still and always has been this: can you trust an open society of common people to make the right decisions and act like good citizens? Or do you have to have a central government provide a high degree oversight and control?
I'm voting that we've still got what it takes. I hope the changes that get passed are minor ones. To do otherwise would be to give up on the "great experiment" that is the point of having a separate country in the first place.
This seems to be a trend. Oracle's most recent software licenses have started to include additional restrictions, such as not being able to use the software to conduct third-party training. This obviously is designed to protect Oracle's own Education centers, but isn't that a restraint of trade? Why should they be able to say what uses you can make of the software?
I think there's a case to be made that End User License Agreements are accepted by users under duress, because there is no acceptable alternative to the software once it's in production and the company is relying on it for its core business processes.
Actually, plain text is quite workable by using CODES instead of CIPHERS. Innocent commercial transactions could carry information in the dollar amount charged, the name of the customer, variations in the address, etc. All one needs is a web site and a commerce server and information can be passed.
This is what makes the regulation of ciphertext an inadequate defense. There are just so many ways to communicate, only a few of which use encryption.
It wasn't easy.;-) I hate having to stop when I'm in the middle of something. By "simple," I meant that the tasks I would leave unfinished were typically grunt work like filing or renaming stuff throughout a project, no brainer stuff I could easily do to warm up for the next day. But never documentation -- that's too important to do that while it's still fresh.
I've done both, and the hardest thing about working at home for me is getting started. It's easy to procrastinate. Once I get involved on a project, I'm usually okay.
What I did the last time I telecommuted is settle into a routine where I left for "work" at the regular time, drove to a nearby coffee shop for breakfast, then drove home. The shift in context was enough to put me in "I'm going to work" mode, and I would get started right away.
The other thing is to leave something simple unfinished the night before, so there's a built-in starting point the next morning.
In Issac Asimov's third novel in the Foundation series, Second Foundation, mathematicians used a video wall projector to display their equations. As described in the book, the Prime Radiant did not cast a shadow, yet the walls were covered with equations. The coolest thing was, you just thought about a part of the equation and those lines marched down the wall to eye level.
So combine this video wall with the mind-activated cursor talked about in this issue of Wired and we're almost there.
What I meant was that 85% of succeeding at a job is the human factors. I didn't mean 85% of minutes worked. So even though your time is 75% spent on technical issues, you had to interview to get the job right? You have to get specs from someone, do reviews with someone, present your results to someone? You're probably communicating with a team at least via email. All of these factors can make you or burn you if you just focus on the syntax of the language you use.
To some extent, prima donna behavior is tolerated depending on the scarcity of the person's talent, and the general market for talent in the IT industry.
We've all heard the story of the third shift computer operator who demanded -- and got -- his entire floor locked off during his shift because he liked to work in the nude. And as long as he was the only person who could do that job, the company went along with it. But people like that are the first against the wall when the market frees up.
Any tech job is only 15% technical. The other 85% is people skills. Over the long term, the 85% catches up with you if you neglect it over the short term.
One for encryption, one for signing. IANAL, but have been told that you can be compelled to reveal your private encryption key so that your documents can be decrypted. However, you cannot be required to reveal your private signing key, as the only purpose would be to forge documents in your name.
When information is so abundant, it's easy to be sidetracked by all the "good" stuff, that we never achieve our "best". 57 channels and nothing on.
I like the quote by Thomas J. Watson, founder of IBM (as quoted by Tom Peters): The way to excellence is to stop doing -- immediately -- all un-excellent stuff. That's attention.
Moral: holding out for the best means saying no to a lot of "also good" things.
I think most technical workers underestimate the amount of effort needed in "non-core" areas like planning, sales, and administration (accounting). The key mistake is to not address these areas at all, thinking that they'll somehow get done. One way or the other, these functions need to be explicitly addressed. Either you can become a generalist who is capable of handling them in addition to your core skills, or you have to buy that expertise from others.
Fortunately, the same trend toward outsourcing that has placed many techies into a shotgun wedding with entrepreneurship has also created a web of resources they can use to cope. For starters, check out Janet Ruhl's Real Rates website. Also, those seeking a relatively painless (though pricey) back-office solution should check out Professional Association of Contract Employees (P.A.C.E.). And be sure to read the Contract Employees' Handbook by the same guy who runs P.A.C.E.
As soon as someone comes up with an acceptable business model for movies on demand (and the last mile problem is solved) we'll see how long that dark fiber takes to fill up to capacity.
The Monday morning quarterbacking on the dotcom shakeout seems to be that the dotcoms were actually more like venture-capital backed R&D labs for the large brick & mortar companies, who are now positioned for the second wave of Internet development. Could the "new media" be the same thing for the old line media companies?
I think the big mistake of both the dotcoms and the new media companies was in assuming that the Internet does indeed change everything. It changes the technology, but the wants and needs of the consumer probably haven't changed that much. We all want (in a Maslovian hierarchy sort of way) safety/security, belonging, relationship, and eventually meaning. Most of us couldn't care less how we get those things or what technology is used.
The New Economy and the New Media both focused 'way too much on the technologies and processes being used, and not enough on the purpose or result. Now they're toast, but the older companies will learn what not to do and will continue going about trying to deliver products and services at a profit.
"Second, if I have technical support that is lousy, professional sales people are always a great point of contact. I just call them up, tell them that I am disappointed with my technical support. After I hang up, the sales person walks back to the tech support people and kicks their ass for me, because they want to sell to me in the future."
I just did this with my ISP and it felt GREAT! I was having webmail problems and tech support basically said "live with it." So I talked to the account rep for my account and two days later response time mysteriously got better and error rates went down.
For years I've been on the other side of that equation as a systems guy. So it was sweet to make it work FOR me for once.
All of your arguments -- which I agree with, BTW, simply reinforce my point, which is that the ASP model has not been reduced to practice yet as has happened in banking.
"If you don't have any cash on you, you're hooped when the ATMs are down." Just as people keep a small amount of cash on them, local computers will probably keep a small amount of "cache" (sorry, couldn't resist!) data in a distributed model, so that they can continue to work in a degraded mode until the net comes up again.
"Now imagine that your data was stolen and deleted. Even if the ASP has decent backups and can restore it, your non-generic data is out there, in the hands of your competitors perhaps." If that data is stored encrypted, it's safe for some time period, after which it's presumably not as valuable any more.
"can you imagine the problems of having to be connected the whole time you're using MS Word (for instance) in order to save your document?" I can imagine networks being much more reliable over time than they are now, and smart caching that automatically resyncs to the network upon next connection.
I'm not saying these aren't problems TODAY. I just think that there will come some future point in time -- 5 years, 10 years, I don't know when -- when we'll see models like this be the norm instead of the exception.
But that's exactly what happened with money. You ARE free to keep it in a mattress if you wish, and in some cases maybe that makes sense. In most cases, however, a bank is a safer bet.
With ASP's, I'm not saying that they will be the only way you can store data. There will still be lots of reasons to have local computing resources and storage, just as there are lots of good reasons to have cash.
Back in the olden days, people thought that giving your money to someone else to hold was risky. And sure enough, many banks did fail and took their depositor's funds with them. But over time, controls and standards were put in place. Now it's the people who keep their money at home in a mattress are the ones considered crazy.
Is data any different than money? Right now, keeping your data at an ASP is risky and everyone says that in-house hosting is the only way to go. I think it's just because the ASP industry is like the banking industry before a lot of standards were developed. In 10 years, will we look at people who keep their own servers and infrastructure as the crazy ones? Why are they taking the risk of uptime, backup/recovery, non-redundant net connection, power failure, correct server configuration/patches upon themselves?
Current problems, like being involuntarily upgraded, will find solutions even as the banks found solutions to the problems of bank robbers and (later) interstate branch banking. Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
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Teachers are IMHO a bunch of whiney, overpaid babysitters who, like most middle management, are scared that the Internet is taking away their advantage as hoarders of knowledge. They mean well and are perhaps even convinced that they are in it for the love of learning, the good of our children, etc. etc. But the truth is, they are part of a top-down industrial model for education. Giving the kids laptops means they will be able to connect directly to a decentralized model of many publishers and many subscribers, making the teacher's present role obsolete.
This doesn't mean we don't need teachers. What it means is that they (and their powerful unions) need to stop whining and get ON with it. Figure out how to be coaches in student-centered learning instead of trying to stay atop their pedestals as dispensers of wisdom. The world has the wisdom, the best they can do is help people filter it in useful ways.
I know /. is not fond of the folks in Redmond, but M$ has been developing a leaderless team model over the past six years that may be worth taking a look at. Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) has a team model that gives each member a key responsibility and holds them accountable for it, but there's no one boss of the whole deal. You can read about it in this Word document.
/. etc and asked for volunteers for the six key positions in the model? If they couldn't get enough takers, maybe the idea isn't so hot. When they get enough, that team would become the nucleus to get the first rev out. After that, the normal OSS process could take over.
What if the person who had a new project idea advertised it in newsgroups and
I'm actually quite embarassed, I edited my post to change first-draft "ugly" to "unpopular" because your point was exactly what I was getting at. Didn't take for some reason, and I was shocked when it posted. I understand what you're saying, drinkypoo, and agree with it. (blush)
I'm not impressed that the CIO's in the article are using Open Source Software as a lever against the CSS companies.
Isn't that a little like making a date for the prom with the ugly girl, knowing full well that once you've made the cheerleader jealous, she'll go with you after all? Nobody cares about the ugly girl, she's just being used. And she'll be dumped in the end.
Seems to me this is the wrong reason to be considering open source. The CIO's want a brand name (cheerleader) and if they have to date OSS to get her, they will. But where does that leave OSS in the end?
Remember HAL's last comment before being destroyed in 2010: "Will I dream?" Earlier in the movie, the arrogant Dr. Chandra told HAL's counterpart SAL9000: "Of course you will. All sentient beings dream. Perhaps you will dream of HAL, as I often do."
Seriously, back in the early 70's I was working for some Ph.D. types whose goal was to mimic the human brain in a computer. I almost got fired for asking if that meant the computer would have to be offline 8 hours a night to dream, so it could reorganize its thoughts the way our brains apparently do during sleep.
Oh darn, now we'll NEVER get fiber to the last mile. ;-)
...not an absolute.
When the country was founded, there was a HUGE debate over whether "we, the people" could be trusted to govern ourselves. Those who favored democracy felt we did; those who wanted to create a mini-Great Britain didn't. So in the end, we got a balancing act in which we democratically elect representatives, in whom we trust to do the right thing. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't, but that's besides the point. The point is, we have a hybrid system on purpose.
So in the wake of 9/11 we can expect the balance to be reopened for debate. The question is still and always has been this: can you trust an open society of common people to make the right decisions and act like good citizens? Or do you have to have a central government provide a high degree oversight and control?
I'm voting that we've still got what it takes. I hope the changes that get passed are minor ones. To do otherwise would be to give up on the "great experiment" that is the point of having a separate country in the first place.
Dang, you mean we're NOT going to lose
Piedmont, NM?? Shoot.
This seems to be a trend. Oracle's most recent software licenses have started to include additional restrictions, such as not being able to use the software to conduct third-party training. This obviously is designed to protect Oracle's own Education centers, but isn't that a restraint of trade? Why should they be able to say what uses you can make of the software?
I think there's a case to be made that End User License Agreements are accepted by users under duress, because there is no acceptable alternative to the software once it's in production and the company is relying on it for its core business processes.
Actually, plain text is quite workable by using CODES instead of CIPHERS. Innocent commercial transactions could carry information in the dollar amount charged, the name of the customer, variations in the address, etc. All one needs is a web site and a commerce server and information can be passed.
This is what makes the regulation of ciphertext an inadequate defense. There are just so many ways to communicate, only a few of which use encryption.
It wasn't easy. ;-) I hate having to stop when I'm in the middle of something. By "simple," I meant that the tasks I would leave unfinished were typically grunt work like filing or renaming stuff throughout a project, no brainer stuff I could easily do to warm up for the next day. But never documentation -- that's too important to do that while it's still fresh.
I've done both, and the hardest thing about working at home for me is getting started. It's easy to procrastinate. Once I get involved on a project, I'm usually okay.
What I did the last time I telecommuted is settle into a routine where I left for "work" at the regular time, drove to a nearby coffee shop for breakfast, then drove home. The shift in context was enough to put me in "I'm going to work" mode, and I would get started right away.
The other thing is to leave something simple unfinished the night before, so there's a built-in starting point the next morning.
In Issac Asimov's third novel in the Foundation series, Second Foundation, mathematicians used a video wall projector to display their equations. As described in the book, the Prime Radiant did not cast a shadow, yet the walls were covered with equations. The coolest thing was, you just thought about a part of the equation and those lines marched down the wall to eye level. So combine this video wall with the mind-activated cursor talked about in this issue of Wired and we're almost there.
What I meant was that 85% of succeeding at a job is the human factors. I didn't mean 85% of minutes worked. So even though your time is 75% spent on technical issues, you had to interview to get the job right? You have to get specs from someone, do reviews with someone, present your results to someone? You're probably communicating with a team at least via email. All of these factors can make you or burn you if you just focus on the syntax of the language you use.
We've all heard the story of the third shift computer operator who demanded -- and got -- his entire floor locked off during his shift because he liked to work in the nude. And as long as he was the only person who could do that job, the company went along with it. But people like that are the first against the wall when the market frees up.
Any tech job is only 15% technical. The other 85% is people skills. Over the long term, the 85% catches up with you if you neglect it over the short term.
One for encryption, one for signing. IANAL, but have been told that you can be compelled to reveal your private encryption key so that your documents can be decrypted. However, you cannot be required to reveal your private signing key, as the only purpose would be to forge documents in your name.
I like the quote by Thomas J. Watson, founder of IBM (as quoted by Tom Peters): The way to excellence is to stop doing -- immediately -- all un-excellent stuff. That's attention.
Moral: holding out for the best means saying no to a lot of "also good" things.
Fortunately, the same trend toward outsourcing that has placed many techies into a shotgun wedding with entrepreneurship has also created a web of resources they can use to cope. For starters, check out Janet Ruhl's Real Rates website. Also, those seeking a relatively painless (though pricey) back-office solution should check out Professional Association of Contract Employees (P.A.C.E.). And be sure to read the Contract Employees' Handbook by the same guy who runs P.A.C.E.
I thought I said that. ;-)
Video on demand.
As soon as someone comes up with an acceptable business model for movies on demand (and the last mile problem is solved) we'll see how long that dark fiber takes to fill up to capacity.
I think the big mistake of both the dotcoms and the new media companies was in assuming that the Internet does indeed change everything. It changes the technology, but the wants and needs of the consumer probably haven't changed that much. We all want (in a Maslovian hierarchy sort of way) safety/security, belonging, relationship, and eventually meaning. Most of us couldn't care less how we get those things or what technology is used.
The New Economy and the New Media both focused 'way too much on the technologies and processes being used, and not enough on the purpose or result. Now they're toast, but the older companies will learn what not to do and will continue going about trying to deliver products and services at a profit.
I just did this with my ISP and it felt GREAT! I was having webmail problems and tech support basically said "live with it." So I talked to the account rep for my account and two days later response time mysteriously got better and error rates went down.
For years I've been on the other side of that equation as a systems guy. So it was sweet to make it work FOR me for once.
All of your arguments -- which I agree with, BTW, simply reinforce my point, which is that the ASP model has not been reduced to practice yet as has happened in banking.
I'm not saying these aren't problems TODAY. I just think that there will come some future point in time -- 5 years, 10 years, I don't know when -- when we'll see models like this be the norm instead of the exception.
With ASP's, I'm not saying that they will be the only way you can store data. There will still be lots of reasons to have local computing resources and storage, just as there are lots of good reasons to have cash.
Is data any different than money? Right now, keeping your data at an ASP is risky and everyone says that in-house hosting is the only way to go. I think it's just because the ASP industry is like the banking industry before a lot of standards were developed. In 10 years, will we look at people who keep their own servers and infrastructure as the crazy ones? Why are they taking the risk of uptime, backup/recovery, non-redundant net connection, power failure, correct server configuration/patches upon themselves?
Current problems, like being involuntarily upgraded, will find solutions even as the banks found solutions to the problems of bank robbers and (later) interstate branch banking. Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.