One of the least privileged school districts in my county purchased a set of Smart Boards for their math department. Aside from just buying them, however, they committed to learning/creating best practices for using their equipment. The results were
1) The equipment streamlined the process of teaching, leaving teachers more time to work with students during the period 2) The technology gave kids more opportunity to interact with the material 3) During planned absenses, teachers were able to record lectures and have them played back by the sub, maintaining continuity 4) Test scores and student interest went up
Of course, technology is not a magic wand. Teachers have to be committed to teaching, and to using the technology a lot (almost all of the time). I've found that even with the most simple technology, you have to use it continuously and integrete it into what you are teaching. On top of that, you have to do the work of researching what works and what doesn't with the technology, and make lesson plans that "work."
It's no magic wand, and I'm not surprised when schools haphazardly invest thousands of dollars in technology without a well defined plan, only to find that their returns are minimal.
Joss Whedon - Creator of Firefly, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Angel.
Serenity - Feature length film based on Firefly, which Fox cancelled a couple of years ago.
Re:Voyeger is more important
on
Hope for Hubble
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
This is a great point. If we have to choose between Hubble and Voyager, frankly I think we should pick Voyager. It may not be as sexy as the Hubble, but at least with the Hubble we could get a working replacement up and running in significantly less time than it would take to get an object to the edge of our solar system.
I'm not sure you understand the original comment. On the Mac, everything is packaged in a single directory w/a metadata file so that the Finder views it as an application. Double clicking the icon runs the enclosed executible, which in turn has all of the libraries it needs right there.
To install the Mac version of the Gimp, I download it, mount the disk image and drag the app icon to my applications folder. Run it, and I'm good to go (assuming X is running). If I need to, I can still enter the directory and mess with those files....but usually I don't have to.
Of course, there is a convenience vs redundancy tradeoff here. Disk space is plentiful, but a commonly used/prepackaged library having a massive security flaw could cause problems, but nothing 15 minutes of terminal work and some shell scripting couldn't solve (terminal still sees is as a normal directory).
I have to make a major plug for Karel the Robot, which is the software package I use to teach logical thinking and basic OO design to my intro students. Karel is highly graphical, object oriented and (more or less...mostly less) language agnostic. I'm not sure what language you'd use, but there is a VERY easy to learn Java Karel library here.
In fact, I have an idea for your presentation. As part of my unit on looping and recursion, I've written a set of classes that generates a maze that Karel has to traverse. You could use that, write a little program to have Karel find his way through the maze. You can them show them graphically how the maze is generated and how the robot works its way through the maze, finally showing them the code. If you're is interested in doing something like this, reply here and I'll post the code to my website.
Complaining to the secretary on the phone probably won't help matters. Likewise, it will be useless fo complain to almost anyone that a total stranger could get on the phone in short order. And, almost by definition, anyone in a spyware company with the power to do anything about it probably doesn't care.
Instead, why not call companies being targeted and encourage them to persist in how they label this product? Likewise, once it comes to light which companies gave in, contact them and let them know how disappointed you are, and how you won't be recommending their products to your clueless relatives.
This sounds good in theory, until you realize that DIY learning isn't all that it is cracked up to be.
Ever try getting online help for an obscure hardware interaction problem on your computer? Spend 30 minutes Googling variations of your problem description, then another 15 minutes giving up and finding a suitable mailing list. Assuming that the list is well managed and you don't get a bunch of socially challenged 13-year-olds telling you to fuck off, you still have to wait and pray that someone with a clue tells you what you need to know (other than, "dude, sounds like you need another brand of network card").
Of course, this is an imperfect analogy, because learning is 20 times more complex than simply troubleshooting a problem. You need to find someone who can quickly diagnose where you are going wrong and give you enough help to move you along in the material, but not just hand you what you need. You need someone with enough experience in the topic (and enough experience in how you learn) to sequence the information in an manner that is fitting to your level of understanding, and force you down paths that may not be enjoyable but will be profitable in the end. You need someone with credibility to encourage you when you aren't sure you can handle the material.
In short, you need a teacher.
Of course, I suppose you could post a few notes on a message board and find a mentor. Of course, if you wanted an education that was broader than your own ego, you would need to find specialists in each of the major subject areas....which is an awful lot of mentors.
Good luck with that, and let me know where you found them because I have some students who need remediation.
I stick with Net/Free/Open BSD for the sake of sheer familiarity. I understand the BSD way of organizing things. I understand and love pf. I understand how most BSD projects organize their code trees, so using CVS to pull down a stable branch and compile is really second nature. I could devote time to relearning Linux, but I don't have any circumstances that necessitates such an undertaking.
I'm sure that my circumstances are not unique, and that Linux folks can say the same thing about their flavor of Linux.
Loading the same set of pages multiple times reveals a different page each time. These html files seem to be generated on the fly so that you get different "messages" and "errors" embedded each time.
All-in-all, this is pretty creepy, even though you know it is just part of the marketing blitz.
-Troy
Evidence for the cross-seeding theory mounts!
on
Martian Racetracks
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· Score: 2, Funny
The Martians were as crazy about Nascar as we are.
I don't think Biblical truth is an all-or-nothing proposition. In fact, Biblical literalism is only a relatively recent development in Christian thought, really only popping up in the last couple hundred years. For centuries people have been able to regard Scripture as being both authoritative and reliable without resorting to literalism; I can believe in the reality of the Resurrection while still reading Gen 1 as a mytho-poetic account.
So, I wouldn't call the literalist approach "pure" so much as I would call it "ignorant." Literalists seem to always be ignorant of the history of Scripture's development, the influences that history and culture exerts on Scripture, the purpose of Scripture throughout centuries of Christian thought, and the multiple issues that arise when one tries to render Scripture in English.
A friend of mine wisely observed that you can take Scripture seriously or literally. I choose the former.
I can see the reasoning behind your claim, though I have a hard time conceding to your point because the theme of knowledge -> punishment does not carry through in the rest of Scripture. What does carry through is the theme of disobediance -> punishment, which is why I tend to read those few verses in that light. The fact that wisdom and knowledge are, in general, praised throughout Scripture also leads me to believe that my interpretation of those few verses is more accurate the your own.
Moreover how someone without the knowledge of good and evil could be held accountable for the moral choice to disobey God is beyond me. Like George Bush, God seems to have no trouble putting to death those who lack the mental maturity to make informed moral decisions.
First....please....never ever ever compare Bush to God. Just contemplating the thought made me 15% dumber than I was before.:)
Of course, you pose a big question that people who take the Bible seriously have struggled with for a long time...and no answer is really satisfactory, so I won't even try to address this answer in general.
In this particular instance, however, I don't even think the question of morality pops up on the radar until some time after the deed is done. To Eve I think the issue is a much more primitive issue of power and obediance than morality -- she did the one thing her creator told her not to do.
Of course, this issue is kind of moot, since I believe very strongly that the first parts of Genesis are more mytho-poetic than historical or scientific.
-Troy
Re:Personally, I would go one step further.
on
Game with God
·
· Score: 1
Blaming the Dark Ages on religion is like blaming smog on the sun.
It's always fun when an atheist takes Scripture more literally than a KJV-only Baptist.
Re:Semi-serious?
on
Game with God
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The problem with using a single verse to make an argument is that there is a whole lot of remaining Bible that can provide clarity and context to that single verse.
For instance, while that verse does say that Eve saw that the fruit would make her wise, the issue goes deeper than that. Look at the previous few verses:
Genesis 3 (NIV):
2 The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, 3 but God did say, 'You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.' " 4 "You will not surely die," the serpent said to the woman. 5 "For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."
Reading the preceding verses, you see that the serpent tempted Eve, not with knowledge, but with Godliness. The serpant told Eve that
1) God had lied to her 2) She could be like God
and Eve chose to believe him instead of God and ate it, gaining this very specific kind of ethical knowledge. Now the knowledge is important because it is what made Adam and Eve like God, but saying that the passage is big parable against the pursuit of knowledge is a little short-cited. If you go on to read the rest of the chapter (and the rest of the Bible) the big problem is not that Adam and Eve had gained knowledge, but that they had disobeyed God and striven to become like Him. This is proven throughout Scripture: whenever someone disobeys God or attempts to deify themselves, a divine bitch slap is always close behind.
On the other hand, wisdom and knowledge (in the general sense) are praised multiple times throughout Scripture -- only when the wisdom/knowledge is gained in defiance of God is the person punished. God blesses Solomon with both wisdom, and from wisdom comes wealth and fame:
I Kings 4 (NIV):
29 And God gave Solomon exceptionally much wisdom and understanding, and breadth of mind like the sand of the seashore. 30 Solomon's wisdom excelled the wisdom of all the people of the East and all the wisdom of Egypt. 31 For he was wiser than all other men--than Ethan the Ezrahite, and Heman, Calcol, and Darda, the sons of Mahol. His fame was in all the nations round about. 32 He also originated 3,000 proverbs, and his songs were 1,005. 33 He spoke of trees, from the cedar that is in Lebanon to the hyssop that grows out of the wall; he spoke also of beasts, of birds, of creeping things, and of fish.
I've had excellent success with Weather Watcher. It sits in the toolbar showing the temperature, has a large number of handy display options, has a common sense radar map system, uses a beautiful forecast layout, can show the radar as your desktop background, and pops up any severe weather alerts. His update software sometimes botches and requires a complete program reinstall, but outside of that minor glitch, it is a top notch program that I run on all of my Windows boxes.
I'll be the last person to poopoo someone else's preferences, but since when was a text editor the same thing as a word processor?
I love vi myself, but when I want to do word processing, I yearn for Word 5.1 as a navigate through all of Word XP's and even OpenOffice's "smart" features that are supposed to make my life easier. I know I can turn all of these off, but the question is whether or not something like word completion is a good feature in the first place.
For those who are running Thunderbird on OS X, what made you choose this over Apple's Mail program? What features does Thunderbird offer that Mail does not?
You Caveman!
Everyone knows the Soylent Greenballots are the wave of the future.
Re:Last Sunday
on
SimChurch
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Let's try very very hard not the be judgemental of churches that we really know nothing about and people that we barely know, shall we? If you've never been hurt and frustrated by a church community, then consider yourself blessed. However, every church, being filled with broken people, will have a social dimension that sometimes falls short of Christ's example.
It happens...in every single church, bible study, and prayer group on the planet and people get damaged in the process. You may think that your church is different, but I promise you that it is not. If it is, y'all can pretty much rip out the remaining weeks from your daytimers, because you're gonna get raptured real soon now.
Likewise, you know nothing of this gentleman's financial situation, priorities, or really anything about him at all save what he said in a couple of lines in a post on the Internet. Save judgements for people slightly better qualified.
-Troy
Re:Defeating some of the purpose?
on
SimChurch
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I think part of the purpose of this virtual church is not to replace brick-and-mortar churches, but to make a church experience accessible to people who (for whatever reason) never considered attending an actual church.
Ship of Fools is supported through donations and have a track record of being conscientious about doing things ethically. I seriously doubt that they would tolerate popup ads on what is intended to be a kind of sacred space.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the least privileged school districts in my county purchased a set of Smart Boards for their math department. Aside from just buying them, however, they committed to learning/creating best practices for using their equipment. The results were
1) The equipment streamlined the process of teaching, leaving teachers more time to work with students during the period
2) The technology gave kids more opportunity to interact with the material
3) During planned absenses, teachers were able to record lectures and have them played back by the sub, maintaining continuity
4) Test scores and student interest went up
Of course, technology is not a magic wand. Teachers have to be committed to teaching, and to using the technology a lot (almost all of the time). I've found that even with the most simple technology, you have to use it continuously and integrete it into what you are teaching. On top of that, you have to do the work of researching what works and what doesn't with the technology, and make lesson plans that "work."
It's no magic wand, and I'm not surprised when schools haphazardly invest thousands of dollars in technology without a well defined plan, only to find that their returns are minimal.
-Troy
Joss Whedon - Creator of Firefly, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Angel.
Serenity - Feature length film based on Firefly, which Fox cancelled a couple of years ago.
This is a great point. If we have to choose between Hubble and Voyager, frankly I think we should pick Voyager. It may not be as sexy as the Hubble, but at least with the Hubble we could get a working replacement up and running in significantly less time than it would take to get an object to the edge of our solar system.
I'm not sure you understand the original comment. On the Mac, everything is packaged in a single directory w/a metadata file so that the Finder views it as an application. Double clicking the icon runs the enclosed executible, which in turn has all of the libraries it needs right there.
To install the Mac version of the Gimp, I download it, mount the disk image and drag the app icon to my applications folder. Run it, and I'm good to go (assuming X is running). If I need to, I can still enter the directory and mess with those files....but usually I don't have to.
Of course, there is a convenience vs redundancy tradeoff here. Disk space is plentiful, but a commonly used/prepackaged library having a massive security flaw could cause problems, but nothing 15 minutes of terminal work and some shell scripting couldn't solve (terminal still sees is as a normal directory).
-T
I have to make a major plug for Karel the Robot, which is the software package I use to teach logical thinking and basic OO design to my intro students. Karel is highly graphical, object oriented and (more or less...mostly less) language agnostic. I'm not sure what language you'd use, but there is a VERY easy to learn Java Karel library here.
In fact, I have an idea for your presentation. As part of my unit on looping and recursion, I've written a set of classes that generates a maze that Karel has to traverse. You could use that, write a little program to have Karel find his way through the maze. You can them show them graphically how the maze is generated and how the robot works its way through the maze, finally showing them the code. If you're is interested in doing something like this, reply here and I'll post the code to my website.
-Troy
Complaining to the secretary on the phone probably won't help matters. Likewise, it will be useless fo complain to almost anyone that a total stranger could get on the phone in short order. And, almost by definition, anyone in a spyware company with the power to do anything about it probably doesn't care.
Instead, why not call companies being targeted and encourage them to persist in how they label this product? Likewise, once it comes to light which companies gave in, contact them and let them know how disappointed you are, and how you won't be recommending their products to your clueless relatives.
-Troy
This sounds good in theory, until you realize that DIY learning isn't all that it is cracked up to be.
Ever try getting online help for an obscure hardware interaction problem on your computer? Spend 30 minutes Googling variations of your problem description, then another 15 minutes giving up and finding a suitable mailing list. Assuming that the list is well managed and you don't get a bunch of socially challenged 13-year-olds telling you to fuck off, you still have to wait and pray that someone with a clue tells you what you need to know (other than, "dude, sounds like you need another brand of network card").
Of course, this is an imperfect analogy, because learning is 20 times more complex than simply troubleshooting a problem. You need to find someone who can quickly diagnose where you are going wrong and give you enough help to move you along in the material, but not just hand you what you need. You need someone with enough experience in the topic (and enough experience in how you learn) to sequence the information in an manner that is fitting to your level of understanding, and force you down paths that may not be enjoyable but will be profitable in the end. You need someone with credibility to encourage you when you aren't sure you can handle the material.
In short, you need a teacher.
Of course, I suppose you could post a few notes on a message board and find a mentor. Of course, if you wanted an education that was broader than your own ego, you would need to find specialists in each of the major subject areas....which is an awful lot of mentors.
Good luck with that, and let me know where you found them because I have some students who need remediation.
-Troy
who is loving his 60+ hour/week cushy job
I stick with Net/Free/Open BSD for the sake of sheer familiarity. I understand the BSD way of organizing things. I understand and love pf. I understand how most BSD projects organize their code trees, so using CVS to pull down a stable branch and compile is really second nature. I could devote time to relearning Linux, but I don't have any circumstances that necessitates such an undertaking.
I'm sure that my circumstances are not unique, and that Linux folks can say the same thing about their flavor of Linux.
-Troy
All Things Considered interviewed the doctor who apparently directed this girl's treatment (and devised a very creative approach to the problem).
A link to the RealAudio/Windows media file is here.
-Troy
When I went to Penny Arcade I got an SQL dump in small white text.
Apparently the Pious Flea gets around!
Loading the same set of pages multiple times reveals a different page each time. These html files seem to be generated on the fly so that you get different "messages" and "errors" embedded each time.
All-in-all, this is pretty creepy, even though you know it is just part of the marketing blitz.
-Troy
The Martians were as crazy about Nascar as we are.
I don't think Biblical truth is an all-or-nothing proposition. In fact, Biblical literalism is only a relatively recent development in Christian thought, really only popping up in the last couple hundred years. For centuries people have been able to regard Scripture as being both authoritative and reliable without resorting to literalism; I can believe in the reality of the Resurrection while still reading Gen 1 as a mytho-poetic account.
So, I wouldn't call the literalist approach "pure" so much as I would call it "ignorant." Literalists seem to always be ignorant of the history of Scripture's development, the influences that history and culture exerts on Scripture, the purpose of Scripture throughout centuries of Christian thought, and the multiple issues that arise when one tries to render Scripture in English.
A friend of mine wisely observed that you can take Scripture seriously or literally. I choose the former.
-Troy
First....please....never ever ever compare Bush to God. Just contemplating the thought made me 15% dumber than I was before.
Of course, you pose a big question that people who take the Bible seriously have struggled with for a long time...and no answer is really satisfactory, so I won't even try to address this answer in general.
In this particular instance, however, I don't even think the question of morality pops up on the radar until some time after the deed is done. To Eve I think the issue is a much more primitive issue of power and obediance than morality -- she did the one thing her creator told her not to do.
Of course, this issue is kind of moot, since I believe very strongly that the first parts of Genesis are more mytho-poetic than historical or scientific.
-Troy
Blaming the Dark Ages on religion is like blaming smog on the sun.
It's always fun when an atheist takes Scripture more literally than a KJV-only Baptist.
For instance, while that verse does say that Eve saw that the fruit would make her wise, the issue goes deeper than that. Look at the previous few verses:Reading the preceding verses, you see that the serpent tempted Eve, not with knowledge, but with Godliness. The serpant told Eve that
1) God had lied to her
2) She could be like God
and Eve chose to believe him instead of God and ate it, gaining this very specific kind of ethical knowledge. Now the knowledge is important because it is what made Adam and Eve like God, but saying that the passage is big parable against the pursuit of knowledge is a little short-cited. If you go on to read the rest of the chapter (and the rest of the Bible) the big problem is not that Adam and Eve had gained knowledge, but that they had disobeyed God and striven to become like Him. This is proven throughout Scripture: whenever someone disobeys God or attempts to deify themselves, a divine bitch slap is always close behind.
On the other hand, wisdom and knowledge (in the general sense) are praised multiple times throughout Scripture -- only when the wisdom/knowledge is gained in defiance of God is the person punished. God blesses Solomon with both wisdom, and from wisdom comes wealth and fame: The entire book of Proverbs is one big love letter to wisdom and knolwedge....especially the first nine chapters.
-Troy
I've had excellent success with Weather Watcher. It sits in the toolbar showing the temperature, has a large number of handy display options, has a common sense radar map system, uses a beautiful forecast layout, can show the radar as your desktop background, and pops up any severe weather alerts. His update software sometimes botches and requires a complete program reinstall, but outside of that minor glitch, it is a top notch program that I run on all of my Windows boxes.
-Troy
I'll be the last person to poopoo someone else's preferences, but since when was a text editor the same thing as a word processor?
I love vi myself, but when I want to do word processing, I yearn for Word 5.1 as a navigate through all of Word XP's and even OpenOffice's "smart" features that are supposed to make my life easier. I know I can turn all of these off, but the question is whether or not something like word completion is a good feature in the first place.
-Troy
Check again, because I believe both von Neumann and Linus are in the running. They are both near the bottom of the list.
For those who are running Thunderbird on OS X, what made you choose this over Apple's Mail program? What features does Thunderbird offer that Mail does not?
Thanks!
-Troy
You Caveman! Everyone knows the Soylent Greenballots are the wave of the future.
Let's try very very hard not the be judgemental of churches that we really know nothing about and people that we barely know, shall we? If you've never been hurt and frustrated by a church community, then consider yourself blessed. However, every church, being filled with broken people, will have a social dimension that sometimes falls short of Christ's example.
It happens...in every single church, bible study, and prayer group on the planet and people get damaged in the process. You may think that your church is different, but I promise you that it is not. If it is, y'all can pretty much rip out the remaining weeks from your daytimers, because you're gonna get raptured real soon now.
Likewise, you know nothing of this gentleman's financial situation, priorities, or really anything about him at all save what he said in a couple of lines in a post on the Internet. Save judgements for people slightly better qualified.
-Troy
I think part of the purpose of this virtual church is not to replace brick-and-mortar churches, but to make a church experience accessible to people who (for whatever reason) never considered attending an actual church.
-Troy
Ship of Fools is supported through donations and have a track record of being conscientious about doing things ethically. I seriously doubt that they would tolerate popup ads on what is intended to be a kind of sacred space.
-Troy