My point was the quote betrays more about the people complaining about the wikipedia than the weaknesses of wikipedia itself. The guy assigned a paper about the relation between structuralism, deconstruction, and postmodernism and didn't make it clear in the assignment that he wanted multiple sources, multiple views on these perspectives? WTF? How about a grading rubric to go with the assignment so I'm not left shooting blind? I don't think that's too much to ask, particularly in the humanities where there are some profs who are notorious for shooting from the hip. If requirements weren't made clear in the assignment, I can imagine a lot of people who would go to Wikipedia for some quick background, realize the whole thing was some gigantic intellectual circle jerk, and just hand in a paper. Fine, grade them down if you want, but I don't see how it follows that the contents of Wikipedia are worthless.
Remember, the issue isn't whether Wikipedia should stand alone as the only reference, the issue is whether the history profs should be able to BAN ALL Wikipedia references because of content concerns.
From TFA: "he wrote that he had 'just read a paper about the relation between structuralism, deconstruction, and postmodernism in which every reference was to the Wikipedia articles on those topics with no awareness that there was any need to read a primary work or even a critical work.'"
Yeah, right. We all know there's an objective response to that question. Sheesh.
What was the cause of the American Civil War? What is "Moby Dick" about? How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
And you're disappointed that students aren't digging deep enough for the truth? It's not like Wikipedia says the American Civil War began in 2005 and ended in 1066. I'd love to see more specifics about what these guys are so upset about.
Obligatory Simpson's reference: "Just say 'slavery.'"
I see your point, but there's more to it than just the cost of the software. I am at a small liberal arts school, and I thought having Moodle was a no-brainer. Free software!
There's more to it than that though. A few more things to consider: Through a consotium of small regional colleges, we get a price break on BB. BB sets the thing up and runs it on their hardware. BB has all sorts of training options for your faculty/staff. Face it, most faculty are not going to figure this stuff out on their own, they want it served up to them. This is the big one: BB fields all technical support calls. So when John Student can't seem to log on, BB support takes care of all that, not your overstretched IT workers at the small college. Our limited IT staff could easily spend half their days (particularly at the beginning of the semester) fielding support calls that could involve almost any computer related issue that might wind up affecting someone's ability to log on (think internet access, viruses, etc.).
In the end, as much as I hated to admit it, the student support costs alone made BB a no-brainer.
On the other hand, at a larger school that was committed to online learning, I would think that hiring your own people just for Moodle might be economically justifiable. BB was not cheap when we had it, and our prices went up significantly after their merger with WebCT. Our consortium has now switched to Sakai.
I think your analysis is spot-on. I work in a wireless environment. Personally I couldn't give a poo-bah about the whole phone thing. But the idea of carrying around Safari in my shirt pocket would be reason enough for me to buy this thing. Add to that email, widgets...
WTF does the article have to do with Psychology? If you RTFA, you'll see it's the American PSYCHIATRIC Association, not the American PSYCHOLOGICAL Association that's _supposedly_ pushing this. Having a PhD in Psychology does not make one a psychiatrist. You need an MD for that. And you seemed to have such praise for neurology...
Just because there are 2 companies with competing products doesn't mean that they don't collude on price fixing, etc. Ever hear of a firm called Archer Daniels Midland? They have lots of competitors worldwide. In the mid/late 1990s they were found guilty of price fixing along with their global "competitors." Just Google "ADM price fixing" for the whole story. Also, there's a great segment on "This American Life" about the executive that helped nail ADM. It's a very twisted tale about how this fellow was embezzling from ADM but was making up industrial espionage stories to cover his tracks. He called the FBI to look for the nonexistant corporate spy. Along with his wife he panics and decides to collect evidence for the government against ADM, hoping it will focus attention away from him. According to FBI agents, the ADM exec was a natural at collecting evidence, geting other execs to say stuff on tape, and cool as a cucumber. You really should track down the "This American Life" episode that tells the story at thislife.org.
Wow. That was interesting reading. I've now had my helping of emotional turmoil for the year.
Let's recap. Parents who can't control their kids send them to camps/schools where they fear their children are abused. The parents are very upset about this perceived abuse.
You'll have to excuse me now, I have to go have a vasectomy. AGAIN!!!!
"It makes me want to go back in time and find and then murder the 'clever' person who thought 'I know, since we can't charge each listener for our radio program, we'll charge companies to advertise on our show!'"
I'm feeling your pain, but we need to remember that it wasn't always as bad as it is now. Ever listen to those old radio shows? There's a brief (30-60 second) spot at the beginning of the show, and then a brief minute or two at the end. It's very unobtrustive by today's standards. Go check out old TV shows on internet archives. They have commercials, but the programming/commercial ratio is very different from today. Even some of the younger people on Slashdot can probably remember the early days of cable, when there were NO commercials on many channels. AMC is a great example. Started out with no commercials, period. Then they introduced commercials in between movies. Now...
My favorite example is Merekat Manor on Animal Planet. Holy craptastic advertising!!! The narrator barely finishes a sentence and they're off to another commercial break. They show the same commercials over and over again, sometimes during the same commercial break!
I don't fault the advertising model. It just seems like old-fashioned greed to me.
I can only thank God that I'm not in college in this day and age. When I went to college ('81) nobody on my floor had a computer freshman year. One guy had an Apple II+ my sophomore year (and a couple of guys had TI-99's after the fire sales in the spring of '83). There is no way I would be able to survive today. Games, music, video, pR0n...
Thank heavens those distractions were all precious and expensive luxuries in my day. I wouldn't have had the mental discipline to study knowing that at the click of a mouse I could have any entertainment I wanted. I admire students today who can balance the temptation.
All we had was Playboy and Tempest at $.25 a game (and I needed those quarters for laundry).
It doesn't just apply to political campaigning, it's a basic aspect of social interaction in our culture. Pick up any intro level Social Psychology textbook and turn to the chapter on perception of others. When you tell people about someone's characteristics, the negative qualities are much more likely to be remembered than the positive qualities. So when told, "John is a nobel-laureate, a loving father, and a puppy-kicker," people are much more likely to recall the puppy-kicker stuff later than any of the other traits. That's why politicians run smear campaigns. They're very effective! While you've got the book out, also take a look at "sleeper effects" for more insight into political campaigns...
A friend's husband sells high-end tires and wheels, just a cottage industry for him. Someone broke into one of his storage lockers and stole some wheels. Fortunately, the thieves were stupid enough to post the merchandise on ebay, complete with photos that included shots of the boxes with the victim's address on them.
That is one intense tune. I can remember watching a WWII film strip (anyone remember that technology?) accompanied by a cassette tape narration and soundtrack way back in 1976 that had a different version of the same song on it. Along with the horrific photos, it really made the hair on the back of my young neck stand up. It still does! Be sure to check out the translated lyrics on that great site.
To paraphrase Montgomery, there were 3 lessons to be learned from WWII: 1. Never invade Russia 2. Never invade China 3. Never invade Russia and China
Some people believe the exact opposite. Get the first generation products because they are so solidly engineered.
After the first generation, manufaturers start looking for ways to cut costs.
I saw a great show on the BBC once about washing machines. They took apart an old first gen washing machine and showed a beautiful machined flywheel. The thing was a work of art and I can't imagine how long it must of taken to make or how much it must of cost. The latest version of the same style of washing machine had the equivalent of a coffee can filled with concrete fulfilling the same role. I kid you not.
When I look back on CD players or VCR's that I bought, the first generation models were like tanks. They weighed a ton and held up under constant use for over a decade. I bought them in the mid-80s, and I gave them to the Salvation Army when I moved in 2001, I'm sure they're still running still 20 years on unless someone tossed them out. I only switched to newer models for the new bells and whistles.
"I have a first-gen MacBook Pro so I can attest to Apple's first-gen foibles."
It might be a good idea to look a bit further back in the history of a firm before making any sweeping statements. For every first-gen Apple product that sucked, you can name another that was wildly successful. Apple IIc's were great, Apple III's sucked. There are still Mac IIci's running today, the Mac IIvx was a "roadapple" the day it was released. The Blackbird series of Powerbooks were fabulous, the 5300's crashed and burned (literally). Aluminum PowerBook G4's were/are great machines, the iBook G3 series never were satisfactorily revised, the same form factor with a G4 was a winner from generation one.
One could continue on like this. I upgraded my first-gen iPod to 20gigs and I suspect I'll probably be buried with it (hopefully not soon).
"BTW, isn't the Slashdot mentality great? Poor driver support for Linux: "Broadcom/ATI/whoever Is The Devil." Poor driver support for Windows: "Vista Beta 2 has Major Problems." Go Figure."
I agree, stick with Apple OS X. It just works.
I bought a 3rd party USB 2 card for my 5 year old G4 tower. Plug it in, it works. Bought a 3rd party Serial ATA card for the same machine. Plug it in, it works. I boot from it.
God forbid I should try something like that with my Wintel XP machine.
"The problem wth doing 'Hello World' first is that learning a programming language is like climbing glass mountain. There is so much to learn before you can do anything useful, so conventionally, teachers are very tempted to miss things out. "
Wise words indeed! All of this illustrates the need for a _curriculum_ that has some sort of oversight at the top. The original poster mentions that he was hired as an adjunct to teach an upper level programming class. That should set off all sorts of warning signs. This program sounds like it was struggling to cover the classes it needed to offer. There wasn't time for anyone to sit down and think about what part of the puzzle each class in the curriculum should be covering.
As education budgets are stretched, and as schools rely more on adjuncts, I'd look for more of this happening. The adjuncts themselves might be great teachers, but if they aren't placed in an organized curriculum...
I'm sorry, did you say something about the quality of Xplay?
I was staring at Morgan Breast's Webb.
Er, Morgan Webb's breasts...
Seriously, silly banter aside, the reviews are quite good in that they seem to know how to use a 5 point Likert scale. Most of their reviews are a 3/5. The distribution of many of the other reviews I see seems to be bimodal - the game either totally sucks, or it rocks "TO THE EXTREME!!!" At least I know that when I watch Xplay if they give a game a 1 it must really suck, and games good enough to earn a 5 are equally rare.
I am sad that I had to scroll most of the way down the list of posts before I finally saw a "Toy Commander" comment. Thank heavens you mentioned it! This is the most innovative and engrossing game since the original Doom. If you haven't played it, you really owe it to yourself to try this one. An evil Teddy Bear mutates and takes over a really cool house. You have to use your toys to fight against his toys in every room, advancing to a showdown. I never really got past the level where you launch your planes from a Japanese carrier in your parents bedroom and try to take out a naval base in the master bath. It was just too much fun and I kept replaying it over and over again. Amazing!
"The real problem, in my opinion, is the role that Middle Management have carved out for themselves. Most problems, including those of the review process, can be traced to them. In many ways they are the reason why the upper management doesn't really know what is going on."
No offense, and I certainly don't know anything about the internal workings of Microsoft, but it does remind me of what people were reported to have said in the Gulags: "If only Stalin knew!"
Slashdot Mirror
My point was the quote betrays more about the people complaining about the wikipedia than the weaknesses of wikipedia itself. The guy assigned a paper about the relation between structuralism, deconstruction, and postmodernism and didn't make it clear in the assignment that he wanted multiple sources, multiple views on these perspectives? WTF? How about a grading rubric to go with the assignment so I'm not left shooting blind? I don't think that's too much to ask, particularly in the humanities where there are some profs who are notorious for shooting from the hip. If requirements weren't made clear in the assignment, I can imagine a lot of people who would go to Wikipedia for some quick background, realize the whole thing was some gigantic intellectual circle jerk, and just hand in a paper. Fine, grade them down if you want, but I don't see how it follows that the contents of Wikipedia are worthless.
Remember, the issue isn't whether Wikipedia should stand alone as the only reference, the issue is whether the history profs should be able to BAN ALL Wikipedia references because of content concerns.
From TFA: "he wrote that he had 'just read a paper about the relation between structuralism, deconstruction, and postmodernism in which every reference was to the Wikipedia articles on those topics with no awareness that there was any need to read a primary work or even a critical work.'" Yeah, right. We all know there's an objective response to that question. Sheesh. What was the cause of the American Civil War? What is "Moby Dick" about? How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? And you're disappointed that students aren't digging deep enough for the truth? It's not like Wikipedia says the American Civil War began in 2005 and ended in 1066. I'd love to see more specifics about what these guys are so upset about. Obligatory Simpson's reference: "Just say 'slavery.'"
I see your point, but there's more to it than just the cost of the software. I am at a small liberal arts school, and I thought having Moodle was a no-brainer. Free software! There's more to it than that though. A few more things to consider: Through a consotium of small regional colleges, we get a price break on BB. BB sets the thing up and runs it on their hardware. BB has all sorts of training options for your faculty/staff. Face it, most faculty are not going to figure this stuff out on their own, they want it served up to them. This is the big one: BB fields all technical support calls. So when John Student can't seem to log on, BB support takes care of all that, not your overstretched IT workers at the small college. Our limited IT staff could easily spend half their days (particularly at the beginning of the semester) fielding support calls that could involve almost any computer related issue that might wind up affecting someone's ability to log on (think internet access, viruses, etc.). In the end, as much as I hated to admit it, the student support costs alone made BB a no-brainer. On the other hand, at a larger school that was committed to online learning, I would think that hiring your own people just for Moodle might be economically justifiable. BB was not cheap when we had it, and our prices went up significantly after their merger with WebCT. Our consortium has now switched to Sakai.
I think if the University of Florida has taught us anything, you have to thoroughly soak your target first.
Yeah, I hear what you're saying, but come on, that 20% share of Acme Land Mines...
I think your analysis is spot-on. I work in a wireless environment. Personally I couldn't give a poo-bah about the whole phone thing. But the idea of carrying around Safari in my shirt pocket would be reason enough for me to buy this thing. Add to that email, widgets...
WTF does the article have to do with Psychology? If you RTFA, you'll see it's the American PSYCHIATRIC Association, not the American PSYCHOLOGICAL Association that's _supposedly_ pushing this. Having a PhD in Psychology does not make one a psychiatrist. You need an MD for that. And you seemed to have such praise for neurology...
Just because there are 2 companies with competing products doesn't mean that they don't collude on price fixing, etc. Ever hear of a firm called Archer Daniels Midland? They have lots of competitors worldwide. In the mid/late 1990s they were found guilty of price fixing along with their global "competitors." Just Google "ADM price fixing" for the whole story. Also, there's a great segment on "This American Life" about the executive that helped nail ADM. It's a very twisted tale about how this fellow was embezzling from ADM but was making up industrial espionage stories to cover his tracks. He called the FBI to look for the nonexistant corporate spy. Along with his wife he panics and decides to collect evidence for the government against ADM, hoping it will focus attention away from him. According to FBI agents, the ADM exec was a natural at collecting evidence, geting other execs to say stuff on tape, and cool as a cucumber. You really should track down the "This American Life" episode that tells the story at thislife.org.
>Nobody in America remembers what the Dark Ages were, they never had one.
Obviously you've never seen someone wearing an orange leisure suit...
Hey,
Don't knock masturbation.
It's sex with somone I love...
Wow. That was interesting reading. I've now had my helping of emotional turmoil for the year.
Let's recap. Parents who can't control their kids send them to camps/schools where they fear their children are abused. The parents are very upset about this perceived abuse.
You'll have to excuse me now, I have to go have a vasectomy. AGAIN!!!!
"It makes me want to go back in time and find and then murder the 'clever' person who thought 'I know, since we can't charge each listener for our radio program, we'll charge companies to advertise on our show!'"
I'm feeling your pain, but we need to remember that it wasn't always as bad as it is now. Ever listen to those old radio shows? There's a brief (30-60 second) spot at the beginning of the show, and then a brief minute or two at the end. It's very unobtrustive by today's standards. Go check out old TV shows on internet archives. They have commercials, but the programming/commercial ratio is very different from today. Even some of the younger people on Slashdot can probably remember the early days of cable, when there were NO commercials on many channels. AMC is a great example. Started out with no commercials, period. Then they introduced commercials in between movies. Now...
My favorite example is Merekat Manor on Animal Planet. Holy craptastic advertising!!! The narrator barely finishes a sentence and they're off to another commercial break. They show the same commercials over and over again, sometimes during the same commercial break!
I don't fault the advertising model. It just seems like old-fashioned greed to me.
I'm afraid you might have drunk a little too much, your Kool-Aid moustache is starting to show...
I can only thank God that I'm not in college in this day and age. When I went to college ('81) nobody on my floor had a computer freshman year. One guy had an Apple II+ my sophomore year (and a couple of guys had TI-99's after the fire sales in the spring of '83). There is no way I would be able to survive today. Games, music, video, pR0n...
Thank heavens those distractions were all precious and expensive luxuries in my day. I wouldn't have had the mental discipline to study knowing that at the click of a mouse I could have any entertainment I wanted. I admire students today who can balance the temptation.
All we had was Playboy and Tempest at $.25 a game (and I needed those quarters for laundry).
It doesn't just apply to political campaigning, it's a basic aspect of social interaction in our culture. Pick up any intro level Social Psychology textbook and turn to the chapter on perception of others. When you tell people about someone's characteristics, the negative qualities are much more likely to be remembered than the positive qualities. So when told, "John is a nobel-laureate, a loving father, and a puppy-kicker," people are much more likely to recall the puppy-kicker stuff later than any of the other traits. That's why politicians run smear campaigns. They're very effective! While you've got the book out, also take a look at "sleeper effects" for more insight into political campaigns...
A friend's husband sells high-end tires and wheels, just a cottage industry for him. Someone broke into one of his storage lockers and stole some wheels. Fortunately, the thieves were stupid enough to post the merchandise on ebay, complete with photos that included shots of the boxes with the victim's address on them.
But of course nothing beats this story:
That is one intense tune. I can remember watching a WWII film strip (anyone remember that technology?) accompanied by a cassette tape narration and soundtrack way back in 1976 that had a different version of the same song on it. Along with the horrific photos, it really made the hair on the back of my young neck stand up. It still does! Be sure to check out the translated lyrics on that great site.
To paraphrase Montgomery, there were 3 lessons to be learned from WWII:
1. Never invade Russia
2. Never invade China
3. Never invade Russia and China
Some people believe the exact opposite. Get the first generation products because they are so solidly engineered.
After the first generation, manufaturers start looking for ways to cut costs.
I saw a great show on the BBC once about washing machines. They took apart an old first gen washing machine and showed a beautiful machined flywheel. The thing was a work of art and I can't imagine how long it must of taken to make or how much it must of cost. The latest version of the same style of washing machine had the equivalent of a coffee can filled with concrete fulfilling the same role. I kid you not.
When I look back on CD players or VCR's that I bought, the first generation models were like tanks. They weighed a ton and held up under constant use for over a decade. I bought them in the mid-80s, and I gave them to the Salvation Army when I moved in 2001, I'm sure they're still running still 20 years on unless someone tossed them out. I only switched to newer models for the new bells and whistles.
"I have a first-gen MacBook Pro so I can attest to Apple's first-gen foibles."
It might be a good idea to look a bit further back in the history of a firm before making any sweeping statements. For every first-gen Apple product that sucked, you can name another that was wildly successful. Apple IIc's were great, Apple III's sucked. There are still Mac IIci's running today, the Mac IIvx was a "roadapple" the day it was released. The Blackbird series of Powerbooks were fabulous, the 5300's crashed and burned (literally). Aluminum PowerBook G4's were/are great machines, the iBook G3 series never were satisfactorily revised, the same form factor with a G4 was a winner from generation one.
One could continue on like this. I upgraded my first-gen iPod to 20gigs and I suspect I'll probably be buried with it (hopefully not soon).
"BTW, isn't the Slashdot mentality great? Poor driver support for Linux: "Broadcom/ATI/whoever Is The Devil." Poor driver support for Windows: "Vista Beta 2 has Major Problems." Go Figure."
I agree, stick with Apple OS X. It just works.
I bought a 3rd party USB 2 card for my 5 year old G4 tower. Plug it in, it works. Bought a 3rd party Serial ATA card for the same machine. Plug it in, it works. I boot from it.
God forbid I should try something like that with my Wintel XP machine.
"The problem wth doing 'Hello World' first is that learning a programming language is like climbing glass mountain. There is so much to learn before you can do anything useful, so conventionally, teachers are very tempted to miss things out. "
Wise words indeed! All of this illustrates the need for a _curriculum_ that has some sort of oversight at the top. The original poster mentions that he was hired as an adjunct to teach an upper level programming class. That should set off all sorts of warning signs. This program sounds like it was struggling to cover the classes it needed to offer. There wasn't time for anyone to sit down and think about what part of the puzzle each class in the curriculum should be covering.
As education budgets are stretched, and as schools rely more on adjuncts, I'd look for more of this happening. The adjuncts themselves might be great teachers, but if they aren't placed in an organized curriculum...
I'm sorry, did you say something about the quality of Xplay?
I was staring at Morgan Breast's Webb.
Er, Morgan Webb's breasts...
Seriously, silly banter aside, the reviews are quite good in that they seem to know how to use a 5 point Likert scale. Most of their reviews are a 3/5. The distribution of many of the other reviews I see seems to be bimodal - the game either totally sucks, or it rocks "TO THE EXTREME!!!" At least I know that when I watch Xplay if they give a game a 1 it must really suck, and games good enough to earn a 5 are equally rare.
I am sad that I had to scroll most of the way down the list of posts before I finally saw a "Toy Commander" comment. Thank heavens you mentioned it! This is the most innovative and engrossing game since the original Doom. If you haven't played it, you really owe it to yourself to try this one. An evil Teddy Bear mutates and takes over a really cool house. You have to use your toys to fight against his toys in every room, advancing to a showdown. I never really got past the level where you launch your planes from a Japanese carrier in your parents bedroom and try to take out a naval base in the master bath. It was just too much fun and I kept replaying it over and over again. Amazing!
Games
"The real problem, in my opinion, is the role that Middle Management have carved out for themselves. Most problems, including those of the review process, can be traced to them. In many ways they are the reason why the upper management doesn't really know what is going on."
No offense, and I certainly don't know anything about the internal workings of Microsoft, but it does remind me of what people were reported to have said in the Gulags: "If only Stalin knew!"