I hate instagram and FB and all my friends and i'm old and stupid, but, i'm also in web analytics, and comparing mid-January to mid-December doesn't make any sense. I mean, I can't think of one, maybe there's some reason that in mid-december, people might be taking a lot more pictures than at other times of the year. Oh wait, I can think of one. A giant one. The biggest one all year.
Or maybe there were more devices going into new owners' hands in mid-december and THAT drove up usage like crazy. Or maybe people take more pictures when they're not at work, and lots of people have lots of days off in Dec and not in Jan. Or maybe oh forget it you get the point.
Compare this week this year to this week last year in December, then do the same in January, and THEN we can talk. Was the week-to-week change different last year? Otherwise you end up with dumb crap like this. Oh, hey, did you hear that Amazon's revenues are down 48% vs. four weeks ago? THEY"RE DOOOOOMED because I'm an idiot.
Man, I would pay to see that shit. And I don't just mean that, being from a blue-and-therefore-giver-state, I would *actually* be paying for that. I mean I would buy a fucking ticket. The only mistake we made at Ruby Ridge was not sending in the tanks.
I'm so tired of this shit. Let them fucking go. Tennessee's a third world country without federal fucking dollars -- they want a part of that? Let them have it.
"It's designed to plug into the best speakers and TV in your home"
See, this is the problem right here: why on earth would I keep the best speakers in my home anywhere *near* my tv? Watching TV and listening to music are completely different activities. They don't even use the same chair.
I don't need to stream *everything* to one place, I need to stream *different* things to *different* places, and I'll gladly pay $250, but not $250 per room if I'm only going to use some of the functionality.
You think that's true? I'm not -- I think that the issue is that they really don't realize exactly how assholish it is. I think that the fact that we're JUST NOW in 2012 getting stories about people who are mad as hell and not going to take it anymore is an indication of the fact that really, most people simply haven't thought about it very hard.
At least that's what I hope. And like I said, I'm not an optimist when it comes to human nature, but I really do think that we're still at the 'ignorant of exactly how much it makes people want to kill you' stage.
Yeah -- I mean, this is the problem. Like, frequently -- most of the time -- I sort of wish that talkers would, you know, die, but there's lots of unobtrusive usage that's nobody's business.
I'll tell you what I really think is going to happen: I think in 10 or 15 years, we're going to look back on this time period, and be sort of aghast at how people behaved with regards to their phones. I don't accept that things are moving in a more-talk-is-OK direction, I think that there's the possibility that this is a manners-haven't-caught-up-to-tech blip. There's going to be a certain amount of soul-searching as we deal with the driving issue, and I'm hoping that what will come out of that will be, 'Wait -- is what I have to say really important enough to need saying, now, in these circumstances?'
And I'm not generally optimistic about human nature. But cell phone usage, I just don't see how this can go on very much longer as it is -- I mean, it's raw uncut assholishness, all the time, and everyone KNOWS it, but for now, they all DO IT anyway.
My fingers are crossed for what alcoholics refer to as a 'moment of clarity'.
The writing's been on the wall for years. If your car gets 35mpg and you live within 15 miles of your job, an increase of $2 a gallon hits you with a whopping $5.80 increase per week -- what's that, a big mac? A latte and a half?
And if you *haven't* got a fuel-efficient car and tried to live where you work or close to transit, given how long we've known that gas prices fluctuate in response to world events, well, you've done it to yourself. Shut up.
Free market, y'all. You asked for it, you got it, and you demanded a house with a lawn and an SUV anyway, and now you've got the nerve to cry about gasoline prices? I believe the french refer to this sort of thing as 'yo problem'.
Understand me -- I wish that these people who are almost certainly wrong are right, and that there's no warming happening.
BUT IF THERE IS, aren't you going to gain any enjoyment from the fact that Texas, the reddest, denyingest of states is going to catch fire first? Be honest: that's going to be funny. When Arizona, Nevada, and Kentucky follow, I mean, seriously? I'm not supposed to smile at *all*?
Sorry -- what exactly haven't I anticipated? I'll be dead in 50 years, by which time, what, 3, 4 degrees? Texas will be on fire, and I'll get to watch from afar. And if it's not, that's great, too.
Are you under the impression that the earth desperately cares whether you or I hang around?
Personally, I think that the preponderance of the scientific evidence suggests that we ought to be worried about climate change. However, there are people who seem to have a chip on their shoulder about this, and they seem to be centralized in the very states that are going to have it worst if they're wrong. Frankly, I hope they're right and that their already-sun-belt homes don't wind up in the middle of a new desert, and that their kids don't end up with some kind of mutant skin cancer.
But if they do? I don't care. Maine could use an extra degree or two, and it'll be funny to watch all the Red States run around begging the federal government for disaster relief like they do when a river floods or there's a hurricane in the gulf. "Oh, noes! Hotness! Who could have guessed! Please help us, evil socialist elitists. Our kids can't play outside and we're all so THIRSTY!!!! Waaaaaah!"
I worked at a school that did exactly this, and you're right, the pressure was still there to pass kids.
Two things made this somewhat successful:
1. The 'marginal' range did move up. So while maybe you're allowing just as many close-but-not-quites to get C's as you would have with D's, the bar for 'marginal' was definitely higher.
2. The administration was behind it. They were very clear: if a kid should not get credit, give them an F.
Though I don't need the rhetoric, this hits it on the head, in every aspect.
I'd like to try teaching math like English -- Math 1, Math 2, Math 3, Math 4, with curriculum determined in part by such apparently meaningless factors as what might be useful in other classes or what's happening, you know, outside of my room.
The textbook comments are particularly right on -- step 1, burn them. If teachers complain that they won't know what to teach, fire them on the spot.
Geometry is also a lousy place for proof. Teach deduction all the time, in every topic -- and in classrooms other than math. "Here's a bunch of fake stuff you don't know anything about that's hard to draw. Now let's think really abstractly about how we're thinking about it!" And induction doesn't get taught at all.
The practical deal-killer, the one that drove me out of the profession, is that the barrel full of math teachers is so close to empty that you're pretty much scraping bottom from day 1. This kind of instruction -- and this kind of critique -- can only originate with someone who likes math, and is sort of good at it. You'd be amazed (or maybe you wouldn't) at how few public high school math teachers this describes.
America has gotten the math teaching instruction it asked for when it decided to prop up bad teachers with lousy but easy-to-use texts, and to boot it got the benefit of not having to pay very well for people willing to go through these motions. (It's not about money, but really, it's a little bit about money. I doubled my salary when I left last year.) It's a big, huge problem, and since you're going to have to convince parents that it needs the kind of dramatic overhaul this (great) article describes, and since parents were largely victimized by the existing system, I'm pretty sure it's a losing battle.
your claim that there's a spectrum is speculative, and i'd say it's at odds with my experience. there are people who would like to be teachers, and people who wouldn't, and no amount of money is going to allow the second group to survive the first week. there's the claim that some amount of money will allow more of the first group to actually do it, but this is at odds with the fact that teachers actually get paid pretty well. when we talk about teacher pay, we're not talking about mcdonalds here -- maine pays quite poorly, and i still make more than enough to get by.
i'm not sure what your point is about the second quote. it doesn't say anyhing at all about raising salaries, except that it might not solve anything. whatever.
as to the phd scenario, you suppose several things that aren't really supported by fact -- that a phd in math will help you teach 7th greaders, that didactic skills are more important than other related skills, that the job will remain interesting to people with this sort of training, that there's consensus on how abstract thinking skills develop. i'm not sure where you're getting this from, and it would be 'nice to think about' if it were true, but i have no reason to believe that any of these things are.
finally, in re: 'a few really, really talented people,' we don't need a few really really talented people. we need a whole lot of passable people who can go to work and be teachers. the people who claim they 'can't justify doing it now', they haven't really looked at the math -- or they've committed themselves financially to a level that's well beyond that of the median american household which, again, is their prerogative. but let's not make this out like there's a huge class of noble geniuses out there just waiting to bail out american learners if only they could afford to help. it ain't like that. the right answer can't be money, because money won't solve the problem. if there's an answer, that's not it.
This is actually one of my personal sticking points -- if we're going to tell the kids it's a variable, how come we're able to solve for its (one) value? I 'waste' a lot of my effort and students' time on things like this one, but i think it's important.
Your larger point -- that there are subtleties involved that aren't just special cases but are part and parcel to what makes the discipline interesting -- is right on.
I'm a teacher, and I love money, but here's the problem:
No one gets into this for the money, and no one stays for the money -- not math teachers, anyway. I did something before this that paid twice as much, as many of us do, but then I got bored and decided to try this.
So the issue is, if people aren't in teaching for the money, why do we suspect that we'll be able to attract more people to teaching with more money?
Now, there's the reasonable argument that there's some segment of the population that would like to teach, but can't because the pay is so low, but there's two things wrong with this argument:
1. teachers are never going to make as much as, say, modelers or programmers, and 2. i have some reason to believe that the sort of people who are just waiting for teaching kids to be really, really profitable might not be the crowd that we want to attract, anyway.
People get into teaching because they like teaching. People leave teaching because it's annoying a lot of the time. Here's how you attract people, in my personal fake expert opinion:
1. make it interesting. don't assign people to courses just because they're what's open, and don't make them wait for someone to die to get to try teaching calculus. 2. give them support, and help them develop. put time into schedules for conferences and bring in real lecturers, provide journals and during the day time to discuss, and fund coursework into anything. 3. throw out the textbooks. they're all shit (with the exception of harold jacobs). 4. demand real expertise and professionalism. make math teacher a job that it's hard to get. if i quit tomorrow, i could work anywhere in Maine by next week. this isn't good, rather it tells me that i don't need to be very good -- and if that's true, how good am i, really?
It's a great job, and you can't fix the shortage with money because things are so bad in terms of available teachers that you're just going to drag the good ones to rich districts and force poor schools to take whoever's left -- and you would be pretty surprised if i were to tell you exactly how bad things are in terms of expertise. The right answer is to make it a job that is attractive in all its aspects, and one that's admirable and challenging. That's all we geeks want, anyway, isn't it? A challenge, and some acknowledgement that we've got giant freaking brains?
This is about where I've always bought, too, and I'm very happy. I do find, though, that I can't usually run things all out (8xAA and the anisotropic all the way up). I mean, I really don't care, because it's an arms race I simply can't afford to get caught up in, but I do think that there's a difference.
Typical slashdot jerk. How about, rather than calling me an idiot, you try, 'Actually, you're mistaken -- the published specs on this one are different than the japanese version, which didn't do those things.'
But hey -- that's just how my parents raised me. With a tendency toward civility. What can I say?
This thing has been discussed pretty thoroughly elsewhere since announcement, and the overwhelming consensus is that since it won't display txt and html (or pdf, while we're on the topic) it's crap. sadly, i agree. I haven't paid full price for a book in years, and i'm not starting just because sony says so.
The story itself is stupid, too:
It's not for a lack of dedicated e-book devices, either.
Yes it is. When i decided to go ebook two years ago, I had to go through a ton of 5-year-old reviews and wound up buying a discontinued franklin ebookman on the 'bay. There were a ton of dedicated devices in 2000, but of course there was no content aside from proj. gutenburg and i mean, i like Mark Twain as much as anyone, which is why i've already read his stuff. and so pretty much everyone except heibook stopped making the devices. there's a real need for a decent reader.
What's the point? Well, i should have some coffee before I post. But also, this is a great device with a crippling flaw that fills a real hole in the market. Fortunately for all of us, someone in a country that gets like 12 minutes of daylight will crack the DRM in like a week, and we should be good to go. It's just a shame that Sony is so freaking stupid about this.
Nah -- think ipod nano. nothing new but the form factor, and they're going to sell, by my calculations, on the order of one zillion of them this holiday.
let's not underestimate this sort of usability/aesthetic/convenience factor. i have 88 pockets for my various devices, but normal humans don't.
I'm an actual teacher at an actual school, and after getting caught using powerpoint in class, the region bought me a smartboard. I've been using it for about three months, and the following sums up what i've found.
it's cool, but a bit touchy for classrooms -- there's a lot of activity, and if something gets bumped, i have to recalibrate, which takes away from the rhythm of the class. this is fixable, but at a public school, simple fixes (bolting things down, mounting them) are that difficult last mile.
retaining student work for posting on a ppt is great, no question about it.
it makes it easier to integrate ppt into class by giving me complete control of the computer without having to approach it.
in general, pcs help illustrate a lot of high school math really, really well, so anything that helps me there is nice.
a real negative is that i actually lose a lot of board space. sure, my old boards are still there, but i haven't yet figured out how to integrate the smart board with my old, stupid boards. this matters.
the ability to recall stuff is huge.
the smartboard software is so-so -- not entirely intuitive, and i find myself hitting one too many or one too few esc's now and again. this isn't fatal, but as all you teachers know, the tiny things can throw a class off.
the kids seem to like it.
in all, i am enjoying learning to integrate the smartboard, but i'm not convinced that it has contributed to a real improvement in learning over a simple projector and wireless mouse. the value resides in the lesson and the plan and the ppt and the gathering of demos and sites that support teaching. the smartboard makes executing these things a bit easier in class, but for a cash-strapped district, the board still strikes me as a bit of a novelty.
just my experience, after three months of actual use in a public school classroom. i'm going to be giving the kids a survey about it on wednesday, if you're interested, email me and i'll let you know what i find.
Slashdot Mirror
I hate instagram and FB and all my friends and i'm old and stupid, but, i'm also in web analytics, and comparing mid-January to mid-December doesn't make any sense. I mean, I can't think of one, maybe there's some reason that in mid-december, people might be taking a lot more pictures than at other times of the year. Oh wait, I can think of one. A giant one. The biggest one all year.
Or maybe there were more devices going into new owners' hands in mid-december and THAT drove up usage like crazy. Or maybe people take more pictures when they're not at work, and lots of people have lots of days off in Dec and not in Jan. Or maybe oh forget it you get the point.
Compare this week this year to this week last year in December, then do the same in January, and THEN we can talk. Was the week-to-week change different last year? Otherwise you end up with dumb crap like this. Oh, hey, did you hear that Amazon's revenues are down 48% vs. four weeks ago? THEY"RE DOOOOOMED because I'm an idiot.
NEXT.
Yeah, i bet he's really upset, too.
Oh wait, he's dead, shut up.
Well, they're not going to fucking Mexico, amirite? That place is a little, what's the word, colorful for them, if you catch my drift.
Man, I would pay to see that shit. And I don't just mean that, being from a blue-and-therefore-giver-state, I would *actually* be paying for that. I mean I would buy a fucking ticket. The only mistake we made at Ruby Ridge was not sending in the tanks.
No, those two things aren't equal in every case. Just this case.
Let. Them. Go.
I'm so tired of this shit. Let them fucking go. Tennessee's a third world country without federal fucking dollars -- they want a part of that? Let them have it.
Let them eat bibles.
Ummmmm, because Google's not a toy company?
"It's designed to plug into the best speakers and TV in your home"
See, this is the problem right here: why on earth would I keep the best speakers in my home anywhere *near* my tv? Watching TV and listening to music are completely different activities. They don't even use the same chair.
I don't need to stream *everything* to one place, I need to stream *different* things to *different* places, and I'll gladly pay $250, but not $250 per room if I'm only going to use some of the functionality.
You think that's true? I'm not -- I think that the issue is that they really don't realize exactly how assholish it is. I think that the fact that we're JUST NOW in 2012 getting stories about people who are mad as hell and not going to take it anymore is an indication of the fact that really, most people simply haven't thought about it very hard.
At least that's what I hope. And like I said, I'm not an optimist when it comes to human nature, but I really do think that we're still at the 'ignorant of exactly how much it makes people want to kill you' stage.
Yeah -- I mean, this is the problem. Like, frequently -- most of the time -- I sort of wish that talkers would, you know, die, but there's lots of unobtrusive usage that's nobody's business.
I'll tell you what I really think is going to happen: I think in 10 or 15 years, we're going to look back on this time period, and be sort of aghast at how people behaved with regards to their phones. I don't accept that things are moving in a more-talk-is-OK direction, I think that there's the possibility that this is a manners-haven't-caught-up-to-tech blip. There's going to be a certain amount of soul-searching as we deal with the driving issue, and I'm hoping that what will come out of that will be, 'Wait -- is what I have to say really important enough to need saying, now, in these circumstances?'
And I'm not generally optimistic about human nature. But cell phone usage, I just don't see how this can go on very much longer as it is -- I mean, it's raw uncut assholishness, all the time, and everyone KNOWS it, but for now, they all DO IT anyway.
My fingers are crossed for what alcoholics refer to as a 'moment of clarity'.
The writing's been on the wall for years. If your car gets 35mpg and you live within 15 miles of your job, an increase of $2 a gallon hits you with a whopping $5.80 increase per week -- what's that, a big mac? A latte and a half?
And if you *haven't* got a fuel-efficient car and tried to live where you work or close to transit, given how long we've known that gas prices fluctuate in response to world events, well, you've done it to yourself. Shut up.
Free market, y'all. You asked for it, you got it, and you demanded a house with a lawn and an SUV anyway, and now you've got the nerve to cry about gasoline prices? I believe the french refer to this sort of thing as 'yo problem'.
That is totally how I'm going to describe where I live next time I run into a Tasmanian. "You know Australia? That's the America of Maine."
Understand me -- I wish that these people who are almost certainly wrong are right, and that there's no warming happening.
BUT IF THERE IS, aren't you going to gain any enjoyment from the fact that Texas, the reddest, denyingest of states is going to catch fire first? Be honest: that's going to be funny. When Arizona, Nevada, and Kentucky follow, I mean, seriously? I'm not supposed to smile at *all*?
Sorry -- what exactly haven't I anticipated? I'll be dead in 50 years, by which time, what, 3, 4 degrees? Texas will be on fire, and I'll get to watch from afar. And if it's not, that's great, too.
Are you under the impression that the earth desperately cares whether you or I hang around?
That's how I removed myself from this jackassery.
Personally, I think that the preponderance of the scientific evidence suggests that we ought to be worried about climate change. However, there are people who seem to have a chip on their shoulder about this, and they seem to be centralized in the very states that are going to have it worst if they're wrong. Frankly, I hope they're right and that their already-sun-belt homes don't wind up in the middle of a new desert, and that their kids don't end up with some kind of mutant skin cancer.
But if they do? I don't care. Maine could use an extra degree or two, and it'll be funny to watch all the Red States run around begging the federal government for disaster relief like they do when a river floods or there's a hurricane in the gulf. "Oh, noes! Hotness! Who could have guessed! Please help us, evil socialist elitists. Our kids can't play outside and we're all so THIRSTY!!!! Waaaaaah!"
I'm smiling just thinking about it.
I worked at a school that did exactly this, and you're right, the pressure was still there to pass kids.
Two things made this somewhat successful:
1. The 'marginal' range did move up. So while maybe you're allowing just as many close-but-not-quites to get C's as you would have with D's, the bar for 'marginal' was definitely higher.
2. The administration was behind it. They were very clear: if a kid should not get credit, give them an F.
So, like i said, some success. More than none.
Though I don't need the rhetoric, this hits it on the head, in every aspect.
I'd like to try teaching math like English -- Math 1, Math 2, Math 3, Math 4, with curriculum determined in part by such apparently meaningless factors as what might be useful in other classes or what's happening, you know, outside of my room.
The textbook comments are particularly right on -- step 1, burn them. If teachers complain that they won't know what to teach, fire them on the spot.
Geometry is also a lousy place for proof. Teach deduction all the time, in every topic -- and in classrooms other than math. "Here's a bunch of fake stuff you don't know anything about that's hard to draw. Now let's think really abstractly about how we're thinking about it!" And induction doesn't get taught at all.
The practical deal-killer, the one that drove me out of the profession, is that the barrel full of math teachers is so close to empty that you're pretty much scraping bottom from day 1. This kind of instruction -- and this kind of critique -- can only originate with someone who likes math, and is sort of good at it. You'd be amazed (or maybe you wouldn't) at how few public high school math teachers this describes.
America has gotten the math teaching instruction it asked for when it decided to prop up bad teachers with lousy but easy-to-use texts, and to boot it got the benefit of not having to pay very well for people willing to go through these motions. (It's not about money, but really, it's a little bit about money. I doubled my salary when I left last year.) It's a big, huge problem, and since you're going to have to convince parents that it needs the kind of dramatic overhaul this (great) article describes, and since parents were largely victimized by the existing system, I'm pretty sure it's a losing battle.
your claim that there's a spectrum is speculative, and i'd say it's at odds with my experience. there are people who would like to be teachers, and people who wouldn't, and no amount of money is going to allow the second group to survive the first week. there's the claim that some amount of money will allow more of the first group to actually do it, but this is at odds with the fact that teachers actually get paid pretty well. when we talk about teacher pay, we're not talking about mcdonalds here -- maine pays quite poorly, and i still make more than enough to get by.
i'm not sure what your point is about the second quote. it doesn't say anyhing at all about raising salaries, except that it might not solve anything. whatever.
as to the phd scenario, you suppose several things that aren't really supported by fact -- that a phd in math will help you teach 7th greaders, that didactic skills are more important than other related skills, that the job will remain interesting to people with this sort of training, that there's consensus on how abstract thinking skills develop. i'm not sure where you're getting this from, and it would be 'nice to think about' if it were true, but i have no reason to believe that any of these things are.
finally, in re: 'a few really, really talented people,' we don't need a few really really talented people. we need a whole lot of passable people who can go to work and be teachers. the people who claim they 'can't justify doing it now', they haven't really looked at the math -- or they've committed themselves financially to a level that's well beyond that of the median american household which, again, is their prerogative. but let's not make this out like there's a huge class of noble geniuses out there just waiting to bail out american learners if only they could afford to help. it ain't like that. the right answer can't be money, because money won't solve the problem. if there's an answer, that's not it.
This is actually one of my personal sticking points -- if we're going to tell the kids it's a variable, how come we're able to solve for its (one) value? I 'waste' a lot of my effort and students' time on things like this one, but i think it's important.
Your larger point -- that there are subtleties involved that aren't just special cases but are part and parcel to what makes the discipline interesting -- is right on.
I'm a teacher, and I love money, but here's the problem:
No one gets into this for the money, and no one stays for the money -- not math teachers, anyway. I did something before this that paid twice as much, as many of us do, but then I got bored and decided to try this.
So the issue is, if people aren't in teaching for the money, why do we suspect that we'll be able to attract more people to teaching with more money?
Now, there's the reasonable argument that there's some segment of the population that would like to teach, but can't because the pay is so low, but there's two things wrong with this argument:
1. teachers are never going to make as much as, say, modelers or programmers, and
2. i have some reason to believe that the sort of people who are just waiting for teaching kids to be really, really profitable might not be the crowd that we want to attract, anyway.
People get into teaching because they like teaching. People leave teaching because it's annoying a lot of the time. Here's how you attract people, in my personal fake expert opinion:
1. make it interesting. don't assign people to courses just because they're what's open, and don't make them wait for someone to die to get to try teaching calculus.
2. give them support, and help them develop. put time into schedules for conferences and bring in real lecturers, provide journals and during the day time to discuss, and fund coursework into anything.
3. throw out the textbooks. they're all shit (with the exception of harold jacobs).
4. demand real expertise and professionalism. make math teacher a job that it's hard to get. if i quit tomorrow, i could work anywhere in Maine by next week. this isn't good, rather it tells me that i don't need to be very good -- and if that's true, how good am i, really?
It's a great job, and you can't fix the shortage with money because things are so bad in terms of available teachers that you're just going to drag the good ones to rich districts and force poor schools to take whoever's left -- and you would be pretty surprised if i were to tell you exactly how bad things are in terms of expertise. The right answer is to make it a job that is attractive in all its aspects, and one that's admirable and challenging. That's all we geeks want, anyway, isn't it? A challenge, and some acknowledgement that we've got giant freaking brains?
This is about where I've always bought, too, and I'm very happy. I do find, though, that I can't usually run things all out (8xAA and the anisotropic all the way up). I mean, I really don't care, because it's an arms race I simply can't afford to get caught up in, but I do think that there's a difference.
Typical slashdot jerk. How about, rather than calling me an idiot, you try, 'Actually, you're mistaken -- the published specs on this one are different than the japanese version, which didn't do those things.'
But hey -- that's just how my parents raised me. With a tendency toward civility. What can I say?
The story itself is stupid, too:
It's not for a lack of dedicated e-book devices, either.
Yes it is. When i decided to go ebook two years ago, I had to go through a ton of 5-year-old reviews and wound up buying a discontinued franklin ebookman on the 'bay. There were a ton of dedicated devices in 2000, but of course there was no content aside from proj. gutenburg and i mean, i like Mark Twain as much as anyone, which is why i've already read his stuff. and so pretty much everyone except heibook stopped making the devices. there's a real need for a decent reader.
What's the point? Well, i should have some coffee before I post. But also, this is a great device with a crippling flaw that fills a real hole in the market. Fortunately for all of us, someone in a country that gets like 12 minutes of daylight will crack the DRM in like a week, and we should be good to go. It's just a shame that Sony is so freaking stupid about this.
Nah -- think ipod nano. nothing new but the form factor, and they're going to sell, by my calculations, on the order of one zillion of them this holiday.
let's not underestimate this sort of usability/aesthetic/convenience factor. i have 88 pockets for my various devices, but normal humans don't.
in all, i am enjoying learning to integrate the smartboard, but i'm not convinced that it has contributed to a real improvement in learning over a simple projector and wireless mouse. the value resides in the lesson and the plan and the ppt and the gathering of demos and sites that support teaching. the smartboard makes executing these things a bit easier in class, but for a cash-strapped district, the board still strikes me as a bit of a novelty.
just my experience, after three months of actual use in a public school classroom. i'm going to be giving the kids a survey about it on wednesday, if you're interested, email me and i'll let you know what i find.