You can 'compete' with someone you're not in direct business competition for. If nothing else, being able to market as "The fast ISP on Earth' (or you could even get away with 'In the known Universe') sounds better than 'The fastest ISP in the country'.
The fastest? I thought they've operated at the speed of light since the first fiber inception.
A very good point. Keep in mind, however, that stunting the growth of minds via metrics leads to other minds learning how to screw with metrics to provide the best self-serving data possible.
This strikes me as yet another place where today's students, many already low in internal motivation, have that motivation replaced with a Big-Brother-esque all-knowing eye that knows when they haven't conformed. All this does is train the low-motivation students to become mindless robots who just respond to the stick when prodded. We're training away motivated learning and replacing it with a closed loop stimulus-response system where no real learning occurs.
Sadly, it will probably just give them more complaining to carry out in text messaging.
If data can be collected someone will collected; once it is collected there is a strong "need" to use. This certainly can be used to help improve coursework; especially if aggregate data shows patterns where material can be improved. If there is correlation between scores and performance than it is worthwhile to see if their is causation as well and use that to help improve learning. OTOH, factoring that into grading would be problematic, since learning styles differ. I took an English Lit class in college and never opened the book and got an A. Why? I had read the book a few years ago and so was familiar enough with the text to discuss and analyze it. Of course, as one of my professors put it" I don't care if you come to class or do any work, we've already got your money. What you get from your investment is up to you."
All this is is a simple military initiative to find those who are most likely to follow rules without thinking. Guns don't kill people; the government does.
I am patenting Pageturner, proven to be the best way to spoof your e-book reading!
Perfect! Between the Big Brother software and the anti-Big Brother software, at least it'll get the economy moving. Keynes (cue conservative and libertarian rants) once opined that in a recession you could help the economy by paying group A to dig holes and group B to fill them in. Certainly a good example of pointless for that era, but I doubt he realized how amazingly good computers would be at doing pointless things.
Careful; he'll forget to pay his taxes when drunk!
Life is full of stress, poor sleep and bad diet. Tests are better because of those things, not worse.
I agree a teacher doing a one on one evaluation would be even better, but if we spent money on that schools could not have such elaborate sports programs.
Oh n0s. What will we do without the sports to keep our inadequate Humans in a dominant position?;)
That is a hard metric, this is an easy one. People love easy metrics, never mind if they are actually worth anything. With this you can make spreadsheets and powerpoint slides, those allow you have meetings and pretend to be important.
This is the best and most accurately described to the point of every day reality I've read yet. +10000!
Thereby forcing everyone to buy an ebook. All Hail
...a more expensive eBook with monitoring attributes attached. Oh, and ya gotta pay (think of it as a tax) for instructor monitoring. It's to Keep America Safe.
I'm not saying I agree or disagree with it, but if I'm honest, I don't see what harm could come from having additional statistics on a student's progress. Hell, extrapolate this further, imagine if you had a statistical breakdown of attendance, course competition (i.e. reading the materials, handing in assignments, etc.), attention span in lectures and so on - imagine you could measure every little detail. If students score highly in those stats, but still fail, it's a simple enough conclusion - the professor has failed. Likewise, if they score lowly in the stats and fail, the professor can be sure he's not at fault.
You raise a good point.
What happens when you have a student that understands the true concept or mechanism behind something but can rarely give a clean answer because the question is always too open-ended? Simplified and dumb example: "What is the best way to get from cost savings point A to cost savings point B when you have seven offers of lowered price points, all similar in quality and consumer satisfaction as the product you are selling at savings point A today?"
My answer would be "Well, ummmm.... uhhhhh.. there are a lot of variables to be played with in that analysis, along with some unknowns. I think the first and best method would be to get external data to show what the overall level of satisfaction is at the current cost savings level, but...."
Then I get an "F".
To finish what I was saying, "..... but there are several different routes that we can take to get to that conclusion, all of which have different costs of their own. Why don't we just hold off on examining this situation until we can find better data points to work with, some of which may cost nothing but time; maybe one week."
The instructor says, "The correct method to use is to find the best average of the quality -vs- cost of the seven offers, then negotiate with the higher-in-quality of the two to provide a lower price point without changing their model."
I ask how the instructor came up with that idea being the best one out of thousands of possible scenarios which haven't even been thought about yet.
Instructor's response: "Because it's in the fucking text book. Get out of my face; I have work to do."
All of the junk is made up above, but that's the BS I've had to deal with in all areas of education with the exception of English; that teacher could explain very well what importance levels existed and why they existed, citing historical and present-day references.;)
Teaching at a private university myself and having done public and private both, everything is tied to a money game. Money is tied to successful alumni (either through direct giving or from foundations that consider what happens to graduates) and having alumni, of course, requires graduation. Higher graduation rates depend on high individual class success. Class success is viewed as tied to grades. The value of the bachelor's degree in the US has dropped substantially in the last 20 years and it is no wonder that there is a push for online education. It is cheaper than physical teaching, it provides a readier supply of students and income and since an internship is the only way to be sure that a student is learning anything related to their chosen field anyway (in many cases), why not?
I'd like to know how your scoring system works; the instructor I know has to lower the baseline for passing and all of the other grade divisors, as well, when large numbers of students fail and/or get low grade averages. To shorten it, a failure student becomes a B student and gets a fucking diploma. The guy on the street who has been working with the applied pieces of the science is refused a job because Mr. College Degree rates higher on the hiring company's "HR Security" charts.
Hear, hear. I know a university professor of applied engineering who goes through the same problem with their students in every class. The more you simplify something, the more alcohol the student consumes, believing that this class it really easy. The more complex you make it, the more students group together to complain about the horrible unfairness of the instructor and the misplacement of the students who can follow.
Yeah, that will be great for you when you fail "Johnny Baseballhat " and kick his ass out of the "Jonathan Baseballhat School of Business" which his father paid for. Good Ol Boys don't let "grades" get in the way of their kids graduating.
The instructor does not need to know, if it is meaningful to him, he is a poor instructor. His job is to present the class, offering the readings and hold tests. Not to be your babysitter.
This used to be said about all teachers in all schools and it's dwindling. Pretty soon we'll have tax-funded babysitters in every classroom for every student. Yes, I exaggerate there but it isn't too far from the damn truth.
Metrics such as "how many pages read" or even class attendance shouldn't factor into grading at all (ridiculous in the age of distant learning courses).
Sorry to butt in, but I copyright that idea as the base thesis and data for my next book: A book of metrics that must be read with metrics to gather more metrics. Wait, this sounds like hit counts on a (-web) page!
I would guess that this will be mostly used to protect the professor's back. So what if a student doesn't read the material, when it comes down to it and the student scores poorly on an exam, the professor can bring up their statistics and point out that it's the student's fault, not theirs.
So it's really a ploy to make sure the teachers don't have to carry the burden of proof anymore, and also frees the universities of bad teaching methods to increase their data-based chances of getting funding. Brilliant! And the idiots at the top are dumb enough to consider this even half-relevant.
Just for some fun, let's see the degrees that every individual who votes for this and approves it have.
This is akin to saying that the waterways will go dry because of the increased cooling needed for power plants, because, you know, those power plants are certainly going to grow without trying to save cost by subsidizing or using other energy sources as time goes on.
How in the hell can you take a growth model that's occurring now and use that model to predict the future as compared to other data source, NEITHER of which are guaranteed to follow a positive curve?
So those college students that have read loads of other material on a particular subject get viewed as cheaters because they didn't read enough pages of the college's e-book yet still got an A?
You have to read ONLY what the college says you need to read, and read all of it or you're an oddball? WTF? The education system gets more and more lost as time goes on.
Wait - is it "climate change" as in "global warming", or "climate change" as in "nuclear winter"? Which meteorologists' turn is it to flip the scare coin?
Slashdot Mirror
You can 'compete' with someone you're not in direct business competition for. If nothing else, being able to market as "The fast ISP on Earth' (or you could even get away with 'In the known Universe') sounds better than 'The fastest ISP in the country'.
The fastest? I thought they've operated at the speed of light since the first fiber inception.
I'm just messin' with words. ;)
For those living in certain parts of Japan. It's also an awesome "competition" with Google Fiber, which isn't in Japan. :)
The danger here is substituting the easy to measure metric "Pages Read" for the much tougher "Material Understood".
Right! The only data gained here is "time spent reading what I told this person to read." What BS.
Wrong. The actual data gained is "time spent making the ebook reader display what I told this person to read".
What?
True!
Okay, how about socialist education, capitalist business (and the socialist education has to present capitalist society information in its lessons)? :)
A very good point. Keep in mind, however, that stunting the growth of minds via metrics leads to other minds learning how to screw with metrics to provide the best self-serving data possible.
This strikes me as yet another place where today's students, many already low in internal motivation, have that motivation replaced with a Big-Brother-esque all-knowing eye that knows when they haven't conformed. All this does is train the low-motivation students to become mindless robots who just respond to the stick when prodded. We're training away motivated learning and replacing it with a closed loop stimulus-response system where no real learning occurs.
Sadly, it will probably just give them more complaining to carry out in text messaging.
If data can be collected someone will collected; once it is collected there is a strong "need" to use. This certainly can be used to help improve coursework; especially if aggregate data shows patterns where material can be improved. If there is correlation between scores and performance than it is worthwhile to see if their is causation as well and use that to help improve learning. OTOH, factoring that into grading would be problematic, since learning styles differ. I took an English Lit class in college and never opened the book and got an A. Why? I had read the book a few years ago and so was familiar enough with the text to discuss and analyze it. Of course, as one of my professors put it" I don't care if you come to class or do any work, we've already got your money. What you get from your investment is up to you."
All this is is a simple military initiative to find those who are most likely to follow rules without thinking. Guns don't kill people; the government does.
I am patenting Pageturner, proven to be the best way to spoof your e-book reading!
Perfect! Between the Big Brother software and the anti-Big Brother software, at least it'll get the economy moving. Keynes (cue conservative and libertarian rants) once opined that in a recession you could help the economy by paying group A to dig holes and group B to fill them in. Certainly a good example of pointless for that era, but I doubt he realized how amazingly good computers would be at doing pointless things.
Careful; he'll forget to pay his taxes when drunk!
Life is full of stress, poor sleep and bad diet.
Tests are better because of those things, not worse.
I agree a teacher doing a one on one evaluation would be even better, but if we spent money on that schools could not have such elaborate sports programs.
Oh n0s. What will we do without the sports to keep our inadequate Humans in a dominant position? ;)
That is a hard metric, this is an easy one. People love easy metrics, never mind if they are actually worth anything. With this you can make spreadsheets and powerpoint slides, those allow you have meetings and pretend to be important.
This is the best and most accurately described to the point of every day reality I've read yet. +10000!
Thereby forcing everyone to buy an ebook. All Hail
...a more expensive eBook with monitoring attributes attached. Oh, and ya gotta pay (think of it as a tax) for instructor monitoring. It's to Keep America Safe.
I'm not saying I agree or disagree with it, but if I'm honest, I don't see what harm could come from having additional statistics on a student's progress. Hell, extrapolate this further, imagine if you had a statistical breakdown of attendance, course competition (i.e. reading the materials, handing in assignments, etc.), attention span in lectures and so on - imagine you could measure every little detail. If students score highly in those stats, but still fail, it's a simple enough conclusion - the professor has failed. Likewise, if they score lowly in the stats and fail, the professor can be sure he's not at fault.
You raise a good point.
What happens when you have a student that understands the true concept or mechanism behind something but can rarely give a clean answer because the question is always too open-ended? Simplified and dumb example: "What is the best way to get from cost savings point A to cost savings point B when you have seven offers of lowered price points, all similar in quality and consumer satisfaction as the product you are selling at savings point A today?"
My answer would be "Well, ummmm.... uhhhhh.. there are a lot of variables to be played with in that analysis, along with some unknowns. I think the first and best method would be to get external data to show what the overall level of satisfaction is at the current cost savings level, but...."
Then I get an "F".
To finish what I was saying, "..... but there are several different routes that we can take to get to that conclusion, all of which have different costs of their own. Why don't we just hold off on examining this situation until we can find better data points to work with, some of which may cost nothing but time; maybe one week."
The instructor says, "The correct method to use is to find the best average of the quality -vs- cost of the seven offers, then negotiate with the higher-in-quality of the two to provide a lower price point without changing their model."
I ask how the instructor came up with that idea being the best one out of thousands of possible scenarios which haven't even been thought about yet.
Instructor's response: "Because it's in the fucking text book. Get out of my face; I have work to do."
All of the junk is made up above, but that's the BS I've had to deal with in all areas of education with the exception of English; that teacher could explain very well what importance levels existed and why they existed, citing historical and present-day references. ;)
Teaching at a private university myself and having done public and private both, everything is tied to a money game. Money is tied to successful alumni (either through direct giving or from foundations that consider what happens to graduates) and having alumni, of course, requires graduation. Higher graduation rates depend on high individual class success. Class success is viewed as tied to grades. The value of the bachelor's degree in the US has dropped substantially in the last 20 years and it is no wonder that there is a push for online education. It is cheaper than physical teaching, it provides a readier supply of students and income and since an internship is the only way to be sure that a student is learning anything related to their chosen field anyway (in many cases), why not?
I'd like to know how your scoring system works; the instructor I know has to lower the baseline for passing and all of the other grade divisors, as well, when large numbers of students fail and/or get low grade averages. To shorten it, a failure student becomes a B student and gets a fucking diploma. The guy on the street who has been working with the applied pieces of the science is refused a job because Mr. College Degree rates higher on the hiring company's "HR Security" charts.
Hear, hear. I know a university professor of applied engineering who goes through the same problem with their students in every class. The more you simplify something, the more alcohol the student consumes, believing that this class it really easy. The more complex you make it, the more students group together to complain about the horrible unfairness of the instructor and the misplacement of the students who can follow.
I'm dizzy just thinking about it.
Yeah, that will be great for you when you fail "Johnny Baseballhat " and kick his ass out of the "Jonathan Baseballhat School of Business" which his father paid for. Good Ol Boys don't let "grades" get in the way of their kids graduating.
Lawsuit follows.
The instructor does not need to know, if it is meaningful to him, he is a poor instructor. His job is to present the class, offering the readings and hold tests. Not to be your babysitter.
This used to be said about all teachers in all schools and it's dwindling. Pretty soon we'll have tax-funded babysitters in every classroom for every student. Yes, I exaggerate there but it isn't too far from the damn truth.
Metrics such as "how many pages read" or even class attendance shouldn't factor into grading at all (ridiculous in the age of distant learning courses).
Sorry to butt in, but I copyright that idea as the base thesis and data for my next book: A book of metrics that must be read with metrics to gather more metrics. Wait, this sounds like hit counts on a (-web) page!
/snark
I would guess that this will be mostly used to protect the professor's back. So what if a student doesn't read the material, when it comes down to it and the student scores poorly on an exam, the professor can bring up their statistics and point out that it's the student's fault, not theirs.
So it's really a ploy to make sure the teachers don't have to carry the burden of proof anymore, and also frees the universities of bad teaching methods to increase their data-based chances of getting funding. Brilliant! And the idiots at the top are dumb enough to consider this even half-relevant.
Just for some fun, let's see the degrees that every individual who votes for this and approves it have.
The danger here is substituting the easy to measure metric "Pages Read" for the much tougher "Material Understood".
Right! The only data gained here is "time spent reading what I told this person to read." What BS.
With all of the airline news coming out lately, we get it.
We're supposed to stop flying. We'll get right on that and have a solution in a week, don't you worry!
This is akin to saying that the waterways will go dry because of the increased cooling needed for power plants, because, you know, those power plants are certainly going to grow without trying to save cost by subsidizing or using other energy sources as time goes on.
How in the hell can you take a growth model that's occurring now and use that model to predict the future as compared to other data source, NEITHER of which are guaranteed to follow a positive curve?
More "OH NO THE SKY IS GONNA FALL" crap.
So those college students that have read loads of other material on a particular subject get viewed as cheaters because they didn't read enough pages of the college's e-book yet still got an A?
You have to read ONLY what the college says you need to read, and read all of it or you're an oddball? WTF? The education system gets more and more lost as time goes on.
They just want another excuse to avoid giving in-flight service.
You caught them. You'll never get a frequent flyer mile again, kind sir. ;)
i first read about global warming sometime around 1990. have any of the original predictions come true?
so far i have noticed that the water at the beach in NYC is colder compared to the 80's
Where are mod points where I need 'em? You make a very astute point.
Wait - is it "climate change" as in "global warming", or "climate change" as in "nuclear winter"? Which meteorologists' turn is it to flip the scare coin?
The one needing grant money.