Agreed. Those suggested reply emails serve no purpose but to make the person who sent you the Word attachment feel like they've somehow violated you. The moment a person reads about Word being a "secret format" (even if Word is secret) they are no longer taking you seriously.
The best approach may be to lead by example. I use web sites for all the courses I teach at my college and I've taken to posting everything in PDF and/or RTF format since there are more and more students coming in using Macs without the ability to open Word documents. Once they realize that anything posted in either of these two formats can be read by anybody, they switch to using it themselves.
5. Rampant sexism. "Divorce, abortion and homosexuality are suppressed and the state is represented as the ultimate guardian of the family institution." No comment necessary.
Exactly how is divorce being suppressed by the government? Last I checked, it was still a thriving legal industry.
Also, the state as the guardian of the family -- and as the institution that defines what the family is -- is at least as much of a hallmark of a liberal administration as it is a "conservative" one. It's unfair to tag Republicans as the sole perpetrators of meddling in the definition and protection of "families" when you can see things like "character education" in public schools, the welfare state, etc. sticking their roots in the Democratic side of things just as often.
11. Distain for intellectuals and the arts. Besides the historic contempt for "liberal professors" and any artist willing to speak her mind (Dixie Chicks),
Anti-intellectualism has been a trademark of American culture for at least 100 years, so I hardly think we can point to indications of this today and say the sky is falling. Also, have you noticed that when artists such as the Dixie Chicks want to say things against the government (which, in DC's case, were just mean-spirited statements with no intellectual content at all) then everyone is up in arms to defend them... but when other artists want to speak their minds against the Dixie Chicks and defend the President, they are labelled as Philistines or lumped into the category of...
6. Controlled mass media. "Sometimes directly controlled by the government, sometimes indirectly controlled by government media, sympathetic media and executives." FCC decision last week, Fox News. No comment necessary.
So in other words, those who happen to agree with what the current president is doing are fascists and under the thumb of the government? Isn't is possible that a person or news organization can disagree with you without being controlled by the government? Isn't it possible that a thinking person could, entirely on her/his own, come to a different conclusion than yours? Isn't the alternative just another form of fascism?
Finally:
14. Fradulent elections. Florida - governored by the brother of one of the candidates (see above). The strange obsession with replacing paper ballots with unauditable electronic voting machines. The connection between those manufacturers and key Republican backers... and the Russian Mafia.
The moment somebody proves, using normal legal processes and logical argumentation, that the 2000 elections were conducted and concluded in some sort of fraudulent way without resorting to bizarre speculation or trying to turn correlations into causations (e.g. Florida is governed by Bush's brother, therefore the Florida elections were fradulent), I'll start listening. Until then, the 2000 elections are innocent until proven guilty, which is one of the rights that none of us wants to see eroded.
What exactly is the magic bit that you learn in a lecture that can't be learned by reading the text and learning to do the problems?...Nothing...
Believe it or not, with the right book and some practice you can learn darn near anything. Heck, I even learned to Juggle from "Juggling for the Complete Klutz." A book can be a guide in exactly the same way that a professor can be a guide.
There is an excellent point here -- lectures (and, by extension, all classes) are educational only insofar as they compel the people in the audience to go out and try things on their own. A lecture teaches nothing. It's the doing things on your own (like picking up the beanbags and tossing them in the air) that really causes learning to happen. The best lecturers know this and aim their lecturing accordingly. And this kind of "lecturing" could very well take place in written form or online.
At the same time, there really is something to interacting with people at a level beyond just being in a physical room with others listening to one of them talk. Learning seems to be reinforced by interacting with others. For instance, I was at a 3-day course on Java programming recently and I was amazed at how important the interaction -- the verbal back-and-forth between us students and between the instructor and the students -- really was. I'd been trying to teach myself Java out of a book for months and had gotten nowhere (dammit Jim, I'm a mathematician, not a programmer!) but once I was able to talk through my difficulties with other people it makes perfect sense. I left that course thinking that there would be no way I'd have gotten that from an online course, or at least not as efficiently. I'm willing to give online courses the benefit of the doubt (in fact I'm doing a week-long workshop online in July to learn a software package) but humans are inherently social creatures and learning is an inherently social activity, and it takes a pretty clever design (ala slahsdot!) to reproduce authentic social interaction at the digital level.
Calculus - yeah, read the book, do the assignments, complete the exam. Hooray, you know calculus - you pass.
I frankly doubt that a person who makes it through Calculus this way really knows Calculus. Really all this approach does for you is put a notch in your transcript. To really understand the subject you have to learn the mechanics but also come to grips with the theory and concepts, learn how to apply what you've learned into new situations, learn how to see it in everyday things... Just punching the clock in the classroom ain't gonna do it. You can get a passing grade that way but you haven't really learned anything that you'll remember.
Whoever said that the prof should be like a guide rather than a talking head was right. If your profs at your school can't find it in their hearts to help you really learn, vote with your feet and go find another college! There are plenty of schools out where teaching matters AND who can give you a state of the art education.
Incidentally, notice we're talking about the human element of a college class making all the difference... these online schools are worthwhile only insofar as they leave that human element in their pedagogy. Just emailing in downloaded homework sets doesn't qualify as a legitimate education, IMHO.
As to the crypto course, first of all cryptanalysts do not create algorithms (that's a cryptographer's job) but rather break them, and that requires knowledge of the underlying mathematics unless you just want to rely on monumental good luck. Second of all, the course was designed as a cross-over course listed as in both the mathematics AND computer science part of the catalog, so the math content was built in all along. Thirdly, and more generally, asking students to do things without some understanding of what's under the hood of the thing they are doing (whether it's math, CS, science, etc.) sounds a lot like impersonal mass production to me. If I ever told a student not to understand something they are working with, I'd no longer really be "educating" students ("educate" = "to lead someone out of something", e.g. ignorance) but rather just be making them mere technicians. I wouldn't call asking a CS major to understand mathematical content "elitist" unless I only assumed that SOME of them were intellectually capable of it.
I'm a faculty member in the math/CS department of a liberal arts college. I'm on the "math" side of things but teach nearly all of our CS and CIS majors at one point or another. What I notice is:
1. Most students we get in CS/CIS have no conception of what computing really *is*. They are not getting into the field to be rich -- because they don't really know WHY they are in ANY field at all. Some major in computing because their parents push them into it (they have a 6-7-year old idea that computing jobs are growing on trees, still) or because -- seriously -- they love playing video games and want to "do" video games as a career. Virtually none of our CS/CIS majors have any previous coding experience coming out of high school. There's very little sense of the breadth of the computing field, the major ideas and current issues in the field, or even that being a CS major means learning several computing languages and writing usable code in them. THAT side of computing never gets portrayed on TV, does it?
2. Most students in CS/CIS -- maybe because they don't have that sense of the meaning or depth of the computing field -- absolutely revolt when math or science are brought into the picture. For instance, I just taught a course on cryptography, and the idea that good cryptosystems (esp. public-key systems) are based on good (= hard) math problems, and therefore we need to understand the math to be good at the systems, was very hard for the CS majors in there to swallow. In general when math shows up in CS, a lot of CS majors suddenly become business or sociology majors. I can't help but think that the decline in CS majors is tied in a fundamental way to an overall decline in interest in math and science here in the US.
3. I see a general trend among all our students that, while they are generally bright and pleasant folks to teach and work with, they don't have much in the way of a big picture idea of who they are and what they want to do with themselves. In particular, a lot of my students don't particularly "enjoy" ANYTHING -- in the sense that they like to spend spare time working on or reading about something, like slashdotters with computers -- that could be remotely considered intellectual or academic. Their hobbies tend more toward passive things like sleeping, watching TV, playing video games etc. rather than computers, reading books, or even playing sports -- things that demand persistence, skill, and discipline.
So from my point of view the decline the article talks about is just symptomatic of a larger shift in the culture to which college students belong. I do think that the students who stick with CS will be the true believers (a lot like math majors in that sense) but every freshman class is going to be the same as it has been composition-wise.
But to end on a positive note, the whole reason I love being a prof is that I get to be counter-cultural all day long and get paid for it.:-)
The AKS algorithm is a beautiful solution to the old problem of finding a deterministic, polynomial-time, unconditional algorithm for finding primality. But it is SLOW -- even with some of the numerous improvements that have been made to it since August. Right now there are still probabilistic primality tests that can give arbitrarily high probabilities for primality that perform the pants off of AKS. Plus, AKS has absolutely nothing to do with factoring at all, which makes it like most primality tests. So it poses no danger at present to any cryptgraphic schemes, and isn't really useful in practice.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. Those suggested reply emails serve no purpose but to make the person who sent you the Word attachment feel like they've somehow violated you. The moment a person reads about Word being a "secret format" (even if Word is secret) they are no longer taking you seriously. The best approach may be to lead by example. I use web sites for all the courses I teach at my college and I've taken to posting everything in PDF and/or RTF format since there are more and more students coming in using Macs without the ability to open Word documents. Once they realize that anything posted in either of these two formats can be read by anybody, they switch to using it themselves.
5. Rampant sexism. "Divorce, abortion and homosexuality are suppressed and the state is represented as the ultimate guardian of the family institution." No comment necessary.
Exactly how is divorce being suppressed by the government? Last I checked, it was still a thriving legal industry.
Also, the state as the guardian of the family -- and as the institution that defines what the family is -- is at least as much of a hallmark of a liberal administration as it is a "conservative" one. It's unfair to tag Republicans as the sole perpetrators of meddling in the definition and protection of "families" when you can see things like "character education" in public schools, the welfare state, etc. sticking their roots in the Democratic side of things just as often.
11. Distain for intellectuals and the arts. Besides the historic contempt for "liberal professors" and any artist willing to speak her mind (Dixie Chicks),
Anti-intellectualism has been a trademark of American culture for at least 100 years, so I hardly think we can point to indications of this today and say the sky is falling. Also, have you noticed that when artists such as the Dixie Chicks want to say things against the government (which, in DC's case, were just mean-spirited statements with no intellectual content at all) then everyone is up in arms to defend them... but when other artists want to speak their minds against the Dixie Chicks and defend the President, they are labelled as Philistines or lumped into the category of...
6. Controlled mass media. "Sometimes directly controlled by the government, sometimes indirectly controlled by government media, sympathetic media and executives." FCC decision last week, Fox News. No comment necessary.
So in other words, those who happen to agree with what the current president is doing are fascists and under the thumb of the government? Isn't is possible that a person or news organization can disagree with you without being controlled by the government? Isn't it possible that a thinking person could, entirely on her/his own, come to a different conclusion than yours? Isn't the alternative just another form of fascism?
Finally: 14. Fradulent elections. Florida - governored by the brother of one of the candidates (see above). The strange obsession with replacing paper ballots with unauditable electronic voting machines. The connection between those manufacturers and key Republican backers... and the Russian Mafia.
The moment somebody proves, using normal legal processes and logical argumentation, that the 2000 elections were conducted and concluded in some sort of fraudulent way without resorting to bizarre speculation or trying to turn correlations into causations (e.g. Florida is governed by Bush's brother, therefore the Florida elections were fradulent), I'll start listening. Until then, the 2000 elections are innocent until proven guilty, which is one of the rights that none of us wants to see eroded.
There is an excellent point here -- lectures (and, by extension, all classes) are educational only insofar as they compel the people in the audience to go out and try things on their own. A lecture teaches nothing. It's the doing things on your own (like picking up the beanbags and tossing them in the air) that really causes learning to happen. The best lecturers know this and aim their lecturing accordingly. And this kind of "lecturing" could very well take place in written form or online.
At the same time, there really is something to interacting with people at a level beyond just being in a physical room with others listening to one of them talk. Learning seems to be reinforced by interacting with others. For instance, I was at a 3-day course on Java programming recently and I was amazed at how important the interaction -- the verbal back-and-forth between us students and between the instructor and the students -- really was. I'd been trying to teach myself Java out of a book for months and had gotten nowhere (dammit Jim, I'm a mathematician, not a programmer!) but once I was able to talk through my difficulties with other people it makes perfect sense. I left that course thinking that there would be no way I'd have gotten that from an online course, or at least not as efficiently. I'm willing to give online courses the benefit of the doubt (in fact I'm doing a week-long workshop online in July to learn a software package) but humans are inherently social creatures and learning is an inherently social activity, and it takes a pretty clever design (ala slahsdot!) to reproduce authentic social interaction at the digital level.
I frankly doubt that a person who makes it through Calculus this way really knows Calculus. Really all this approach does for you is put a notch in your transcript. To really understand the subject you have to learn the mechanics but also come to grips with the theory and concepts, learn how to apply what you've learned into new situations, learn how to see it in everyday things... Just punching the clock in the classroom ain't gonna do it. You can get a passing grade that way but you haven't really learned anything that you'll remember.
Whoever said that the prof should be like a guide rather than a talking head was right. If your profs at your school can't find it in their hearts to help you really learn, vote with your feet and go find another college! There are plenty of schools out where teaching matters AND who can give you a state of the art education.
Incidentally, notice we're talking about the human element of a college class making all the difference... these online schools are worthwhile only insofar as they leave that human element in their pedagogy. Just emailing in downloaded homework sets doesn't qualify as a legitimate education, IMHO.
As to the crypto course, first of all cryptanalysts do not create algorithms (that's a cryptographer's job) but rather break them, and that requires knowledge of the underlying mathematics unless you just want to rely on monumental good luck. Second of all, the course was designed as a cross-over course listed as in both the mathematics AND computer science part of the catalog, so the math content was built in all along. Thirdly, and more generally, asking students to do things without some understanding of what's under the hood of the thing they are doing (whether it's math, CS, science, etc.) sounds a lot like impersonal mass production to me. If I ever told a student not to understand something they are working with, I'd no longer really be "educating" students ("educate" = "to lead someone out of something", e.g. ignorance) but rather just be making them mere technicians. I wouldn't call asking a CS major to understand mathematical content "elitist" unless I only assumed that SOME of them were intellectually capable of it.
I'm a faculty member in the math/CS department of a liberal arts college. I'm on the "math" side of things but teach nearly all of our CS and CIS majors at one point or another. What I notice is:
:-)
1. Most students we get in CS/CIS have no conception of what computing really *is*. They are not getting into the field to be rich -- because they don't really know WHY they are in ANY field at all. Some major in computing because their parents push them into it (they have a 6-7-year old idea that computing jobs are growing on trees, still) or because -- seriously -- they love playing video games and want to "do" video games as a career. Virtually none of our CS/CIS majors have any previous coding experience coming out of high school. There's very little sense of the breadth of the computing field, the major ideas and current issues in the field, or even that being a CS major means learning several computing languages and writing usable code in them. THAT side of computing never gets portrayed on TV, does it?
2. Most students in CS/CIS -- maybe because they don't have that sense of the meaning or depth of the computing field -- absolutely revolt when math or science are brought into the picture. For instance, I just taught a course on cryptography, and the idea that good cryptosystems (esp. public-key systems) are based on good (= hard) math problems, and therefore we need to understand the math to be good at the systems, was very hard for the CS majors in there to swallow. In general when math shows up in CS, a lot of CS majors suddenly become business or sociology majors. I can't help but think that the decline in CS majors is tied in a fundamental way to an overall decline in interest in math and science here in the US.
3. I see a general trend among all our students that, while they are generally bright and pleasant folks to teach and work with, they don't have much in the way of a big picture idea of who they are and what they want to do with themselves. In particular, a lot of my students don't particularly "enjoy" ANYTHING -- in the sense that they like to spend spare time working on or reading about something, like slashdotters with computers -- that could be remotely considered intellectual or academic. Their hobbies tend more toward passive things like sleeping, watching TV, playing video games etc. rather than computers, reading books, or even playing sports -- things that demand persistence, skill, and discipline.
So from my point of view the decline the article talks about is just symptomatic of a larger shift in the culture to which college students belong. I do think that the students who stick with CS will be the true believers (a lot like math majors in that sense) but every freshman class is going to be the same as it has been composition-wise.
But to end on a positive note, the whole reason I love being a prof is that I get to be counter-cultural all day long and get paid for it.
Hmm... 7 and 11 are both prime... maybe you're on to something here.
The AKS algorithm is a beautiful solution to the old problem of finding a deterministic, polynomial-time, unconditional algorithm for finding primality. But it is SLOW -- even with some of the numerous improvements that have been made to it since August. Right now there are still probabilistic primality tests that can give arbitrarily high probabilities for primality that perform the pants off of AKS. Plus, AKS has absolutely nothing to do with factoring at all, which makes it like most primality tests. So it poses no danger at present to any cryptgraphic schemes, and isn't really useful in practice.
But it is really nice mathematics.