Why not make it interactive by using interactive response devices, that is, clickers? They aren't applicable for every type of presentation but if you are looking for feedback from the staff, they can work very well. Sure, a set might set your company back a few thousand dollars but they work pretty good for keeping your audience awake.
You can try cell phone polling alternatives if you want to save a buck as well but the cell phone polling option does not go over so well with some folks. They just don't want to be bothered to pull out their cell phone unless they are texting someone.
I'm not sure if they will work in conjunction with pizza & hot wings during a lunch presentation.
Firstly I think the concept that you learn X at age Y should be ditched.
This argument has good intentions but is fundamentally flawed. There are cetain things that children must learn at certain ages. To support your point, however, there are cetain things that cannot be taught at certain ages because the mind has not properly developed.
No one should be forced to learn anything, learning should be self directed and interest based
Ok, this is a nice sentiment for an adult but what about a 4 year old? What about an 8 year old? What about a 12 year old?
Playing is a nice way to learn how to count change. Learning advanced topics requires serious effort.
Your comments on cultural traditions being passed on from generation to generation in the American educational system have merit. Unfortunately, your comment should be ranked as "troll" because if you actually work in public education then you should also understand the reasoning for having unions. Although there are many problems with teacher unions, ditching tenure would result in teachers losing the ability to criticize poor administrators. School administrators are well known for promoting personal agendas that go against the interests of students. The assessment of teachers and the nuturing of student interest in the learning process are nice sentiments but neither observable nor measurable. Examples:
*Student will demonstrate a thirst for knowledge * Student will be a productive member of society
or combine them: *Student will demonstrate a thirst for knowledge by being a productive member of society
Tell me how you will evaluate that with anything but a tombstone epitaph.
My students who live on campus will receive disciplinary action for downloading music via torrent or whatever program they are using. They are required to attend a couple sessions on the illegal nature of their activities. The sessions including watching a few videos & sign some papers saying their sorry or some such nonsense. I've had 3 or 4 claim this has happened.
I teach two courses right now and it is only roughly 1/2 of my work expectations. Tenured and tenure-track faculty are expected to teach 4-5 courses per academic year. That means that tenured faculty who are not publishing and only teaching 2-3 courses are doing a part-time job. It would be hard to justify faculty salaries of 60-120k/year for only teaching 5 classes over the course of 32 weeks. People teaching 4-5 (8-10 per academic year) classes per semester hold the rank of non-tenured track assistant professor (or instructor) and are not held to any significant publishing requirements. They have little to do with this discussion as the universities are already considering them cheap labor. Courses taught during the summer time at my university pay based upon the number of credit hours taught, typically 3 hours per course. This is a basic guideline for US Universities and, if you have doubts, pick a major university and pull up the teacher contract.
As far as the only money in their pockets, if you are unfamiliar with the wages that faculty make or if you think that university faculty are underpaid, perhaps you should take a look at the chronicle's salary survey: http://chronicle.com/stats/aaup/ and take a second look at a few university faculty contracts. Tenured track assistant professors that consider 2-3 classes a semester full-time work are probably confusing what their priorities are from the perspective of the university and may be in danger of not receiving tenure based upon time-management skills.
As a former academic at a research university, perhaps you might elaborate on your experience as to what the primary criteria are for pay and the tenure process. My experience shows that you are expected to hold roles in professional organizations but it is not typically a criteria for determining pay or tenure.
Why not the job performance of private employees too? My tax dollars are used for the negotiating of corporate relocation into and out of the state I live in. The companies that are involved are benefiting by receiving tax breaks and other incentives. Why shouldn't their employees information be freely available? My tax dollars pay for health inspections at restaurants. Let's see the results and employment histories of every waiter & cook at the restaurant that served me an over-cooked cheeseburger last week. It's all in the best interest of keeping American society healthy!
Let's get our prying eyes and fingers in everyone's business. It's the only way to ensure quality and honesty!
You make a fine point on the purpose of evaluations but did you look at the formula being used to evaluate the teachers? This is not a simple case of Teacher X's students averaged 95% on this years test and last year they averaged 93%. The final score in the NYC equation is influenced by factors such as "True Total School Effect" and "District Participation Indicator." The misinterpretation of proper statistics is difficult enough without introducing "magic math" into the equation. Many of the factors used in the equation are items that have no bearing on the instructional ability of the teacher or are completely out of their control. The other problem is that the method of evaluation is not consistent enough to be applied to all of the teachers in the district.
Evaluations are always going to be subjective in nature. For example, a simple 1-5 Likert scale for "Classroom Management Skills" with a comment section could result in a score like: 4, Good skills, needs to develop ability to monitor off-task high-performing students. Just because it is somewhat subjective does not mean that it is not useful. The value-added score being used in the NYC situation reminds me of a poor attempt at developing a rating system comparable to professional sports, for example, the team is +5 when player X is on the floor.
One of the expectations when hired in many academia roles is to publish papers. If you don't want to publish papers then perhaps you should be taking on a different career or different position. If you are hired on as an assistant/associate professor at a major university, they will often only assign you 2-3 courses to teach per semester with summer courses being extra money in your pocket. Teaching 2-3 courses per semester is a part-time job and they are not typically paying you to be a member of a professional organization.
With that being said, firing someone because their articles were not in the "Top Five" journals of their field is a little ridiculous if you consider how many universities, professors, and researchers are out there. Those journals can only handle so many articles, and even then the articles must align with the theme of the issue.
Ok, Microsoft has done countless "evils" in the past and still does, but with that being said, they do a wonderful job of pointing out the privacy issues of Gmail and the risks of implementing Google Apps. Googlighting was an excellent and humorous video as well.
Maybe if Google and MS duke it out enough, all of their little wrong-doings will get pointed out, fixed, and society may actually advance! Or perhaps we will just sit around and watch some mudslinging while our privacy is further reduced. I'm feeling pessimistic at the moment and leaning towards the latter.
You are correct. It is most definitely not "douchey." Everybody loves it when their best friend, leader of the local grammar police comes over. It's especially nice to have them over for a formal dinner as it makes for great transitions in conversation. +1 mod for coolness factor.
Going on the idea of having it already figured out, consider the parts & labor.
It has to be cheaper & less time consuming to create in install the parts on a U-2 than a newer high tech jet. Less parts, less to go wrong. Strap a new high-tech camera & radar on that old timer and off she goes!
there has been no established correlation between technology in schools and improved academic performance.
but better than some imaginary assumed linked between technology and success.
There are many situations in which specific uses of technology has had a positive correlation to student achievement and, on the flip side, there are also many situations in which there has been a negative correlation. This is to be expected if you consider that there has been over 40 years of research into the effects of computer technology upon student achievement. Sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn't. Current meta-analysis research in instructional technology has shown a small positive correlation between the use of technology in instruction when compared to control groups that do not have technology during the same instruction.
If you are saying that throwing technology into a school setting does not guarantee improved student achievement then I would agree but your statements are incorrect.
If you do not prepare your students for taking online courses in HS then they will be unprepared for the online courses that they may be required to take in college. Students who take an online course or two in HS will be better prepared, plain and simple.
Apple and Intel played a part in the bill because they are corporate stakeholders. Will they profit? No more than usual. There are already countless Apple machines & Intel chips in schools everywhere in the U.S.
Morons with no actual understanding of the language say "could care less."
Morons with an actual understanding of language would describe the term "could care less" as a slang phrase. It means exactly what the original poster implied. Changing the phrase to "couldn't care less" does not change the original poster's intent, something that you were very well aware of before you started your rant to make yourself feel better about your language skills. This is all beside the point since the English language and subcultural phrases change from region to region.
It's just that there's a lot of them.
Are you a member of the APA, MLA, or similar group because each has its own set of guideline (with multiple versions) of what is an acceptable practice. Make sure that you have the right qualifications before you sign up to be a member of the language police. For example, what does "it's" refer to? If you want to be technical, your sentence reads "It is just that there is a lot of them." Since there really is no "it," your sentence must be read, "there is justice in that there is a lot of them."
It wasn't an official ruling so we'll see how the final interpretation works out. Bot used those two examples, perhaps specifically as your suggest or perhaps just as a simple example.
I would personally hope that such sentiment would be extended to patents as well. For example, I could understand an IP patent for a specific algorithm used for image deblurring but not a patent on the end product, i.e., a patent on all photo deblurring.
As a professor, you should know that current research has effectively shown that there is no significant difference in student achievement when comparing face-to-face and online courses. You should also be aware the the primary method of comparing the delivery method is the results of a traditional assessment. This means that there are problems with online courses but the end result that quantitative research is concerned with has been met. Spend five minutes doing research in online/distance/computer education and you will find countless articles to verify this.
This is not to say that there are not problems and in many ways I agree with you but to claim that online courses are not "valuable" is, sorry to say, rubbish. If you want to say that many professors are not trained to teach online and do a poor job? Fact. Many students are not prepared for taking online courses? Fact. Universities have implemented online courses without proper preparation? Fact. Now, online degree mills are a completely different subject...
to what was going on in Mexico. Sure, I knew about the rampant drug killings but without this current Anonymous attack, I would have never hear about the school system extortion in Acapulco. I go to the BBC and major new sites daily and this was new to me, 2 weeks after the fact. Perhaps their efforts were based upon publicity to the issue in general, not personal gain. Just saying...
I would argue that it does count as "found art" but, perhaps more appropriately, "readymade" in the tradition of Marcel Duchamp. The Fountain (a urinal turned on end) is one of his more famous and controversial readymades. Modern art museums will often have galleries dedicated to industrial design but this doesn't seem to meet that description based upon the nature of the work.
What I find especially interesting is that the work is not about the object itself but what might be contained within. Questions such as: Which programs did the artist load onto it? What's the most expensive program on it? How much does the software on my external drive add up to?
As mentioned in other posts, the article was a waste of time.
First off, typing is essential for writing papers, end of story. High school & college students without this skill will hunt & peck & spend more time on their writing instead of other tasks.
Secondly, Dvorak keyboards are faster but good luck switching between computers and I cannot give up common keyboard shortcuts and have no tolerance for switching all of my computers over.
How did Two Chinese scientists propose to nudge a ten-meter asteroid nearing earth in 2049 into an earth orbit transform into "The Chinese want to capture an asteroid into earth's orbit and mine it" ?
Well, the article does say "This nudge should place the asteroid in an orbit at about twice the distance of the Moon. From there it can be studied and mined, they say."
I'm tired of the belly aching from computer geeks that they can't adapt to a new system. Is it that challenging to give a new GUI an hour or two? As if the old windows system was that great to navigate.
Let me guess, you know how to use VI but the ribbon is too complex? Which CLI makes sense to a new user?
The next thing that I'm going to hear is that the interface with Zork and Kings Quest was intuitive. Of course, I do patiently wait for that trend to return.
Slashdot Mirror
Why not make it interactive by using interactive response devices, that is, clickers? They aren't applicable for every type of presentation but if you are looking for feedback from the staff, they can work very well. Sure, a set might set your company back a few thousand dollars but they work pretty good for keeping your audience awake.
You can try cell phone polling alternatives if you want to save a buck as well but the cell phone polling option does not go over so well with some folks. They just don't want to be bothered to pull out their cell phone unless they are texting someone.
I'm not sure if they will work in conjunction with pizza & hot wings during a lunch presentation.
Firstly I think the concept that you learn X at age Y should be ditched.
This argument has good intentions but is fundamentally flawed. There are cetain things that children must learn at certain ages. To support your point, however, there are cetain things that cannot be taught at certain ages because the mind has not properly developed.
No one should be forced to learn anything, learning should be self directed and interest based
Ok, this is a nice sentiment for an adult but what about a 4 year old? What about an 8 year old? What about a 12 year old?
Playing is a nice way to learn how to count change. Learning advanced topics requires serious effort.
Your comments on cultural traditions being passed on from generation to generation in the American educational system have merit. Unfortunately, your comment should be ranked as "troll" because if you actually work in public education then you should also understand the reasoning for having unions. Although there are many problems with teacher unions, ditching tenure would result in teachers losing the ability to criticize poor administrators. School administrators are well known for promoting personal agendas that go against the interests of students. The assessment of teachers and the nuturing of student interest in the learning process are nice sentiments but neither observable nor measurable. Examples:
*Student will demonstrate a thirst for knowledge
* Student will be a productive member of society
or combine them:
*Student will demonstrate a thirst for knowledge by being a productive member of society
Tell me how you will evaluate that with anything but a tombstone epitaph.
My students who live on campus will receive disciplinary action for downloading music via torrent or whatever program they are using. They are required to attend a couple sessions on the illegal nature of their activities. The sessions including watching a few videos & sign some papers saying their sorry or some such nonsense. I've had 3 or 4 claim this has happened.
Grammar_Nazi == Loser
I teach two courses right now and it is only roughly 1/2 of my work expectations. Tenured and tenure-track faculty are expected to teach 4-5 courses per academic year. That means that tenured faculty who are not publishing and only teaching 2-3 courses are doing a part-time job. It would be hard to justify faculty salaries of 60-120k/year for only teaching 5 classes over the course of 32 weeks. People teaching 4-5 (8-10 per academic year) classes per semester hold the rank of non-tenured track assistant professor (or instructor) and are not held to any significant publishing requirements. They have little to do with this discussion as the universities are already considering them cheap labor. Courses taught during the summer time at my university pay based upon the number of credit hours taught, typically 3 hours per course. This is a basic guideline for US Universities and, if you have doubts, pick a major university and pull up the teacher contract.
As far as the only money in their pockets, if you are unfamiliar with the wages that faculty make or if you think that university faculty are underpaid, perhaps you should take a look at the chronicle's salary survey: http://chronicle.com/stats/aaup/ and take a second look at a few university faculty contracts. Tenured track assistant professors that consider 2-3 classes a semester full-time work are probably confusing what their priorities are from the perspective of the university and may be in danger of not receiving tenure based upon time-management skills.
As a former academic at a research university, perhaps you might elaborate on your experience as to what the primary criteria are for pay and the tenure process. My experience shows that you are expected to hold roles in professional organizations but it is not typically a criteria for determining pay or tenure.
Why not the job performance of private employees too? My tax dollars are used for the negotiating of corporate relocation into and out of the state I live in. The companies that are involved are benefiting by receiving tax breaks and other incentives. Why shouldn't their employees information be freely available? My tax dollars pay for health inspections at restaurants. Let's see the results and employment histories of every waiter & cook at the restaurant that served me an over-cooked cheeseburger last week. It's all in the best interest of keeping American society healthy!
Let's get our prying eyes and fingers in everyone's business. It's the only way to ensure quality and honesty!
You make a fine point on the purpose of evaluations but did you look at the formula being used to evaluate the teachers? This is not a simple case of Teacher X's students averaged 95% on this years test and last year they averaged 93%. The final score in the NYC equation is influenced by factors such as "True Total School Effect" and "District Participation Indicator." The misinterpretation of proper statistics is difficult enough without introducing "magic math" into the equation. Many of the factors used in the equation are items that have no bearing on the instructional ability of the teacher or are completely out of their control. The other problem is that the method of evaluation is not consistent enough to be applied to all of the teachers in the district.
Evaluations are always going to be subjective in nature. For example, a simple 1-5 Likert scale for "Classroom Management Skills" with a comment section could result in a score like: 4, Good skills, needs to develop ability to monitor off-task high-performing students. Just because it is somewhat subjective does not mean that it is not useful. The value-added score being used in the NYC situation reminds me of a poor attempt at developing a rating system comparable to professional sports, for example, the team is +5 when player X is on the floor.
One of the expectations when hired in many academia roles is to publish papers. If you don't want to publish papers then perhaps you should be taking on a different career or different position. If you are hired on as an assistant/associate professor at a major university, they will often only assign you 2-3 courses to teach per semester with summer courses being extra money in your pocket. Teaching 2-3 courses per semester is a part-time job and they are not typically paying you to be a member of a professional organization.
With that being said, firing someone because their articles were not in the "Top Five" journals of their field is a little ridiculous if you consider how many universities, professors, and researchers are out there. Those journals can only handle so many articles, and even then the articles must align with the theme of the issue.
Ok, Microsoft has done countless "evils" in the past and still does, but with that being said, they do a wonderful job of pointing out the privacy issues of Gmail and the risks of implementing Google Apps. Googlighting was an excellent and humorous video as well.
Maybe if Google and MS duke it out enough, all of their little wrong-doings will get pointed out, fixed, and society may actually advance! Or perhaps we will just sit around and watch some mudslinging while our privacy is further reduced. I'm feeling pessimistic at the moment and leaning towards the latter.
You are correct. It is most definitely not "douchey." Everybody loves it when their best friend, leader of the local grammar police comes over. It's especially nice to have them over for a formal dinner as it makes for great transitions in conversation. +1 mod for coolness factor.
Going on the idea of having it already figured out, consider the parts & labor.
It has to be cheaper & less time consuming to create in install the parts on a U-2 than a newer high tech jet. Less parts, less to go wrong. Strap a new high-tech camera & radar on that old timer and off she goes!
there has been no established correlation between technology in schools and improved academic performance.
but better than some imaginary assumed linked between technology and success.
There are many situations in which specific uses of technology has had a positive correlation to student achievement and, on the flip side, there are also many situations in which there has been a negative correlation. This is to be expected if you consider that there has been over 40 years of research into the effects of computer technology upon student achievement. Sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn't. Current meta-analysis research in instructional technology has shown a small positive correlation between the use of technology in instruction when compared to control groups that do not have technology during the same instruction.
If you are saying that throwing technology into a school setting does not guarantee improved student achievement then I would agree but your statements are incorrect.
If you do not prepare your students for taking online courses in HS then they will be unprepared for the online courses that they may be required to take in college. Students who take an online course or two in HS will be better prepared, plain and simple.
Apple and Intel played a part in the bill because they are corporate stakeholders. Will they profit? No more than usual. There are already countless Apple machines & Intel chips in schools everywhere in the U.S.
Morons with no actual understanding of the language say "could care less."
Morons with an actual understanding of language would describe the term "could care less" as a slang phrase. It means exactly what the original poster implied. Changing the phrase to "couldn't care less" does not change the original poster's intent, something that you were very well aware of before you started your rant to make yourself feel better about your language skills. This is all beside the point since the English language and subcultural phrases change from region to region.
It's just that there's a lot of them.
Are you a member of the APA, MLA, or similar group because each has its own set of guideline (with multiple versions) of what is an acceptable practice. Make sure that you have the right qualifications before you sign up to be a member of the language police. For example, what does "it's" refer to? If you want to be technical, your sentence reads "It is just that there is a lot of them." Since there really is no "it," your sentence must be read, "there is justice in that there is a lot of them."
It wasn't an official ruling so we'll see how the final interpretation works out. Bot used those two examples, perhaps specifically as your suggest or perhaps just as a simple example.
I would personally hope that such sentiment would be extended to patents as well. For example, I could understand an IP patent for a specific algorithm used for image deblurring but not a patent on the end product, i.e., a patent on all photo deblurring.
You know what's hard to take seriously? Someone that couldn't catch the flying bloody Mario in a game made by PETA.
You have two choices: Grow a pair and catch the coon (it takes like 2 minutes without dying) or Turn in your geek card!
But to put Steve Jobs in the same league as people like Alan Turing, or Ada Lovelace, or Charles Babbage seems... very wrong.
Agreed. But what league would you put him in? Henry Ford? Wright Brothers? Maybe we should just wait for Bill & Woz to die so we can start a new one.
As a professor, you should know that current research has effectively shown that there is no significant difference in student achievement when comparing face-to-face and online courses. You should also be aware the the primary method of comparing the delivery method is the results of a traditional assessment. This means that there are problems with online courses but the end result that quantitative research is concerned with has been met. Spend five minutes doing research in online/distance/computer education and you will find countless articles to verify this.
This is not to say that there are not problems and in many ways I agree with you but to claim that online courses are not "valuable" is, sorry to say, rubbish. If you want to say that many professors are not trained to teach online and do a poor job? Fact. Many students are not prepared for taking online courses? Fact. Universities have implemented online courses without proper preparation? Fact. Now, online degree mills are a completely different subject...
to what was going on in Mexico. Sure, I knew about the rampant drug killings but without this current Anonymous attack, I would have never hear about the school system extortion in Acapulco. I go to the BBC and major new sites daily and this was new to me, 2 weeks after the fact. Perhaps their efforts were based upon publicity to the issue in general, not personal gain. Just saying...
I would argue that it does count as "found art" but, perhaps more appropriately, "readymade" in the tradition of Marcel Duchamp. The Fountain
(a urinal turned on end) is one of his more famous and controversial readymades. Modern art museums will often have galleries dedicated to industrial design but this doesn't seem to meet that description based upon the nature of the work.
What I find especially interesting is that the work is not about the object itself but what might be contained within. Questions such as: Which programs did the artist load onto it? What's the most expensive program on it? How much does the software on my external drive add up to?
As mentioned in other posts, the article was a waste of time.
First off, typing is essential for writing papers, end of story. High school & college students without this skill will hunt & peck & spend more time on their writing instead of other tasks.
Secondly, Dvorak keyboards are faster but good luck switching between computers and I cannot give up common keyboard shortcuts and have no tolerance for switching all of my computers over.
How did Two Chinese scientists propose to nudge a ten-meter asteroid nearing earth in 2049 into an earth orbit transform into "The Chinese want to capture an asteroid into earth's orbit and mine it" ?
Well, the article does say "This nudge should place the asteroid in an orbit at about twice the distance of the Moon. From there it can be studied and mined, they say."
I'm tired of the belly aching from computer geeks that they can't adapt to a new system. Is it that challenging to give a new GUI an hour or two? As if the old windows system was that great to navigate.
Let me guess, you know how to use VI but the ribbon is too complex? Which CLI makes sense to a new user?
The next thing that I'm going to hear is that the interface with Zork and Kings Quest was intuitive. Of course, I do patiently wait for that trend to return.