Oh, that's interesting. I never thought about it, but now that I think back to using a landline (not even sure when that last was), you do get at least a bit of yourself coming through the receiver. It sounds louder than your normal speech.
Have you ever actually seen anyone use those phones? I've flown quite a lot, and I haven't seen them used once. I doubt the airlines are still holding their breath for the profit on those.
For the same reason that it's ok to talk to your seatmate but not to your friend sitting three rows away. You talk quietly to someone sitting right next to you, but for some reason many people seem to feel it's necessary to project into the phone inches from their mouth. I think it has something to do with the fact that cel phones, unlike receivers on traditional phones, don't actually reach to your mouth anymore, so people subconciously feel the need to make up for that - plus, of course, if your signal isn't so hot you might actually NEED to speak up. Either way, it's far louder and more annoying.
And don't forget the people participating in the "Buy one, give one" campaign. I don't know how many have sold this way, but it's being heavily promoted to a very mainstream audience, many of whom have never used Linux and are probably buying it for their children. MS doesn't want any of those people to realize that Linux even exists, let alone that it might be better for some uses.
You know what? Knowing how to use PageMaker made it a whole lot easier to pick up a host of other types of software - InDesign, Pages, even Photoshop, actually. Because I knew what kinds of things should be possible and so at least I knew what to look for. Learning to use a piece of software is actually more than just knowing what buttons go where.
And yes, there would be some students in the class who can't take those skills and easily apply them to another software package. But it's unlikely that this guy will be able to, in a single semester, get those kids to the point where they could no matter what he did. For the other kids, learning on something that's widely-used will give them a leg up in places where that software is used, but also some basics that can be applied to other software.
Outside of the classroom including being able to do homework?
This is a good point and one argument for using OSS. Although none of my computer classes in high school gave computer-based homework (since back then, many kids still didn't have computers at home). It's a tradeoff - your time is limited, is it better to use it having kids do all the work in-class at the expense of getting to more material, or to use it trying to teach "broad principles" that take up more time than teaching skills with a particular software package?
Published by which standards body? Is there anything like the (new) ISO PDF standard document for PSDs?
Because there's totally only one definition of "standard," and everything ever referred to as standard is approved by a formal standards body.
I was trying to be somewhat pragmatic. Unless this guy teaches at a really nice high school, he probably has one semester to fit stuff in, possibly with extra time due to block scheduling. And a lot of the students who take his class won't be there because they're techies. Sad as it may be, teaching an average high school student skills with a popular software package is more likely to serve them in the long run than trying to teach them underlying principles that can be broadly applied - especially when you probably don't have time needed to get those principles across effectively.
If he has students who are more motivated to learn about it or are technically-inclined and pick it up quickly, then by all means take those students and give them the extra challenge and extra benefit. Or if he gets to teach an advanced version of the course, definitely use multiple software packages. But for an average high school class, it's better they walk out with something they can actually use than a failed attempt at something even more useful.
I don't know about the others, but if you want them to actually be able to easily apply what they're learning outside of the classroom (possibly even in jobs), an older Photoshop is better than GIMP. GIMP just isn't Photoshop, and Photoshop is the standard.
And yes, they might actually use these skills. I took a desktop publishing class for fun in high school and learned to use PageMaker. I then got a job during college that involved creating publicity materials for an academic department (flyers for events, etc) in PageMaker, and from there got a job doing layout at a local paper also in PM. And no, I'm not a graphic design major or anything - I was a cognitive science major and am now in a PhD program, but layout is a hobby of mine (and possibly the only visual art-type-thing at which I have any skill). And that newspaper job paid much better than anything else I could have gotten at the time.
If some of the other open-source programs are more similar to the standard clossed-source ones, they might be valid alternatives. Or you could let them explore with both programs (for example, more advanced students might be able to do projects comparing the capabilities of two different programs).
Oh hey, thanks! We played this in a summer class I took in high school, and I've wondered recently if I could find the instructions online or something, but I couldn't remember the name of it.
Actually I don't even think it's that hard to come up with educational games. For instance I can identify every kind of ship in the Star Wars universe and I don't even LIKE Star Wars. Why? Because when playing Tie Fighter it's just secondary knowledge that you picked up.
The work of James Gee and Kurt Squire is all about this - the idea that all successful video games are (almost by definition) ideal learning environments. You necessarily have to learn stuff to progress in the game - if it were too easy or too hard, no one would enjoy it.
Of course, the real trick is getting people to apply what they've learned in-game to the outside world. Though that can't be impossible - I still refer to crossing any deep puddle as "fording the river."
You obviously didn't even read the summary. They're not talking about educational games - they're talking about games created by academics in the hopes that once people start playing, they can test out theories on the people/virtual world.
The liberal view that all opinions are equally valid
You can believe that all opinions are equally valid while still accepting that things presented as fact can be correct or incorrect. Not all statements are equally valid.
While I wouldn't say that only experts should contribute, I would certainly say that those who can provide the most support for their statements should be given precedent over those who cannot.
But LJ, Inc. will still be an American company - which means it will still be bound by American child pornography laws, right? Which is exactly what the latest uproar was about - could LJ itself get in legal trouble for hosting drawings of Snape and Harry doing it? The answer to that question doesn't change (or become any less muddy) if LJ, Inc.'s owners live in another country but the company itself is still here. (Btw, I think they've decided that drawings of fictional minors *don't* count legally as child porn, so feel free to post your Snarry.)
I've got a stack of studies sitting in front of me (doing a paper on it) showing that action video games like Unreal Tournament improve a host of spatial cognition skills, and can even help to close the usual gender gap in these skills.
Don't kid yourself that cartoons are better than video games. How many puzzles do you have to solve to watch Tom & Jerry? How much exercise does the cartoon give you versus a round of Wii boxing or DDR? Will your kid learn more about history (not just facts, mind you, but the cause-and-effect process) from a cartoon or Civilization?
Also, how many kids have so little time that they can't play video games and a sport (or just playing outside)? If that's an issue, you've overscheduled your children.
6 is a totally normal age to start reading. If kids start reading naturally at 2-3 years old, that's great. But most aren't, and parents who try and push their kids into this kind of thing before they're ready really piss me off. I love the suggestion above of giving her a more reading-intensive game like Animal Crossing - that's the kind of motivation she needs, not seeing reading as a chore to get over with so she can get on to fun stuff.
Pssh, you haven't read the studies I have, then. Let me just grab a few sitting on my desk (not counting the ones done on children) and list their participants:
36 respondents at the U of MN, 107 students at U of MN (journal of consumer research)
90 U of MD undergrads (j of personality and social psych)
100 Columbia undergrads, 60 Columbia undergrads, 29 Columbia undergrads (j of personality and social psych)
114 UCSB undergrads, 16 female UCSB grad students (applied cog psych)
26 males with normal or corrected-to-normal vision, 20 non-video-game-players (Cognition)
20 male U of Rochester undergrads, 32 non-video-game-players (psychological science)
48 undergrads at U Toronto, 20 undergrads at U Toronto (psychological science)
My not-very-random sample shows only one paper that did not specifically use undergrads for at least one of its studies, and 4 of 7 that used students for all of the studies in the paper (and none of the others were at all specific as to where their subjects were from, they just didn't use the word student). And these are mostly in decent journals, some of them are very highly cited studies. In many places (including where I'm at now for grad school), Intro to Psych students are *required* to spend X hours participating in experiments for course credit.
This one quote makes the entire thing a non-story, and it's obvious that many of the commenters below haven't read it. And yes, it's a real quote - google any section of it and you'll pull up a dozen stories on it from mid-September. The AT&T CEO can't leak something that Jobs already said in public, which means we can stop theorizing about the motivations behind or repercussions of such a leak.
IQ tests don't test metacognition. They test a specific set of cognitive skills that are thought to be related to how quickly/efficiently your brain processes information in general. IQ also only makes up about 30% of the variance on any given outcome - higher than just about any other single variable, but nowhere close to a majority, and there are many other variables at work. Learning to monitor your own learning and thinking is a way that you can improve and increase your learning, but doesn't affect the cognitive skills measured by a traditional IQ test. It might, actually, be able to improve performance on a dynamic ability test, where part of the point is to learn during the administration, but these are very new and little research has been done on them. But you can learn skills to improve your learning without increasing your IQ - you're increasing that other 70%.
Considering that the majority of psychological studies are performed on college freshmen taking a Psych 101 class, the reality is that "getting an ubiased random sample" is an ideal that researchers rarely worry too much about living up to.
Not that I'm defending this practice, but I do think that a very large sample of Google/AOL users who opted-in would actually be more generalizable than the average study.
To be clear, in most cases even the ten-point increase would be difficult unless the first test was flawed (the person was sick that day, not trying their hardest, etc). Intelligence tests are used for assessment because that's what they are - assessments. You don't give a kid a math test in order to teach them math. You might give them similar problems for practice as part of the learning process, etc - but the test itself is there to assess what their current state is.
The problem with vocabulary is that while it's partially dependent on g (the general factor of intelligence that IQ tests try to measure), it's also highly dependent on cultural factors that have nothing to do with your intelligence. You can be very intelligent but happen to have never heard a particular word. So most verbal IQ tests do have vocab sections, but they are only one small part of the test.
The quickest answer to your question about why learning skills aren't emphasized is that our educational system is too obsessed with testing right now to focus on anything that's not going to be on the test. It's certainly not because educational and psychological researchers don't think they should be taught. Metacognition (monitoring your own thinking and learning) is a very useful skill, and although it's being worked into curricula more and more these days it's still not there as much as it could be. Intelligent people are generally better at it, but it is one skill that *can* be taught and improved in everyone.
IQ tests aren't tests of knowledge, they're tests of specific cognitive skills like pattern-matching, etc. For the most part, IQ is stable over time, but that doesn't mean that the skill needed absolutely can't be developed. But it's extremely, extremely unlikely that you can take a person who scored 100 and then get them to score a 160 next time. 110 maybe. There are limits to the malleability.
At this point, I'm going to leave it at that. I almost went into a big long thing about the different types of IQ or ability tests and how some actually test fluid ability rather than crystalized, so the point is to learn during the test... but there's a reason I usually avoid all intelligence-related discussion on Slashdot. (Basically, I'm lazy - my Master's degree focused on this stuff so I know a ton about it, but I never actually feel like pulling out my references to argue with everyone.)
BTW, the kind of stuff talked about in this article (entity vs incremental theories) is at least a decade or so old. This will not come as a shock to any psychologist studying intelligence anywhere.
Yep, most psychological studies just seem to state the obvious.
There have actually been studies showing that when shown the results of a psychological experiment, most people think the results were obvious. And yet - when people are asked to predict the results of those same experiments, they're no better at it than chance. Hindsight is 20/20.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, that's interesting. I never thought about it, but now that I think back to using a landline (not even sure when that last was), you do get at least a bit of yourself coming through the receiver. It sounds louder than your normal speech.
Have you ever actually seen anyone use those phones? I've flown quite a lot, and I haven't seen them used once. I doubt the airlines are still holding their breath for the profit on those.
For the same reason that it's ok to talk to your seatmate but not to your friend sitting three rows away. You talk quietly to someone sitting right next to you, but for some reason many people seem to feel it's necessary to project into the phone inches from their mouth. I think it has something to do with the fact that cel phones, unlike receivers on traditional phones, don't actually reach to your mouth anymore, so people subconciously feel the need to make up for that - plus, of course, if your signal isn't so hot you might actually NEED to speak up. Either way, it's far louder and more annoying.
Pretty easily: "I'm sorry sir, I'm going to have to ask you to turn that off to avoid disturbing other passengers."
And don't forget the people participating in the "Buy one, give one" campaign. I don't know how many have sold this way, but it's being heavily promoted to a very mainstream audience, many of whom have never used Linux and are probably buying it for their children. MS doesn't want any of those people to realize that Linux even exists, let alone that it might be better for some uses.
And yes, there would be some students in the class who can't take those skills and easily apply them to another software package. But it's unlikely that this guy will be able to, in a single semester, get those kids to the point where they could no matter what he did. For the other kids, learning on something that's widely-used will give them a leg up in places where that software is used, but also some basics that can be applied to other software.
This is a good point and one argument for using OSS. Although none of my computer classes in high school gave computer-based homework (since back then, many kids still didn't have computers at home). It's a tradeoff - your time is limited, is it better to use it having kids do all the work in-class at the expense of getting to more material, or to use it trying to teach "broad principles" that take up more time than teaching skills with a particular software package?
Published by which standards body? Is there anything like the (new) ISO PDF standard document for PSDs?
Because there's totally only one definition of "standard," and everything ever referred to as standard is approved by a formal standards body.
If he has students who are more motivated to learn about it or are technically-inclined and pick it up quickly, then by all means take those students and give them the extra challenge and extra benefit. Or if he gets to teach an advanced version of the course, definitely use multiple software packages. But for an average high school class, it's better they walk out with something they can actually use than a failed attempt at something even more useful.
And yes, they might actually use these skills. I took a desktop publishing class for fun in high school and learned to use PageMaker. I then got a job during college that involved creating publicity materials for an academic department (flyers for events, etc) in PageMaker, and from there got a job doing layout at a local paper also in PM. And no, I'm not a graphic design major or anything - I was a cognitive science major and am now in a PhD program, but layout is a hobby of mine (and possibly the only visual art-type-thing at which I have any skill). And that newspaper job paid much better than anything else I could have gotten at the time.
If some of the other open-source programs are more similar to the standard clossed-source ones, they might be valid alternatives. Or you could let them explore with both programs (for example, more advanced students might be able to do projects comparing the capabilities of two different programs).
Oh hey, thanks! We played this in a summer class I took in high school, and I've wondered recently if I could find the instructions online or something, but I couldn't remember the name of it.
The work of James Gee and Kurt Squire is all about this - the idea that all successful video games are (almost by definition) ideal learning environments. You necessarily have to learn stuff to progress in the game - if it were too easy or too hard, no one would enjoy it.
Of course, the real trick is getting people to apply what they've learned in-game to the outside world. Though that can't be impossible - I still refer to crossing any deep puddle as "fording the river."
You obviously didn't even read the summary. They're not talking about educational games - they're talking about games created by academics in the hopes that once people start playing, they can test out theories on the people/virtual world.
You can believe that all opinions are equally valid while still accepting that things presented as fact can be correct or incorrect. Not all statements are equally valid.
While I wouldn't say that only experts should contribute, I would certainly say that those who can provide the most support for their statements should be given precedent over those who cannot.
The company running LJ - LJ, Inc - will continue to be an American company and most likely hosted here. It will just be *owned* by a Russian company.
But LJ, Inc. will still be an American company - which means it will still be bound by American child pornography laws, right? Which is exactly what the latest uproar was about - could LJ itself get in legal trouble for hosting drawings of Snape and Harry doing it? The answer to that question doesn't change (or become any less muddy) if LJ, Inc.'s owners live in another country but the company itself is still here. (Btw, I think they've decided that drawings of fictional minors *don't* count legally as child porn, so feel free to post your Snarry.)
Don't kid yourself that cartoons are better than video games. How many puzzles do you have to solve to watch Tom & Jerry? How much exercise does the cartoon give you versus a round of Wii boxing or DDR? Will your kid learn more about history (not just facts, mind you, but the cause-and-effect process) from a cartoon or Civilization?
Also, how many kids have so little time that they can't play video games and a sport (or just playing outside)? If that's an issue, you've overscheduled your children.
6 is a totally normal age to start reading. If kids start reading naturally at 2-3 years old, that's great. But most aren't, and parents who try and push their kids into this kind of thing before they're ready really piss me off. I love the suggestion above of giving her a more reading-intensive game like Animal Crossing - that's the kind of motivation she needs, not seeing reading as a chore to get over with so she can get on to fun stuff.
36 respondents at the U of MN, 107 students at U of MN (journal of consumer research)
90 U of MD undergrads (j of personality and social psych)
100 Columbia undergrads, 60 Columbia undergrads, 29 Columbia undergrads (j of personality and social psych)
114 UCSB undergrads, 16 female UCSB grad students (applied cog psych)
26 males with normal or corrected-to-normal vision, 20 non-video-game-players (Cognition)
20 male U of Rochester undergrads, 32 non-video-game-players (psychological science)
48 undergrads at U Toronto, 20 undergrads at U Toronto (psychological science)
My not-very-random sample shows only one paper that did not specifically use undergrads for at least one of its studies, and 4 of 7 that used students for all of the studies in the paper (and none of the others were at all specific as to where their subjects were from, they just didn't use the word student). And these are mostly in decent journals, some of them are very highly cited studies. In many places (including where I'm at now for grad school), Intro to Psych students are *required* to spend X hours participating in experiments for course credit.
Probably, there are plenty of online communities for animal welfare supporters who hate PeTA.
This one quote makes the entire thing a non-story, and it's obvious that many of the commenters below haven't read it. And yes, it's a real quote - google any section of it and you'll pull up a dozen stories on it from mid-September. The AT&T CEO can't leak something that Jobs already said in public, which means we can stop theorizing about the motivations behind or repercussions of such a leak.
IQ tests don't test metacognition. They test a specific set of cognitive skills that are thought to be related to how quickly/efficiently your brain processes information in general. IQ also only makes up about 30% of the variance on any given outcome - higher than just about any other single variable, but nowhere close to a majority, and there are many other variables at work. Learning to monitor your own learning and thinking is a way that you can improve and increase your learning, but doesn't affect the cognitive skills measured by a traditional IQ test. It might, actually, be able to improve performance on a dynamic ability test, where part of the point is to learn during the administration, but these are very new and little research has been done on them. But you can learn skills to improve your learning without increasing your IQ - you're increasing that other 70%.
Not that I'm defending this practice, but I do think that a very large sample of Google/AOL users who opted-in would actually be more generalizable than the average study.
The problem with vocabulary is that while it's partially dependent on g (the general factor of intelligence that IQ tests try to measure), it's also highly dependent on cultural factors that have nothing to do with your intelligence. You can be very intelligent but happen to have never heard a particular word. So most verbal IQ tests do have vocab sections, but they are only one small part of the test.
The quickest answer to your question about why learning skills aren't emphasized is that our educational system is too obsessed with testing right now to focus on anything that's not going to be on the test. It's certainly not because educational and psychological researchers don't think they should be taught. Metacognition (monitoring your own thinking and learning) is a very useful skill, and although it's being worked into curricula more and more these days it's still not there as much as it could be. Intelligent people are generally better at it, but it is one skill that *can* be taught and improved in everyone.
At this point, I'm going to leave it at that. I almost went into a big long thing about the different types of IQ or ability tests and how some actually test fluid ability rather than crystalized, so the point is to learn during the test... but there's a reason I usually avoid all intelligence-related discussion on Slashdot. (Basically, I'm lazy - my Master's degree focused on this stuff so I know a ton about it, but I never actually feel like pulling out my references to argue with everyone.)
BTW, the kind of stuff talked about in this article (entity vs incremental theories) is at least a decade or so old. This will not come as a shock to any psychologist studying intelligence anywhere.
There have actually been studies showing that when shown the results of a psychological experiment, most people think the results were obvious. And yet - when people are asked to predict the results of those same experiments, they're no better at it than chance. Hindsight is 20/20.