Wow. That's great. How many sections was this professor teaching? How many students per section? How many writing courses? Currently I have 88 students per semester, with 5 five-page papers each. At my previous job, I had 135 per semester with 3 five-page papers each. I'm afraid to do the math to see what my life would be like if I gave each student a half-hour meeting for every paper (on top of class prep, my committee work, research work, stupid paperwork work, and basic bodily needs). Kudos to this teacher! (Or to hell with her for busting the curve. I know so many of us on uppers to get the work done. I hate them. Anyway, Gentle Reader, if you're about to do the math and tell me life would be great, be aware that I will perform the readerly equivalent of putting my fingers in my ear and yelling "la la la."
I'm using one of these on Virgin Mobile (sprint network), my wife too. Both are rooted. We get hotspot, greater speed, greater memory life from the rooting. They do everything we like, except there's no decent free podcast app, but I don't use the phone for music anyway, as I have an iPod touch. If I spent some time shopping and a few bucks, I expect I could cut out the iPod. The Map app crashes pretty often, which can be problematic when using GPS, and Sprint doesn't have the best coverage. We can drive for 45 minutes sometimes without coverage, which is only really an issue because we use Google Maps instead of a real GPS program. All in all, I'm happy with what I get for the cost. (A note though: I have NEVER gotten GrooveIP to work well on both phones. For a brief period it worked on my phone for outgoing calls only, but even with lots of help from support, it never worked on my wife's phone, and stopped working on mine a few weeks after I bought the phone. So I wouldn't count on making IP calls to save on the minutes.)
I recently attended a mandatory meeting at my university that was an extended sales pitch. I've actually attended about five of those so far this year. Administrators eat that crap up, especially the brown-nosing from the salesperson. Anyway, this particular one was about half about how wonderful it will be if we adopted their RFID system for student tracking. It's primarily aimed at attendance, which is a major problem at out institution. We have, in our general education courses, an about 40% attendance rate, which is, perhaps not coincidentally, the pass-rate for those same courses. I'm expecting administration to buy these damn RFID things, which will be another waste of cash. The problem isn't taking attendance; the problem is that there are no significant penalties for failing to attend. And that won't change because federal money in the form of tuition is dependent on keeping that nonattending student enrolled.
That's funny. A half hour ago, I walked out of a literature conference keynote at which the speaker showed a proliferation of digital literature. It's not the sort of stuff that was pushed by companies like StorySpace; it was much weirder. But there's a ton of it out there. Again, not fiction, mostly various sorts of work conceived of as some sort of poetry. One notable source was the two-volume Electronic Literature Collection; you can also google "new media" or "digital media" perhaps combining those things with "literature." I think one reason that "hypertext" isn't going anywhere is that the people calling for it or imagining it aren't or weren't so good at imagining what people would want to do with the hypertextual and other possibilities of digital texts. It seems to be that the people really into it are those who also like Joyce and Stein. I will say, though, that there's a boom in hyperlinked literature, stuff with media links and such in it, as we can see with the iStuff that Apple is iPushing right now. I'll throw one more brick before I go read the other comments here: most readers of "absorbtive" or engrossing fiction want the author to carry them into another world, want to get lost in the author's creation. Fewer people are interested in the iterative or resistant text (like the French New Novel) or the (snarkily-labeled) choose-your-own-adventure type fiction.
"forty years ago, people believed" is just too broad. And it's very clear that there were many scientists 40 years ago who believed that animals experience pain, emotion, and even thought. Since I know I'll be gob-smacked with "citation please," I'll just throw out Cousteau, pere. Heck maybe fils too. Certainly the farmers in my family, most of whom were old codgers, and the wildlife wardens, also old, believed that animals experienced pain. And all these people hunted for food and sport, by the way, and appreciated the animal's suffering enough to instill in the next generation the importance of a clean kill and a disdain for bowhunters (a family bias). At any rate, "people," maybe some of those people believed that animals feel no pain, and they have published. The biological sciences in the West, especially in North American were until quite recently pretty horrible, utilitarian, pragmatic, and loaded with self-justifying rhetoric. That doesn't mean other people--ones that the Pope here would call "sick"--acknowledged the worth, the depth and breadth, of animal experience.
Clearly you are a pinko. Embittered smart-assery aside, I know several people, and I'm one of them, who have delayed treatment or consultation with a doctor for fear of acquiring a "pre-existing condition." In my case, I have had symptoms of prostate cancer for several years, but I kept putting off diagnosis because I was on the job market and feared losing coverage of any treatment I might need. Now that I have a decent job, and that I've been tested and received a negative diagnosis, I look back and think about how stupid I was back then. But I'm not back then anymore. I'm still the same relatively smart and mildly paranoid person I was back then. I know two others who are currently delaying diagnosis while they seek jobs, for conditions not so serious as cancer, but both with serious pain and performance implications. And they're smart people too. I'm hoping someone will reply to this and say that we're misinformed, that there's some protection for people in that spot. But I don't think that is the case. (I'm not hoping, but I know that someone will post below saying that what I want is not health "insurance" but "socialized medicine." Okay. I do. So what? I've spent a ton of money and a lot of time getting myself educated, and the government has spent a metric fuck-ton on my education; I'm worth keeping alive and functional. Socialize me, baby!)
The US convoys are better protected than suggested by this article. When I lived in Knoxville, I was encouraged by an acquaintance to apply for one of these escort jobs when I complained about how little I was paid as a university teacher. Apparently he was in the process of applying, or was being courted to apply, as a combat veteran. Anyway, the work he described to me indicated a great deal of heavily-armed protection that was kept covert. He was able to send me to a website of a company that produced some of the vehicles used for escort duty; the ones I saw there had concealed mounts for remotely-operated miniguns. I don't have first-hand knowledge, and I'm presuming that my acquaintance also did not. I was relieved, actually, given the rumors I often heard about suspicious characters trying to monitor waste, parts, and weapons shipments out of Oak Ridge.
Putting the crosshairs off the target is called "kentuckying" or "kentucky windage"; it's for amateur hour. Snipers use scopes that let you dial in the range and windage so that the cross hairs keep the point of aim and point of impact the same. Some scopes for short range sniping use "mil-dots," which is an indexed system of little aimpoints up the vertical axis and along the horizontal axis. Those are typically used in telescopic sights of low magnification. (My hobby used to be long-distance target shooting; now I have a wife and kids; my hobby is dodging responsibility.)
I see already a pattern familiar from when I taught in learning labs as a graduate student. I taught writing. I would diagnose a troubled student, using what I'd learned in classes in which we studied composition researchers. I would then tell the student, "What you're doing is a partially effective strategy. But, as you've noticed, it has these negative side-effects. If you do ______, you'll struggle at first, until you get used to it, and then writing will become much easier." The student with then reply, "Oh, no, I've heard about that/tried that, I'm an exception to the rule. I only write well when ________." And the blank would be "it's the night before," "music is blaring," "I've waited until the pressure motivates me," "I do it all in one inspired go," or something like that. What Bjork is talking about is old, old news. Like the article says, most of this stuff has been around since Ebbinghaus. It's very unlikely that anyone who is reading that advice is an exception to these well-studied facts about how human adults learn. But most people who read the advice will go on doing what they do, each assuming that he/she is exceptional. I'd suggest that instead that people who still study (and all technical/professional people should) give interleaving and delayed review a shot.
It depends on what you mean by "isn't very communist." In the 90s they were calling it "communism with Chinese characteristics." I'd say, based on my time there and my continuing reading on China, that it's much more communist than not. But "communist" and "socialist" are thrown around so much in English-language media that they have almost no meaning anymore.
An old story. You can read similar concerns in William James' "The PhD Octopus," and there's a good historical overview of this issue in US academic in Chad Hanson's _The Community College and Good Society_. Also there have been recent debates between people like Charles Murray (American Interprise Institute) and Christopher Caldwell (in the NYT). The one thing I think often goes missing in these debates is how effective a college education is, in the humanities or the sciences, in allowing people to climb up a social class or two.
Well, Anonymous, I don't know where you're going to school, or what that 3.93 is actually worth. You might be a genius. But you're definitely a slacker. I was too. Until I hit grad school and finally had to buckle down and learn to study. I'd love to make grades dependent upon students coming to class truly prepared. But the reality of the current university climate/system and its funding forces me to choose between that and keeping my family fed (ie, keeping my damn job). I'm too tired to go into the long explanation now, and it's depressing as hell. But basically it boils down to the same thing we've seen in high schools, a sort of "no child left behind." And there are all sorts of carrots and sticks to incentivize not holding students to too high a standard. Given time and energy, I could muster up a good rant on how this seems to have emerged from the increase in administrators and the MBA-style management theories that drive universities and state/federal politics. But, again, I'm facing a day of meetings tomorrow, including, I shit you not, enforced cheering from the faculty about the greatness of our institution.... I think I'm going to go climb into bed and sulk now. (On the slacker thing: the point isn't that silly-shit more or less worthless number but what you actually learn. I made the mistake of not learning enough, caring about the number, the girls, and the beer. Now I wish I'd spent a bit more time in the labs and library.)
As a professor, allow me to say "Ha ha ha!" Or, "Yes, that sounds great, but...." The most common question asked during the last final exams I gave was "Do you have a pencil I can borrow?" Sadly, we're not allowed to treat students as responsible adults who will "get all the passive shit done at home." I wish we could. Otherwise the good students are being penalized by the slow-down necessitated by the chuckleheads.
That's not a lecture course. That's a discussion course. A fair bit of research shows that it's the best way of learning. The problem is bang for your buck. U's want large lecture sections to provide students "contact" hours with professor-rank faculty. Having a faculty member drone away at 200 students is a good way to tell your dean that you're giving general education students access to your research faculty. Without actually giving non-majors access to your research faculty. To be fair to departments, if colleges within the U's really wanted general education students to have contact with professorial faculty, they would allow departments to hire more professors, so that the department wouldn't have to choose between area coverage for majors and service courses for general education students.
As far back as the late 80s, the KH satellites were fairly common knowledge. At least I know that we knew about them at the planetarium I worked at. And there were complaints/rumors from some quarters that Hubble was "just" a repurposed KH design, whether that was true or not. I'm sure that, at some level, secrets were kept, but the overall project was known of. The same is true at Oak Ridge. If you live in the area, you eventually meet people who tell you things that aren't such common knowledge, like about the escort vehicles, terrorist threats, conventional weapons manufacturing, etc in the area. None of it is really, really secret, but just not generally known about, or talked about. Of course a lot of what you hear is probably BS. Anyway, BS or not, none of this implies that we need to rewatch all the alien dissection films to see if that was a secret badly-kept. At some level I think credulousness and paranoia should be trumped by common sense.
Do you really not know the answer? Real incomes have steadily declined in the U.S. for around 40 years, with a few brief upticks now and then. Since the 80s, our society has invested less and less in the basic infrastructure of society, especially schools. And also people in the U.S. have spent more and more, as frills became essentials (cable TV, cell phones, satellite TV, game consoles) and other products have become increasingly expensive, like cars. Then throw into that the declining dollar.... It's pretty simple, really, and it's talked about all the time. And government has done a poor job of addressing the problem, instead tending toward banking deregulation and free trade, both of which have tended to stifle or end investment in jobs here. Oh well. At least we do a good job of fretting other other people's sex lives, religions, etc. God knows, that's what's important.
This matches my experience with "computers" in the classroom. I use the scare-quotes because there are so damn many ways to use the things. One of my more effective uses of them is teaching library research. When the actual library database is on the overhead, and students are throwing out search terms for an actual topic, or discussing actual database entries, the whole process is a lot more engaging. Students see the environment they will use, see how different terms are more effective, etc. ad nauseum. I've also used multimedia a lot. But I haven't had as much luck with individual use of computers in classrooms. More often that not, students start farting around on Facebook or something. I can't blame them. The same thing happens to me, which is why pull the plug sometimes in my office, or block addresses of places like Facebook. I need to get the temptation out of my face. One thing I have found--and I'm talking about found in a small study with a sample size of about 300--is that all this talk about the digital divide and digital natives is more or less a lot of hooey when it comes to actual useful skills. The "digital natives" can text like Gutenberg in heat or plagiarize like Ben Franklin on weed, but they can't insert a header in Word or set up a useful Google search.
Let's see the refutation. I'm in education and constantly am on the lookout for information on this topic. I've yet to see any studies demonstrating lasting benefits. But this isn't my particular field, so, despite my intense interest, I don't have time to do thorough research. So, if you know something, let's see it. It would do me a world of good.
I have limited experience with being a union worker, but in both cases, the union promoted good work, supported good workers, and bad workers met with peer pressure to get out or get good. I don't know about the UAW or whatever union the post office has. But I am pretty sure that a lot of stuff said about unions is no more true than stuff said about gay people, "colored" people, etc.. In other words, I bet a lot of it is a bunch of divisive lies spewed by "1%" to keep the "99%" distracted and effectively disenfranchised.
And public transit sucks because so few people use/demand it. And back to the top.... I'm as bad as the next person. I can't be bothered to look up a bus schedule because I just "know" that it won't be frequent enough, fast enough convenient enough. So I keep riding a motorcycle to work in the rain....
Slashdot Mirror
Wow. That's great. How many sections was this professor teaching? How many students per section? How many writing courses? Currently I have 88 students per semester, with 5 five-page papers each. At my previous job, I had 135 per semester with 3 five-page papers each. I'm afraid to do the math to see what my life would be like if I gave each student a half-hour meeting for every paper (on top of class prep, my committee work, research work, stupid paperwork work, and basic bodily needs). Kudos to this teacher! (Or to hell with her for busting the curve. I know so many of us on uppers to get the work done. I hate them. Anyway, Gentle Reader, if you're about to do the math and tell me life would be great, be aware that I will perform the readerly equivalent of putting my fingers in my ear and yelling "la la la."
I'm using one of these on Virgin Mobile (sprint network), my wife too. Both are rooted. We get hotspot, greater speed, greater memory life from the rooting. They do everything we like, except there's no decent free podcast app, but I don't use the phone for music anyway, as I have an iPod touch. If I spent some time shopping and a few bucks, I expect I could cut out the iPod. The Map app crashes pretty often, which can be problematic when using GPS, and Sprint doesn't have the best coverage. We can drive for 45 minutes sometimes without coverage, which is only really an issue because we use Google Maps instead of a real GPS program. All in all, I'm happy with what I get for the cost. (A note though: I have NEVER gotten GrooveIP to work well on both phones. For a brief period it worked on my phone for outgoing calls only, but even with lots of help from support, it never worked on my wife's phone, and stopped working on mine a few weeks after I bought the phone. So I wouldn't count on making IP calls to save on the minutes.)
US folks, on our side of the Atlantic Paracetamol goes by "acetaminophen" (Tylenol is popular brand). Just FYI for the non-Googling types.
I recently attended a mandatory meeting at my university that was an extended sales pitch. I've actually attended about five of those so far this year. Administrators eat that crap up, especially the brown-nosing from the salesperson. Anyway, this particular one was about half about how wonderful it will be if we adopted their RFID system for student tracking. It's primarily aimed at attendance, which is a major problem at out institution. We have, in our general education courses, an about 40% attendance rate, which is, perhaps not coincidentally, the pass-rate for those same courses. I'm expecting administration to buy these damn RFID things, which will be another waste of cash. The problem isn't taking attendance; the problem is that there are no significant penalties for failing to attend. And that won't change because federal money in the form of tuition is dependent on keeping that nonattending student enrolled.
That's funny. A half hour ago, I walked out of a literature conference keynote at which the speaker showed a proliferation of digital literature. It's not the sort of stuff that was pushed by companies like StorySpace; it was much weirder. But there's a ton of it out there. Again, not fiction, mostly various sorts of work conceived of as some sort of poetry. One notable source was the two-volume Electronic Literature Collection; you can also google "new media" or "digital media" perhaps combining those things with "literature." I think one reason that "hypertext" isn't going anywhere is that the people calling for it or imagining it aren't or weren't so good at imagining what people would want to do with the hypertextual and other possibilities of digital texts. It seems to be that the people really into it are those who also like Joyce and Stein. I will say, though, that there's a boom in hyperlinked literature, stuff with media links and such in it, as we can see with the iStuff that Apple is iPushing right now. I'll throw one more brick before I go read the other comments here: most readers of "absorbtive" or engrossing fiction want the author to carry them into another world, want to get lost in the author's creation. Fewer people are interested in the iterative or resistant text (like the French New Novel) or the (snarkily-labeled) choose-your-own-adventure type fiction.
"forty years ago, people believed" is just too broad. And it's very clear that there were many scientists 40 years ago who believed that animals experience pain, emotion, and even thought. Since I know I'll be gob-smacked with "citation please," I'll just throw out Cousteau, pere. Heck maybe fils too. Certainly the farmers in my family, most of whom were old codgers, and the wildlife wardens, also old, believed that animals experienced pain. And all these people hunted for food and sport, by the way, and appreciated the animal's suffering enough to instill in the next generation the importance of a clean kill and a disdain for bowhunters (a family bias). At any rate, "people," maybe some of those people believed that animals feel no pain, and they have published. The biological sciences in the West, especially in North American were until quite recently pretty horrible, utilitarian, pragmatic, and loaded with self-justifying rhetoric. That doesn't mean other people--ones that the Pope here would call "sick"--acknowledged the worth, the depth and breadth, of animal experience.
Clearly you are a pinko. Embittered smart-assery aside, I know several people, and I'm one of them, who have delayed treatment or consultation with a doctor for fear of acquiring a "pre-existing condition." In my case, I have had symptoms of prostate cancer for several years, but I kept putting off diagnosis because I was on the job market and feared losing coverage of any treatment I might need. Now that I have a decent job, and that I've been tested and received a negative diagnosis, I look back and think about how stupid I was back then. But I'm not back then anymore. I'm still the same relatively smart and mildly paranoid person I was back then. I know two others who are currently delaying diagnosis while they seek jobs, for conditions not so serious as cancer, but both with serious pain and performance implications. And they're smart people too. I'm hoping someone will reply to this and say that we're misinformed, that there's some protection for people in that spot. But I don't think that is the case. (I'm not hoping, but I know that someone will post below saying that what I want is not health "insurance" but "socialized medicine." Okay. I do. So what? I've spent a ton of money and a lot of time getting myself educated, and the government has spent a metric fuck-ton on my education; I'm worth keeping alive and functional. Socialize me, baby!)
The US convoys are better protected than suggested by this article. When I lived in Knoxville, I was encouraged by an acquaintance to apply for one of these escort jobs when I complained about how little I was paid as a university teacher. Apparently he was in the process of applying, or was being courted to apply, as a combat veteran. Anyway, the work he described to me indicated a great deal of heavily-armed protection that was kept covert. He was able to send me to a website of a company that produced some of the vehicles used for escort duty; the ones I saw there had concealed mounts for remotely-operated miniguns. I don't have first-hand knowledge, and I'm presuming that my acquaintance also did not. I was relieved, actually, given the rumors I often heard about suspicious characters trying to monitor waste, parts, and weapons shipments out of Oak Ridge.
People play the piano, the organ, the recorder, saxophone, guitar, banjo, etc. just fine.
"the guy has reality, vengeance, and anger issues that rivals that of women I've let into my life" -- The women are variable; the constant is you.
Putting the crosshairs off the target is called "kentuckying" or "kentucky windage"; it's for amateur hour. Snipers use scopes that let you dial in the range and windage so that the cross hairs keep the point of aim and point of impact the same. Some scopes for short range sniping use "mil-dots," which is an indexed system of little aimpoints up the vertical axis and along the horizontal axis. Those are typically used in telescopic sights of low magnification. (My hobby used to be long-distance target shooting; now I have a wife and kids; my hobby is dodging responsibility.)
I see already a pattern familiar from when I taught in learning labs as a graduate student. I taught writing. I would diagnose a troubled student, using what I'd learned in classes in which we studied composition researchers. I would then tell the student, "What you're doing is a partially effective strategy. But, as you've noticed, it has these negative side-effects. If you do ______, you'll struggle at first, until you get used to it, and then writing will become much easier." The student with then reply, "Oh, no, I've heard about that/tried that, I'm an exception to the rule. I only write well when ________." And the blank would be "it's the night before," "music is blaring," "I've waited until the pressure motivates me," "I do it all in one inspired go," or something like that. What Bjork is talking about is old, old news. Like the article says, most of this stuff has been around since Ebbinghaus. It's very unlikely that anyone who is reading that advice is an exception to these well-studied facts about how human adults learn. But most people who read the advice will go on doing what they do, each assuming that he/she is exceptional. I'd suggest that instead that people who still study (and all technical/professional people should) give interleaving and delayed review a shot.
It depends on what you mean by "isn't very communist." In the 90s they were calling it "communism with Chinese characteristics." I'd say, based on my time there and my continuing reading on China, that it's much more communist than not. But "communist" and "socialist" are thrown around so much in English-language media that they have almost no meaning anymore.
An old story. You can read similar concerns in William James' "The PhD Octopus," and there's a good historical overview of this issue in US academic in Chad Hanson's _The Community College and Good Society_. Also there have been recent debates between people like Charles Murray (American Interprise Institute) and Christopher Caldwell (in the NYT). The one thing I think often goes missing in these debates is how effective a college education is, in the humanities or the sciences, in allowing people to climb up a social class or two.
Chuck Grassley is from Iowa. And is very powerful. As are Monsanto et al. There's the impetus of your E85 right there.
Well, Anonymous, I don't know where you're going to school, or what that 3.93 is actually worth. You might be a genius. But you're definitely a slacker. I was too. Until I hit grad school and finally had to buckle down and learn to study. I'd love to make grades dependent upon students coming to class truly prepared. But the reality of the current university climate/system and its funding forces me to choose between that and keeping my family fed (ie, keeping my damn job). I'm too tired to go into the long explanation now, and it's depressing as hell. But basically it boils down to the same thing we've seen in high schools, a sort of "no child left behind." And there are all sorts of carrots and sticks to incentivize not holding students to too high a standard. Given time and energy, I could muster up a good rant on how this seems to have emerged from the increase in administrators and the MBA-style management theories that drive universities and state/federal politics. But, again, I'm facing a day of meetings tomorrow, including, I shit you not, enforced cheering from the faculty about the greatness of our institution.... I think I'm going to go climb into bed and sulk now. (On the slacker thing: the point isn't that silly-shit more or less worthless number but what you actually learn. I made the mistake of not learning enough, caring about the number, the girls, and the beer. Now I wish I'd spent a bit more time in the labs and library.)
As a professor, allow me to say "Ha ha ha!" Or, "Yes, that sounds great, but...." The most common question asked during the last final exams I gave was "Do you have a pencil I can borrow?" Sadly, we're not allowed to treat students as responsible adults who will "get all the passive shit done at home." I wish we could. Otherwise the good students are being penalized by the slow-down necessitated by the chuckleheads.
That's not a lecture course. That's a discussion course. A fair bit of research shows that it's the best way of learning. The problem is bang for your buck. U's want large lecture sections to provide students "contact" hours with professor-rank faculty. Having a faculty member drone away at 200 students is a good way to tell your dean that you're giving general education students access to your research faculty. Without actually giving non-majors access to your research faculty. To be fair to departments, if colleges within the U's really wanted general education students to have contact with professorial faculty, they would allow departments to hire more professors, so that the department wouldn't have to choose between area coverage for majors and service courses for general education students.
As far back as the late 80s, the KH satellites were fairly common knowledge. At least I know that we knew about them at the planetarium I worked at. And there were complaints/rumors from some quarters that Hubble was "just" a repurposed KH design, whether that was true or not. I'm sure that, at some level, secrets were kept, but the overall project was known of. The same is true at Oak Ridge. If you live in the area, you eventually meet people who tell you things that aren't such common knowledge, like about the escort vehicles, terrorist threats, conventional weapons manufacturing, etc in the area. None of it is really, really secret, but just not generally known about, or talked about. Of course a lot of what you hear is probably BS. Anyway, BS or not, none of this implies that we need to rewatch all the alien dissection films to see if that was a secret badly-kept. At some level I think credulousness and paranoia should be trumped by common sense.
I think the fluoride in the water has finally gotten to you.
Do you really not know the answer? Real incomes have steadily declined in the U.S. for around 40 years, with a few brief upticks now and then. Since the 80s, our society has invested less and less in the basic infrastructure of society, especially schools. And also people in the U.S. have spent more and more, as frills became essentials (cable TV, cell phones, satellite TV, game consoles) and other products have become increasingly expensive, like cars. Then throw into that the declining dollar.... It's pretty simple, really, and it's talked about all the time. And government has done a poor job of addressing the problem, instead tending toward banking deregulation and free trade, both of which have tended to stifle or end investment in jobs here. Oh well. At least we do a good job of fretting other other people's sex lives, religions, etc. God knows, that's what's important.
This matches my experience with "computers" in the classroom. I use the scare-quotes because there are so damn many ways to use the things. One of my more effective uses of them is teaching library research. When the actual library database is on the overhead, and students are throwing out search terms for an actual topic, or discussing actual database entries, the whole process is a lot more engaging. Students see the environment they will use, see how different terms are more effective, etc. ad nauseum. I've also used multimedia a lot. But I haven't had as much luck with individual use of computers in classrooms. More often that not, students start farting around on Facebook or something. I can't blame them. The same thing happens to me, which is why pull the plug sometimes in my office, or block addresses of places like Facebook. I need to get the temptation out of my face. One thing I have found--and I'm talking about found in a small study with a sample size of about 300--is that all this talk about the digital divide and digital natives is more or less a lot of hooey when it comes to actual useful skills. The "digital natives" can text like Gutenberg in heat or plagiarize like Ben Franklin on weed, but they can't insert a header in Word or set up a useful Google search.
Let's see the refutation. I'm in education and constantly am on the lookout for information on this topic. I've yet to see any studies demonstrating lasting benefits. But this isn't my particular field, so, despite my intense interest, I don't have time to do thorough research. So, if you know something, let's see it. It would do me a world of good.
I have limited experience with being a union worker, but in both cases, the union promoted good work, supported good workers, and bad workers met with peer pressure to get out or get good. I don't know about the UAW or whatever union the post office has. But I am pretty sure that a lot of stuff said about unions is no more true than stuff said about gay people, "colored" people, etc.. In other words, I bet a lot of it is a bunch of divisive lies spewed by "1%" to keep the "99%" distracted and effectively disenfranchised.
And public transit sucks because so few people use/demand it. And back to the top.... I'm as bad as the next person. I can't be bothered to look up a bus schedule because I just "know" that it won't be frequent enough, fast enough convenient enough. So I keep riding a motorcycle to work in the rain....