What does your girlfriend like to watch? Start with the episodes/movies that are closest to that. For some people, "Star Trek: First Contact" is the best intro. For others, it's the JJ Abrams reboot, for others it's DS9, etc. "Star Trek: Insurrection" is often referred to as "Star Trek: Date Movie" for good reason; that might be a starting place.
Yes, it does take more, which is why we analyze the difficulty and discrimination of tests.
Difficulty: what percentage of the population gets the answer right?
Discrimination: sort the class by overall grade. Divide them into groups. (Thirds, quarters, etc. depending on class size.) Compare, question by question, the percentage of students in the top performing group who answer correctly to the percentage of students in the low performing group who answer correctly. A highly discriminating question should be correctly answered by the top performers but incorrectly answered by bottom performers. If the reverse is true, the question is confusing or miskeyed and needs to be adjusted accordingly.
We should also analyze how often students pick the "distractors" (i.e. incorrect answers) in multiple choice tests to determine if students answer correctly because they know the material or because the wrong answers are so obviously wrong.
Obviously, there is a lot more to it than this. The point I'm trying to make is that test structures need to be chosen and analyzed carefully to ensure validity and reliability. This can't be done by creating tests from "whole cloth" every time. Some degree of reuse needs to take place. That's why I used the LaTeX package. It can base questions on random numbers, and answers can be generated randomly or with preprogrammed algebra, so I set it up to have the correct answer, two answers generated by the most common mistakes, and a random number from a range that could make it the highest or lowest number on the list, sorted from smallest to largest. Then option e was "none of the above" for every question. I rarely used it intentionally, but it came in useful on the first couple of tests where typos in my algebra setting up the tests prevented the right answer from appearing on the list. (If you are interested, I wrote a book on assessment that you can access via my signature.)
You don't have to make the questions easier. I've written "open library" tests at University that allowed us to bring in any and all books we wanted. (1998; wi-fi was not an issue.) The tests had questions hard enough, phrased well enough and timed well enough that a student who understood the material had no problems getting it done in time, but students who depended on being able to look things up during the exam bombed because they didn't have time to find the final answers.
How do you proctor when a lot of institutions use online courses to collect tuition from students who live impractical distances away? Yes, you can find local proctors, and some institutions do, but for the institutions that prioritize the "cash grab" aspect that's not going to happen.
I went to a great school that allowed calculators on calculus tests. Why? In the prof's words: "because there's no way they will help you answer the questions I wrote for you, but paperweights can be useful the way these desktops are sloped."
Making new tests every time means we can't analyze student responses to confirm that test questions really are testing what they are supposed to be testing. When I was teaching in the classroom, I used the happy medium: I generated tests and homework with LaTeX packages that randomized numbers in the questions and the wrong answers, so I could verify phrasing and alignment with learning outcomes quite rigorously while still making sure the third period class couldn't feed useful answers and tips to the fourth period class. It works extremely well in my fields (math and physics), although I openly admit Language Arts/English and Social Studies teachers would have a tougher time of it.
True, but that's largely due to Apple watching the market. Most people weren't "renting" TV shows, so they dropped the pay-per-view model for individual episodes. Instead of paying $0.49-$0.99 to rent an episode, you buy it for $0.99-$3.49 (all prices based on what I've seen in the Canadian store for shows I'm interested in; YMMV) per episode to watch as often as you like. It's expensive pay-per-view for TV episodes because that's not quite what they are selling, because that's not what most people were buying.
As someone with a collector's impulse, I like the prices. When I had cable, I'd pay each month for the HDTV feed, download episodes to the PVR, and felt that any show worth watching was worth owning, so I bought the DVD/Blu-Ray set later. Now, it amounts to paying for the DVD/Blu-Ray set up front and just watching the episodes when I get around it. Instead of finding storage space for one season after another, I found storage space for a 3TB external hard drive for the laptop and stream it all from there. By the time that puppy fills, a far larger hard drive will be available at a lower price, I'm sure. Even with the slightly limited offerings in Canada, I find the combination of AppleTV and Netflix covers everything I've wanted to watch in the past year with the exception of the Academy Awards. (Caveat: I have no interest in local news broadcasts or sports. As far as I can tell, cable is still king for those, although that is also rapidly changing.)
This was a hybrid approach. How would they have done without the face-to-face hour each week to get questions answered that the machines couldn't answer?
This is enough to rule out brute-forcing. But notice of course that both assumptions are critical. An average person doesn't have a 171,476 word vocabulary and humans can't make genuinely random choices.
True, but humans can download large electronic dictionaries and use a computer to pick, say, 4-8 words at random. Since that XKCD came out, I've used a non-random 35 character string followed by one of my old 8 character gobbledegook passwords as a new 43 character password that I can remember. Takes time to type, but I figure it's the "best of both worlds" for security. Unfortunately, a lot of websites I've tried to do this with have an upper limit on password length that is shorter than this.
Issue 50 was the final issue of Tiny Titans. The creative team moved on to Superman Family Adventures, which is previewed this Saturday with Free Comic Book Day.
The first Saturday in May is Free Comic Book Day. It's a great time to sample a variety of comics and styles for all ages. Expose your son to a wide variety of options and gauge his reactions accordingly when making further buying decisions. This year's collections include multiple Spider-Man titles, the first issue of Superman Family Adventures (which is a STRONG candidate), Atomic Robo (one of the best, and truly "all ages"; think Pixar on the comic book page) and more. Every reader is different, so find out on May 5 and cater to him.
The profs that are teaching the same subject to in person are worse than the guys in coursera videos. Sure, if I were at Stanford, I'd prefer them live - but a top professor online is better than a mediocre professor in any way.
This is also true. However, I can imagine a working model in the future that actually allows for the larger class sizes the taxpayers seem to want to pay for, while mitigating the instructional quality problem by having the region or country's best teachers providing video lectures and then the best of the local teachers supplementing the questions, preferably with a different outlook. The obvious risk is that the local teachers will grow less experienced over the generations, and the interaction between teacher and student will suffer.
I've tried to learn online, and I've tried to learn in a classroom. I've also tried to teach both ways. Nothing beats a teacher who can interact with a student in person. Now, this may transform teachers into the people who answer questions students have after watching the videos, and it can certainly expand the reach of quality courses to low income and low population areas, which is a good thing (because reaching more students is always a good thing) but some elements of our education system survive because they work.
Now, in the long term, coupling this with live teachers and individualized, adaptive education content can really change the world...
Look at the tablet and portable phone technology from any incarnation of Star Trek or other popular sci-fi. The concept has been around for decades. The technological infrastructure to support a device that appeals to the general public didn't exist until very recently. Look at the wireless data speeds and network demands of today's smart phones: there's no practical way to have gotten them on the market sooner.
The local laws in my area (Alberta, Canada) say you must stop and then *remain* at a complete stop for three seconds before proceeding. A delay that long would have been noticeable in spite of this argument. Are California's laws similar?
I'm sure they would handle the two situations differently. The judge is denying the copyright holder from identifying the bill payer, not the police. If law enforcement officials traced a source of child porn to an IP, they'd mostly likely be given the warrant required to determine who the infringing party is. The parents of the child that was photographed wouldn't get that information: the law enforcement officials would. That's a significant and fair distinction in my mind. Granted, I'm not a lawyer, but this is how I would expect a reasonable and level headed court to handle the two situations. If law enforcement officials wanted the IPs rather than the copyright holders, then it may again be different.
It's possible, but teachers on staff who bucked the tablets still get through more with the students. However, as I originally said, the human teacher is the single greatest factor here; a good teacher with chalk and a blackboard will have students that grossly outperform students taught by a bad teacher with an unlimited technology budget.
Not completely. Different students have different learning styles that are predisposed at birth. If Sara can learn, Tommy can learn, but Sara might learn with a measurable increase in efficiency if she hears the material, while Tommy can learn more efficiently if he sees it. It's certainly not an on/off switch, but it is a fast/slow switch.
And, for the record, I work in private education and we've been teaching with tablets (iPads and otherwise) for almost two years. On average, students are more engaged and learning faster than when we did a similar job on paper. There are rare exceptions, of course. Note that the tablet doesn't do the teaching; a human teacher does the teaching, and the content is on the tablet screen. The biggest variable in how effectively students learn is the teacher, and not the technology the teacher happens to be using.
That works in the extreme southern trim only. The U.S. border is an 8 hour drive from here, IF I'm speeding, and it's two tanks of gas, each at the cost of a game. Vancouver, Toronto, etc. can do that. Much of the country can't.
The same thing happened in Canada. Why don't they lower the prices? Because we're used to paying them, so they don't have to. If we stop paying artificially inflated prices for all of our media, it'll change. NOTE: I'm not advocating piracy. That won't change their minds; they'll just say we are ripping them off for the heck of it. I'm advocating that individuals do not spend money on media with prices that seem artificially inflated, and that those doing so tell the media providers that this is happening and why.
As a Canadian teacher, I think I can speak about one part of that. In western Canada, the unions are too damn strong. Once a teacher has a permanent contract ("tenure" by another name) they are guaranteed a full time position if they want one, unless they touch a student. There is no contractual obligation to adhere to the curriculum. The overwhelming majority are great, but the "lemon dance" described in "Waiting for Superman" is something that I have observed on more than one occasion, as both teacher and student.
I'm not anti-union, but these particular unions have too much power. There is no "minimum performance criteria" clause in the tenure contracts of our local unions, and tenure is awarded after holding a full time classroom for three years. No clauses about student performance, just keep the job for three years. Then you are guaranteed a full time job somewhere in the district if you want one. Hence, a (now retired) teacher from my high school who was formally trained as an elementary teacher and who hated technology. In an attempt to get her out of the system, she was told the only position they could offer her was teaching computers (comparable to a course in Microsoft Office today) at the high school. They were sure she'd say no, but she said yes, so that's what she did for the last seven years of her career. Her students were not inspired. Most of us were frustrated by the blatantly obvious fact that we knew more than she did. (Sample test question: How do you make text bold? My answer: highlight it with the mouse and hit command-B. (Mac Plus lab.) This was marked wrong, as the answer she wanted was to go through the menus, pick for format option, check the box, and hit okay. She refused to give me the mark for my answer, even after I showed her that it worked.)
The original comment probably could have used more detail, but it certainly isn't wrong. There is a place for unions, but some teaching unions are just far too strong.
If you read the original paper, you'll find that they did NOT claim the "too good to be true" result. It was reported that way by a lot of press agents, but the original source basically says "we think there's a systematic error at work we haven't identified. Can you see the problem?" Do not blame CERN for the way the press misrepresented them.
I worked at CERN for six months doing my M.Sc. (in 2000, on ATLAS, not OPERA which is the experiment reporting the result.) Having seen the actual systems and the level of complexity and sensitivity involved, I think assembling them with two small errors identified this quickly is actually pretty damned impressive. Most tech companies dream of CERN's quality control.
Slashdot Mirror
What does your girlfriend like to watch? Start with the episodes/movies that are closest to that. For some people, "Star Trek: First Contact" is the best intro. For others, it's the JJ Abrams reboot, for others it's DS9, etc. "Star Trek: Insurrection" is often referred to as "Star Trek: Date Movie" for good reason; that might be a starting place.
Yes, it does take more, which is why we analyze the difficulty and discrimination of tests.
Difficulty: what percentage of the population gets the answer right?
Discrimination: sort the class by overall grade. Divide them into groups. (Thirds, quarters, etc. depending on class size.) Compare, question by question, the percentage of students in the top performing group who answer correctly to the percentage of students in the low performing group who answer correctly. A highly discriminating question should be correctly answered by the top performers but incorrectly answered by bottom performers. If the reverse is true, the question is confusing or miskeyed and needs to be adjusted accordingly.
We should also analyze how often students pick the "distractors" (i.e. incorrect answers) in multiple choice tests to determine if students answer correctly because they know the material or because the wrong answers are so obviously wrong.
Obviously, there is a lot more to it than this. The point I'm trying to make is that test structures need to be chosen and analyzed carefully to ensure validity and reliability. This can't be done by creating tests from "whole cloth" every time. Some degree of reuse needs to take place. That's why I used the LaTeX package. It can base questions on random numbers, and answers can be generated randomly or with preprogrammed algebra, so I set it up to have the correct answer, two answers generated by the most common mistakes, and a random number from a range that could make it the highest or lowest number on the list, sorted from smallest to largest. Then option e was "none of the above" for every question. I rarely used it intentionally, but it came in useful on the first couple of tests where typos in my algebra setting up the tests prevented the right answer from appearing on the list. (If you are interested, I wrote a book on assessment that you can access via my signature.)
The only part of the parent I disagree with is "of that era." I can't think of a more famous female aviator from any era.
You don't have to make the questions easier. I've written "open library" tests at University that allowed us to bring in any and all books we wanted. (1998; wi-fi was not an issue.) The tests had questions hard enough, phrased well enough and timed well enough that a student who understood the material had no problems getting it done in time, but students who depended on being able to look things up during the exam bombed because they didn't have time to find the final answers.
How do you proctor when a lot of institutions use online courses to collect tuition from students who live impractical distances away? Yes, you can find local proctors, and some institutions do, but for the institutions that prioritize the "cash grab" aspect that's not going to happen.
I went to a great school that allowed calculators on calculus tests. Why? In the prof's words: "because there's no way they will help you answer the questions I wrote for you, but paperweights can be useful the way these desktops are sloped."
Making new tests every time means we can't analyze student responses to confirm that test questions really are testing what they are supposed to be testing. When I was teaching in the classroom, I used the happy medium: I generated tests and homework with LaTeX packages that randomized numbers in the questions and the wrong answers, so I could verify phrasing and alignment with learning outcomes quite rigorously while still making sure the third period class couldn't feed useful answers and tips to the fourth period class. It works extremely well in my fields (math and physics), although I openly admit Language Arts/English and Social Studies teachers would have a tougher time of it.
True, but that's largely due to Apple watching the market. Most people weren't "renting" TV shows, so they dropped the pay-per-view model for individual episodes. Instead of paying $0.49-$0.99 to rent an episode, you buy it for $0.99-$3.49 (all prices based on what I've seen in the Canadian store for shows I'm interested in; YMMV) per episode to watch as often as you like. It's expensive pay-per-view for TV episodes because that's not quite what they are selling, because that's not what most people were buying.
As someone with a collector's impulse, I like the prices. When I had cable, I'd pay each month for the HDTV feed, download episodes to the PVR, and felt that any show worth watching was worth owning, so I bought the DVD/Blu-Ray set later. Now, it amounts to paying for the DVD/Blu-Ray set up front and just watching the episodes when I get around it. Instead of finding storage space for one season after another, I found storage space for a 3TB external hard drive for the laptop and stream it all from there. By the time that puppy fills, a far larger hard drive will be available at a lower price, I'm sure. Even with the slightly limited offerings in Canada, I find the combination of AppleTV and Netflix covers everything I've wanted to watch in the past year with the exception of the Academy Awards. (Caveat: I have no interest in local news broadcasts or sports. As far as I can tell, cable is still king for those, although that is also rapidly changing.)
Not to mention xkcd on April 1, 2012...
This was a hybrid approach. How would they have done without the face-to-face hour each week to get questions answered that the machines couldn't answer?
This is enough to rule out brute-forcing. But notice of course that both assumptions are critical. An average person doesn't have a 171,476 word vocabulary and humans can't make genuinely random choices.
True, but humans can download large electronic dictionaries and use a computer to pick, say, 4-8 words at random. Since that XKCD came out, I've used a non-random 35 character string followed by one of my old 8 character gobbledegook passwords as a new 43 character password that I can remember. Takes time to type, but I figure it's the "best of both worlds" for security. Unfortunately, a lot of websites I've tried to do this with have an upper limit on password length that is shorter than this.
Issue 50 was the final issue of Tiny Titans. The creative team moved on to Superman Family Adventures, which is previewed this Saturday with Free Comic Book Day.
The first Saturday in May is Free Comic Book Day. It's a great time to sample a variety of comics and styles for all ages. Expose your son to a wide variety of options and gauge his reactions accordingly when making further buying decisions. This year's collections include multiple Spider-Man titles, the first issue of Superman Family Adventures (which is a STRONG candidate), Atomic Robo (one of the best, and truly "all ages"; think Pixar on the comic book page) and more. Every reader is different, so find out on May 5 and cater to him.
The profs that are teaching the same subject to in person are worse than the guys in coursera videos. Sure, if I were at Stanford, I'd prefer them live - but a top professor online is better than a mediocre professor in any way.
This is also true. However, I can imagine a working model in the future that actually allows for the larger class sizes the taxpayers seem to want to pay for, while mitigating the instructional quality problem by having the region or country's best teachers providing video lectures and then the best of the local teachers supplementing the questions, preferably with a different outlook. The obvious risk is that the local teachers will grow less experienced over the generations, and the interaction between teacher and student will suffer.
I've tried to learn online, and I've tried to learn in a classroom. I've also tried to teach both ways. Nothing beats a teacher who can interact with a student in person. Now, this may transform teachers into the people who answer questions students have after watching the videos, and it can certainly expand the reach of quality courses to low income and low population areas, which is a good thing (because reaching more students is always a good thing) but some elements of our education system survive because they work.
Now, in the long term, coupling this with live teachers and individualized, adaptive education content can really change the world...
Look at the tablet and portable phone technology from any incarnation of Star Trek or other popular sci-fi. The concept has been around for decades. The technological infrastructure to support a device that appeals to the general public didn't exist until very recently. Look at the wireless data speeds and network demands of today's smart phones: there's no practical way to have gotten them on the market sooner.
The local laws in my area (Alberta, Canada) say you must stop and then *remain* at a complete stop for three seconds before proceeding. A delay that long would have been noticeable in spite of this argument. Are California's laws similar?
I'm sure they would handle the two situations differently. The judge is denying the copyright holder from identifying the bill payer, not the police. If law enforcement officials traced a source of child porn to an IP, they'd mostly likely be given the warrant required to determine who the infringing party is. The parents of the child that was photographed wouldn't get that information: the law enforcement officials would. That's a significant and fair distinction in my mind. Granted, I'm not a lawyer, but this is how I would expect a reasonable and level headed court to handle the two situations. If law enforcement officials wanted the IPs rather than the copyright holders, then it may again be different.
It's possible, but teachers on staff who bucked the tablets still get through more with the students. However, as I originally said, the human teacher is the single greatest factor here; a good teacher with chalk and a blackboard will have students that grossly outperform students taught by a bad teacher with an unlimited technology budget.
Not completely. Different students have different learning styles that are predisposed at birth. If Sara can learn, Tommy can learn, but Sara might learn with a measurable increase in efficiency if she hears the material, while Tommy can learn more efficiently if he sees it. It's certainly not an on/off switch, but it is a fast/slow switch.
And, for the record, I work in private education and we've been teaching with tablets (iPads and otherwise) for almost two years. On average, students are more engaged and learning faster than when we did a similar job on paper. There are rare exceptions, of course. Note that the tablet doesn't do the teaching; a human teacher does the teaching, and the content is on the tablet screen. The biggest variable in how effectively students learn is the teacher, and not the technology the teacher happens to be using.
My company vehicle is a small SUV. One tank gets through 400km, and it's about 700km to the border.
That works in the extreme southern trim only. The U.S. border is an 8 hour drive from here, IF I'm speeding, and it's two tanks of gas, each at the cost of a game. Vancouver, Toronto, etc. can do that. Much of the country can't.
The same thing happened in Canada. Why don't they lower the prices? Because we're used to paying them, so they don't have to. If we stop paying artificially inflated prices for all of our media, it'll change. NOTE: I'm not advocating piracy. That won't change their minds; they'll just say we are ripping them off for the heck of it. I'm advocating that individuals do not spend money on media with prices that seem artificially inflated, and that those doing so tell the media providers that this is happening and why.
As a Canadian teacher, I think I can speak about one part of that. In western Canada, the unions are too damn strong. Once a teacher has a permanent contract ("tenure" by another name) they are guaranteed a full time position if they want one, unless they touch a student. There is no contractual obligation to adhere to the curriculum. The overwhelming majority are great, but the "lemon dance" described in "Waiting for Superman" is something that I have observed on more than one occasion, as both teacher and student.
I'm not anti-union, but these particular unions have too much power. There is no "minimum performance criteria" clause in the tenure contracts of our local unions, and tenure is awarded after holding a full time classroom for three years. No clauses about student performance, just keep the job for three years. Then you are guaranteed a full time job somewhere in the district if you want one. Hence, a (now retired) teacher from my high school who was formally trained as an elementary teacher and who hated technology. In an attempt to get her out of the system, she was told the only position they could offer her was teaching computers (comparable to a course in Microsoft Office today) at the high school. They were sure she'd say no, but she said yes, so that's what she did for the last seven years of her career. Her students were not inspired. Most of us were frustrated by the blatantly obvious fact that we knew more than she did. (Sample test question: How do you make text bold? My answer: highlight it with the mouse and hit command-B. (Mac Plus lab.) This was marked wrong, as the answer she wanted was to go through the menus, pick for format option, check the box, and hit okay. She refused to give me the mark for my answer, even after I showed her that it worked.)
The original comment probably could have used more detail, but it certainly isn't wrong. There is a place for unions, but some teaching unions are just far too strong.
If you read the original paper, you'll find that they did NOT claim the "too good to be true" result. It was reported that way by a lot of press agents, but the original source basically says "we think there's a systematic error at work we haven't identified. Can you see the problem?" Do not blame CERN for the way the press misrepresented them.
I worked at CERN for six months doing my M.Sc. (in 2000, on ATLAS, not OPERA which is the experiment reporting the result.) Having seen the actual systems and the level of complexity and sensitivity involved, I think assembling them with two small errors identified this quickly is actually pretty damned impressive. Most tech companies dream of CERN's quality control.