It's still VB http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....
For 'rapid prototyping' of a website, I guess that would be Wordpress.
1,961 karma · joined August 17, 2010
For 'rapid prototyping' of a website, I guess that would be Wordpress.
(it's a java applet, but it was ported to ios/android with the icircuit app)
I tutored students with a modified version of this simulation and they learned in less than a half hour stuff they hadn't learned after 2 circuit courses.
There's a detachable Ekoore Python S3 tablet which triple boots to Ubuntu, Windows, and Android, but it doesn't appear to be available in the U.S.
There are alternative approaches to teaching math such as problem-based learning, active learning, and inquiry-based learning, that help students not only understand the math better, but learn why the math is useful and how to apply it in the real-world (transfer of learning). Students also are much more likely to continue on and succeed in future courses and graduate.
Here are best practices for teaching calculus, for example: http://launchings.blogspot.com/2014/01/maa-calculus-study-se...
And research showing that in traditional lecture courses (vs. active learning courses), students are 1.5 times more likely to fail: http://news.sciencemag.org/education/2014/05/lectures-arent-...
Underrepresented populations (minorities) and females are much more likely to succeed in active and inquiry learning math courses, too: http://theconversation.com/who-learns-in-maths-classes-depen...
See also concept inventories which are tests which are similarly helping measure and assess student conceptual understanding (and misconceptions) in various disciplines (including computer science and mathematics). There are also surveys of student attitudes and engagement and beliefs which are helping improve student learning and retention (like NSSE - the National Survey of Student Engagemen). Then there are non-standard assessments which are helpful for assessing and improving and demonstrating student learning, such as e-portfolios.
Learning can be measured. It can be assessed. (As can motivation, beliefs, etc.) And there are some skills we try to help students learn that are indeed major-agnostic. The ability to write and communicate effectively. The ability to critically think about and evaluate information. The ability to work with others. The ability to properly use and apply mathematical and computational tools. Even digital humanities folks are using computational tools to assist their work. Employers are complaining about some college graduates having poor communication skills, having poor programming skills or conceptual understanding of fundamentals (fizz buzz test), etc. There are things that can and should be improved at the college level - at all levels.
Are you arguing that higher grades might be causing femaleness? Interesting theory.
There are a lot of myths out there about (U.S. K12) education, such as all these "bad teachers" that we can't ever fire because of tenure, and how awful U.S. education is compared to other countries or compared to the U.S. in the 50s and 60s, and how charter schools or vouchers will solve all education's problems.
There is actual data and research out there on all this, buried under all this opinion. Did you know for example that tenured teachers are twice as likely to lose their job as non-tenured teachers? http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/teachers/the-m...
There is also a history behind all this. Before teacher tenure, teachers were regularly fired on the whim of principals or because of getting pregnant. See for example "Why Teacher Unions Are Good for Teachers—and the Public" http://www.aft.org/newspubs/periodicals/ae/winter0607/ravitc...
And see the book "50 Myths & Lies That Threaten America’s Public Schools" http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/03/...
As the authors state: "The mythical failure of public education has been created and perpetuated in large part by political and economic interests that stand to gain from the destruction of the traditional system."
Once you get past the myths, I'd recommend doing a little reading on how people actually learn (it's not just dumping information on empty brains). See for example the book How People Learn (free, pdf): http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?isbn=0309070368
Or for the more impatient, watch this beginning of this video Minds of Our Own: http://www.learner.org/resources/series26.html
Or this even shorter video on the counter-intuitive nature of how people learn from videos (criticizing the Khan Academy videos): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVtCO84MDj8
Teaching is an incredibly difficult job, because learning is incredibly complex. A single phrase or gesture can have an enormous positive or negative influence on learning. If you tried spending even one hour in a typical K12 classroom, most likely you'd be eaten alive. It may not seem like many K12 teachers are getting fired, partly because most teachers quit within 5 years.
You mean like those at Google (dart), Microsoft (typescript), Mozilla (asm.js) and the developers of dozens of other languages that compile to javascript, I guess: https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/wiki/List-of-lang...
That's true of everything. It's fear and anxiety that prevents a lot of people from learning and trying new things. I keep trying to tell students or family members when they are learning to do stuff on the computer, just right click everything, just google anything you can think of, don't worry about it being perfect, don't worry about breaking anything. You have to hold back showing them the "answers" or else they become dependent.
There were research studies showing that folks made less errors with case-insensitivity, and it's something that would help novices without hurting "experts" at all (in fact, save time). Even Guido van Rossom thought it might be a good idea to make Python case-insensitive apparently, but folks revolted (NIMPY - not in my python!): https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2000-May/03710...
Ultimately, who cares if python or javascript (excuse me, Python or JavaScript) are case sensitive. That's just how they are designed, and they weren't designed for beginners. Maybe future language designers though might not do something solely because it is the tradition, the cargo cult practice.
This is part of a larger class of problems I see with open source in particular. They copy some feature that made perfect sense in the time, context, and constraints under which it was designed, but don't factor in how things have changed or they don't have knowledge of the original problem that feature was designed to solve (which may no longer apply). I'm thinking of common programming language features in particular.
That said, the spike in usability and stability and compatibility problems of Ubuntu (like not being able to even see the last item in a list of files because the bottom status bar was removed and replaced with a floating box) just finally pushed me off Ubuntu as my primary OS this past fall, after using it as my primary OS for 7 years. I know it's free and a lot of the compatibility problems are more the fault of Microsoft/Nvidia (dual graphics, uefi, etc.), I shouldn't complain, but to me it's not a good sign when you won't even use something that's free. But maybe this article is a sign that Ubuntu will improve in the future.
Coursera was founded by programmers and is dominated by programmers.
I'm not saying that's always a bad thing - Google is dominated by engineers and it is an engineering company.
But I have been surprised by how few people (zero, from what I can see) they have hired who specialize in education and learning, which I thought was the business of Coursera.
But I disagree with the primary reasoning in the article: "when you have an adjunct professor instead of a full-timer, you are getting a substandard education"
Students actually learn more from non-tenured faculty than tenured or tenure track faculty: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/09/09/study-finds-st...
Partly that's due to things like adjuncts may not have research obligations and can focus more on teaching, and also of course those adjuncts who get worse student ratings are not re-hired. Universities should give more job security and more pay to instructors whose main job is teaching instead of research.
so it's the .141... part
So, pardon my french, but no freaking way do I want any local Chrome extensions allowed by default anymore.
For extensions from the Chrome store, perhaps Chrome should make updates more like on Android, where you are notified and can click for more info.
Their bottom line is to get more exposure to their ads, and I'm not arguing if that's good or bad. Driverless cars would mean that passengers have more time to be exposed to web ads on their phones and tablets (I'm not saying that's the primary motivation or benefit, but it certainly is a factor in Google's involvement). Expanding Internet access in cities through Google Fiber means more people can be exposed to their ads. Sharing Android freely with anyone means increased access to the web and thus Google ads. It's not too difficult to see what the motivation for developing Google Glass is - you would potentially be exposed to ads all day long, not just when you whip out your phone or when you are using your computer.
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/edx-drops-plans-to-co...
The percentages were not part of his original pyramid, they are just made up. And there is no research verifying the 'order' of the parts of the pyramid, either.
From Wikipedia: "Dale's "Cone of Experience," which he intended to provide an intuitive model of the concreteness of various kinds of audio-visual media, has been widely misrepresented. Often referred to as the "Cone of Learning," it purports to inform viewers of how much people remember based on how they encounter information. However, Dale included no numbers and did not base his cone on scientific research, and he also warned readers not to take the cone too seriously."
Here are some other articles debunking the cone and percentages: http://www.willatworklearning.com/2006/05/people_remember.ht... http://www.brainfriendlytrainer.com/theory/dale%E2%80%99s-co... http://www.asee.org/documents/sections/pacific-southwest/200...
That said, there is plenty of support for the general idea that the more participatory and applied our learning, the better. For example http://www.vcu.edu/cte/workshops/teaching_learning/2009_reso...
including an activity for people with no programming experience: http://learn.code.org/hoc/1
The colon in python, for example, makes sense for aiding readability (and parsing) in a case-insensitive programming language like its predecessor ABC. It's completely unnecessary for parsing today. Zero-based arrays make sense in C where you have pointers and addresses.
A lot of the features of programming languages today (including the fact that they are all text based) made perfect sense in the 1960s or 1970s, when all computers were ASCII plain text-based and had very limited memory and speed. Some languages would probably be better served by an outliner than a plain text editor, for example, but that didn't exist decades ago.
Does that mean we need to stop trying to raise the living standards of the majority of people and stop trying to offer things like free food, free healthcare, and free education? No.
It's like if someone argued against the use of penicillin because it increased the lifespan disparity between rich and poor. I'm sure it did and still does (for those with no access to pencillin), but what is the point? Are we supposed to stop using penicillin then to keep lifespans closer together? Or should we instead focus on getting more people access to penicillin, similar in a (very rough) sense to how the "learning to code" movement is focusing on making computational literacy more accessible to everyone.
The only data she can find (KDnuggets survey) indicates that both R and Python are growing in popularity, not one at the expense of the other. 61% use R and 39% Python.