edtechdev

It doesn't matter - Dart can compile to JavaScript.

When it might matter is if there are apps (like games) that run faster in a Dart VM than in javascript. Anyway though, even Chrome doesn't include a Dart VM yet by default, so no big deal yet.

1,1,1 is black, also

Great piece, great thoughts

I'm glad you were able to get some good experiences out of the MOOCs that focused on more relevant, practical skills (startup engineering, technology entrepreneurship, etc.).

I wish more faculty (teaching MOOCs or not) would try to make their course more relevant and applied rather than abstract and rote (there are tons of techniques like service learning, problem-based learning, etc.).

"I also was able to deal with the independence due to everything being very task/goal oriented rather than just the instructor saying abstract concepts for us to somehow grasp from listening. It also had an extremely practical aspect to it, as by the end, one had to bootstrap a startup using all the skills learned, and so there was an incentive to spend extra time learning."

I have a presentation on the Pros and Cons of MOOCs I'm giving tomorrow (I gave it 6 months ago, too), and I added a link to your post (on the slide about the perspective of non-matriculated/outside students): http://bit.ly/considermoocs

The update also makes Chrome blurry (and other apps like Steam)

You have to right click the Chrome desktop icon -> properties -> compatibility -> disable display scaling

Then go to Chrome settings -> advanced settings -> increase font and/or zoom

Yeah physics departments should share this article with incoming students, to help them see where the field is going. Although one thing missing is that I would want to find another article that illustrates the ways that physics research is improving and helping our lives today.

I started out in physics, was interested in relativity and the like, but thought ahead to a career in physics and saw that folks were into string theory, which didn't really appeal to me, and I wasn't seeing how physics research was helping people today. I should have done more research into the field before leaving it, but, I went into physics and science education research and cognitive science. Ironically, a similar article like this one got me into cognitive science (before I even started college), an interview with Patricia Churchland by Bill Moyers.

As I mentioned, but you still downvoted me, I didn't downvote lisp. I have used lisp - required to use it in a course. And I do recall seeing that many parentheses in lisp programs. I recall seeing that many parentheses (and curly braces) in C, C#, Java, Javascript, Perl, Scala, groovy, PHP, and other programs, too. Let's not pretend they don't exist though.

I don't dislike groovy - I remember studying the compiler 8 years ago (I was helping work on the boo compiler at the time).

But every programming language I've ever seen has flaws - that are both objective and subjective. If I were a Ruby developer wanting to create something on the JVM, I might think that groovy is inferior to JRuby, for example. If I were a straight up Java developer, I might think that groovy is slow or inconsistent or too unsafe (how some people perceive ruby's monkey patching). I'm not saying any of those perceptions are correct, but it is very easy to imagine all kinds of reasons and perspectives for disliking every single language up there. Heck, for about a third of them, it's harder for me to imagine reasons that people DO like them. But I know that's just my opinion, man, and who I am to stop people from using drugs, jumping off cliffs, or using Perl.

I didn't down vote those or other languages I haven't really used. But you honestly can't think of any feature of those languages that might turn people off? ((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((? any)))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))

You can actually replace 1 Macbook Air with 4 Chromebooks

But more generally, most of the things most people do on a laptop can be (or are) done in the browser. You can even do image and video editing in the browser nowadays, as well as programming.

"paste this in Chrome's address bar: chrome://flags/, use Ctrl+F to search for "Enable Instant Extended API" and click" Disable

Although it only appears to be enabled on non-Linux platforms

This data rewards schools that reject more applicants and/or fail more students (prevent them from graduating). Because that increases the average & median of their graduates. Charter schools and private schools do the same thing to increase test scores, but when controlling for other factors they are no better than public schools.

In order words, the data shows which schools do the best job of attracting and filtering out the top students. Many folks including some faculty think that IS their job - to set a high bar and see which few students can make it over, but from my point of view that is only half of the job - the other part, the hard part, is to actually educate students - to help more students get over that high bar.

One recent one is NoFlo http://noflojs.org/

A well established one for kids & novices is Scratch: http://scratch.mit.edu/

And you can see some other javascript-based visual programming tools here: https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/wiki/List-of-lang...

Student ratings actually negatively correlate with learning

I think maybe I'll trust the decades of research on math education rather than your intuitions. For example, there is research showing that many more students succeed in calculus when the math is taught in context, not abstractly and plug and chug. One set of studies showed that such a course increased calculus pass rates from 60% to 90% (see the Wright State engineering math course, and see the ENGAGE Engineering project). Another large set of studies shows that student learning can double and graduation rates triple when active, participatory learning techniques are used by the instructor instead of traditional lecture (The PCAST report - Engage to Excel cites it).

Virtually every class focuses on memorization and not conceptual understanding, unfortunately. That's what students have to do to survive high school and college courses, because that's how they are taught and assessed.

A recent study of calculus courses found for example that almost 80% of the test questions simply involved recalling and applying a procedure (i.e., "plug and chug"). http://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/cspcc/TSG13_Bress...

The students don't want it to be this way: "74% preferred to make sense of mathematics rather than simply memorizing it and 72% saw the role of the instructor as helping students to reason through problems on their own rather than showing students how to work the problem".

And yet because it is easier to test and grade rote learning and memorization, we end up killing students' interest in STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) and most students who enter college as a STEM major end up changing majors, transferring, or dropping out. "students leave STEM majors primarily because of poor instruction in their mathematics and science courses, with calculus often cited as a primary reason."

yes: https://twitter.com/mozlabs/status/380847329437159424

wonder if they might to add some kind of drawing/annotation tools

Chromebooks have a 5% share

Who cares - people like them, they have a nice sized niche. Just like macs, just like other distros.

They're great for schools - esp. high schools. iPads are probably the more suitable option for elementary age kids.

And luckily prices are staying down. Chromebooks are <$300. iPad minis are $329.

Windows 8 tablets are good for math/science/engineering majors who have to run windows software and might need to use the stylus for notes/drawings.

Even though I've used middle of the road laptops running Ubuntu the past 6 years, I ended up getting a higher end Windows 8 touchscreen laptop to use for video editing, games, graphics, etc. I'll dual boot to Ubuntu or else run it in a vm.

I have a 10 year old boy

Maybe ask him what he wants

A lot of boys that age like Minecraft and other videogames on xbox or pc. You might get him a small android tablet or else an old smart phone or laptop to play games. A bike or scooter.

Taibbi had a good article on this last month: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/ripping-off-young-...

"Carey talks about how colleges spend a lot of energy on what he calls "gilding" – pouring money into superficial symbols of prestige, everything from new buildings to celebrity professors, as part of a "never-ending race for positional status." "What you see is that spending on education hasn't really gone up all that much," he says. "It's spending on things like buildings and administration. ."

One reason they do the gilding is to increase their ranking - which itself has problems. Rankings are primarily based on selectivity and prestige, which is sort of like judging that a hospital is better because of how healthy the patients are when they get there, not how much healthier they got while they were there: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/02/14/110214fa_fact_...

The age recommendations on this are way off

This article recommends Scratch for 12 and up. Scratch is good for kindergartners and up. The Snap fork is more appropriate for older students: http://byob.berkeley.edu/

This article recommends Lego Mindstorms for ages 9-12 (and python and ruby). The average age of people who used to buy Lego Mindstorms was 28. The box recommends it for kids over 10. Lego has a robotics kit for younger kids called WeDo. I would not introduce python or ruby to a 9 year old, unless you want them to hate programming. Teaching programming for its own sake is a recipe for disaster.

And again it's missing so much. For coding robots to do things see sites like http://fightcodegame.com/ http://robocode.sourceforge.net/ http://www.nessbots.com/

For making games, I'd start with Scratch for < 13 kids, but for older kids see sites like http://www.playmycode.com/ http://pixieengine.com/ https://www.scirra.com/construct2

He forgot about all the robot fighting games, where you 'program' a robot (or tank) to fight other robots/tanks, such as: http://fightcodegame.com/ http://robocode.sourceforge.net/ http://www.nessbots.com/ and dozens of others: http://www.sumost.ca/steve/games/

Also, there are tools that make it easier for kids/beginners to create games, and in doing so learn programming, such as: http://www.playmycode.com/ http://pixieengine.com/ https://www.scirra.com/construct2

Some other LightBot-like games include Cargo-Bot, Robologic, and several others: http://breakoutmentors.com/kids-programming-resources/

There's ComputerCraft in Minecraft, etc.

And there's learning programming by modding games/simulations such as minecraft

I admire the effort

I can't help mentioning though that the buildapc sub-reddit has had some threads on PCs for under 350: http://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/1khff2/we_need_to_...

But it would be nicer for more novice folks to be able to buy one pre-built.

You do know that article is an opinion piece that you're using to back your argument.

Especially for tech folks, I would start with research on how people actually learn.

The electronic version of this book How People Learn can be downloaded for free: http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=9853

See also "What Technologists and Entrepreneurs Should Know about Education": http://guide.hackeducation.com/techies.html

If you look into actual research on education (it exists), private schools and charter schools are no better at educating than public schools.* It is just a matter of other pre-existing differences, like socioeconomic status (poverty), etc. As numerous people have pointed out - you want to fix education, you need to fix poverty and inequity. Sure, other things will help, too, like requiring all teachers have masters degrees and paying them like other professionals, as other countries like Finland do.

That said, the article that is the subject of the blog complaint states that it is morally wrong to send your kid to private school. I disagree with that - even people who send their kids to private schools pay taxes that go to support public schools. It is a little more of a shame when parents send their kids to (some) crappy charter schools, which DO take away money from public schools, but sometimes it is because the public school really is bad, or because the kid isn't doing well in the public school and the only other alternative is homeschooling.

* http://www.edline.com/uploads/pdf/PrivateSchoolsReport.pdf http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1670063,0... http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/are-private-sc... http://www.nea.org/home/18142.htm

I tried to comment on the article but the comment form wasn't working with chrome or firefox, but:

The article is forgetting a couple of things - in the real-world you also have a purpose, a goal for what you are trying to create or a problem you are trying to solve. You also have a wealth of background and tacit knowledge about the constraints and affordances of programming. If you just had students mimic the actions of how programming is done in the real world, they would be doing it without understanding the reason for it.

Another point: none of this is new - there is actually a field of study for education research. Search for example for "problem-based learning" for more information on approaches in education that have students work on real-world, messy problems.

For a more intuitive explanation and history of transfinite cardinals and a cognitive analysis of their development, see writings by Rafael Nunez, including these two papers: http://www.cogsci.ucsd.edu/~nunez/web/SingaporeF.pdf http://www.cogsci.ucsd.edu/~nunez/web/TransfinitePrgmtcs.pdf

Chromebook with Chrubuntu might work

Yeah it's partly a byproduct of some schools being slow to change, which is partly from wanting tight centralized control (like at a business), partly from budget cuts, and partly from just being slow to learn new things and not wanting to have to do more work. Our university still uses Windows XP, just like at some businesses. Our students were still in elementary school when XP was released. And we still use Blackboard since before even XP was released. They don't support Apple or Google stuff at all, even when it's completely free (like Google Apps for Education).

e-cigarettes replace the habits. I used to smoke in the car. It was a stupid habit. Things like patches wouldn't help with that because I couldn't avoid being in the car.

It's not so much healthy, but dramatically less unhealthy. I think it's referred to as harm reduction, if you want to google that for more info.

It's like using stevia or splenda instead of sugar in your coffee or tea. In that case, you're still going to crave sugar. In the e-cigarette case though, you'll crave e-cigarettes perhaps instead of real cigarettes. I tried a real cigarette again after two months of using an e-cigarette and it tasted awful, burned my mouth.

I second that.

Try e-cigarettes, etc. to replace the cigarettes. Exercise also gives a cognitive boost. Get an exercise bike (or real bike) and do 5-15 minutes of interval training on it. Cut down on the sugar - coffee instead of soda, nuts instead of candy bars or donuts, etc.