edtechdev

It traces back to cultural and educational issues.

Math has typically been taught devoid of any context or relevance to our everyday lives. Even in college, you just mindlessly plug and chug formulas to get by. Some students don't see the use in it, beyond perhaps the parts needed for basic financial literacy (which many do not have, either).

Better and more engaging and relevant and effective ways to teach math have already been developed, such as Realistic Mathematics Education.

But people actually say things like "I can't do math" in regards to all forms of literacy, I believe. It depends what standards you are mentally comparing yourself to, I guess, such as professional vs. social standards.

"I'm not good with money, or I'm not good with the business stuff" - financial literacy

"I can't write" - as in, I can't write books or novels or easily do other professional writing tasks. Again, there are pedagogical techniques that can help students write more, write better, and have more interest and confidence in writing.

"I don't read" - most folks nowadays don't really read books or novels anymore, what with TV, movies, and the Internet.

"I don't know computers" - how often do we hear that - that's computer literacy. I hear it less and less though nowadays.

To tell you the truth, maybe it will be nice when one day people feel forced to admit "I can't code." Because that would mean that programming and computational literacy is something taught in most schools.

They have over 100 million users, and then of course there is Google Drive, Microsoft Skydrive, etc. I've convinced several non-techie folks to use Dropbox once they realize it replaces the need for flash drives (which of course can get lost). So it's not so much "file synchronization" that was the killer app for some, but rather "accessing and storing/backing up files in the cloud."

There is a widespread misconception that online education is just inherently inferior to learning in a real classroom. The Department of Education did a huge meta-analysis and found this was not the case - in face online education is a little better than face to face. Blended and hybrid learning was better than either online or face to face alone. http://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/tech/evidence-based-practic...

We're talking about actual learning, not how well we liked the learning (the two are inversely correlated). An online video for example you can pause, rewind, fast forward, compared to a face to face lecture in which the speaker is likely going too fast or too slow for many.

That said, are there certain types of topics or certain types of students which are better taught face to face? Sure. Remedial courses require much more learner support, and really one-on-one tutoring. Other courses are inherently social or inherently difficult to teach online. Are you going to hire a pilot or a firefighter that only trained online? Of course not, but I would hire a pilot or firefighter who had hundreds of hours of practice with difficult scenarios in a simulator over one who had only learned in a face to face context.

"It's pretty hard to argue with the data."

Would be nice if there were any actual data in this article.

They made some poor decisions in the user interface this time that make things more difficult or impossible for average users. Hidden menus, hidden options... I know they can't copy iphone/android's user interface elements because of patents, though. Plus everything is so slow - launching apps, loading web pages, etc. Things that hinder both average and power users include having two desktops, two control panels, two versions of most apps (the metro one usually being very crippled), and having no start button in the windows 7-like desktop anymore. Add onto all that the lack of apps, the un-user-friendly behavior, like shutting down without asking, including while I was trying to record a meeting in onenote - the expensive desktop version, not the free metro version, which doesn't include the ability to add audio anymore. Luckily I was also recording it on my android phone - had no problem, shared the audio file to dropbox and emailed the link to others. Can't do any of that in Windows 8, at least no where near as easily anymore.

Dart is great and I like how they are focusing on making it fast and creating a special VM for it (dartium, although it compiles to javascript, too). It's tempting to target a compiler to generate dart code, too, instead of javascript. But there is one deal breaker for me - dart can't compile locally in the browser (even a dartium one). It requires a server or else compiling off-line (same issue with Closure Compiler, too). You can't code a dart app on a chromebook, for example (unless you use remote desktop or install ubuntu on it). The future to me is doing all development work in the browser, and only connecting to the server for the server components or version control, like with c9.io and other browser-based IDEs. Even Eclipse has a browser-based version now - Orion.

It's not a huge deal - there are over a hundred alternative languages that compile to javascript out there now, many of which do support compiling in the browser: https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/wiki/List-of-lang...

This would be very popular indeed if a WYSIWYG editor was used instead of a markup language.

There has been study after study showing how the wiki markup syntax is a hurdle to participation on wikipedia, to the point where wikipedia is now finally, after 12 years, working on a wysiwyg editor: http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/21/jimmy-wales-on-new-editing-...

There are so many free and open source wysiwyg editors that can be easily plugged into a site: aloha, tinymce, ckeditor, etc.

I don't mind it being posted, but I am surprised there haven't been any other comments that try to tie it back to hackernews related topics.

Every professional field seems to have its share of delusions and resists data to the contrary - programming, academia, technology, entrepreneurship, etc. Some delusions cause more damage than others. Some are harder to refute with data. Baseball scouts had their own beliefs about evaluating players, and the sabermetrics stuff (along with the results of teams like the A's that used it) at least showed them how they could improve things with more data.

I'd give examples of delusions vs. data related to hackernews topics, but ah, no thanks, because hackernews is more like reddit and every other large scale public forum than you think.

that slowmo.js that I think was mentioned here recently inserts a timer that checks how long a loop is running https://github.com/toolness/slowmo-js

An old tool I used would insert a check at the end of each loop for if the escape key was being pressed and exit

This may seem tangentially on-topic, but I'd really recommend faculty at universities be required to go through some basic computer (and Internet) literacy courses. Some faculty I've worked with can barely check their email, and most universities already require students to show basic computer proficiency.

Yeah whenever people would recommend Raphael.js, I'd find out they didn't even realize that android < 3.0 didn't even support SVG. Not to mention drawing to canvas is faster than SVG. At least there are plenty of canvas alternatives like paper.js

You should be happy, once I set up multiple users on my nexus 7, I never saw it again :)

A college degree is essentially used by some employers as just a proxy for an IQ test.

And college (and all schooling here in the U.S.) likely does have a disparate impact, but it is not the same as jobs. Schools don't hire students. We have universal education at least for K-12, and colleges have scholarships and the like to enroll more minority and lower-income students.

"More important, not only do students enter college with unequal demonstrated abilities, but those inequalities tend to persist—or, in the case of African-American students relative to white students, increase—while they are enrolled in higher education." http://chronicle.com/article/Are-Undergraduates-Actually/125...

The problem with college is that they aren't doing a good job at actually educating students (see the above article about the book Academically Adrift). Faculty at most colleges, for example, are never even trained in how to effectively teach - they lecture. Research has shown that engineering students in traditional lecture courses are twice as likely to leave engineering and three times as likely to drop out of college compared with students taught using active learning methods. Active learning also results in twice as much learning as lecture methods. (http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ost...)

And the problems at the K-12 levels include things like no universal pre-school, which could decrease inequity, and the lack of learning and high number of dropouts in high school.

Even if conservative criticisms of 'disparate impact' are right (http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-dead-...), there is still the moral problem of inequality. Do we just accept racial/income differences as unchangeable or inherent to humans, or do we actively try to improve the situation.

You can do all that in the browser or via remote desktop to a server or desktop. Eclipse Orion works in the browser (as do several other IDEs such as cloud9). Office works in the browser (but I prefer Google Docs).

For simple image editing, I just use pixlr.com. If I really needed advanced features from photoshop (or gimp), I can A) remote connect to a desktop or B) boot to ubuntu from a flash drive.

If you need Visual Studio and don't have access to a desktop computer you can remote connect to, then yes, don't buy a chromebook.

Or of course if you are developing native iphone/ipad apps (i.e., not phonegap, etc.) and don't have access to a mac computer, then yes, of course, get a macbook instead of a chromebook.

It's still a bit surprising that types were never (and still haven't been) added to javascript, as proposed for javascript 2.0 back in 1999: http://web.archive.org/web/20000817085058/http://www.mozilla...

Now we have Google's Dart & Closure compilers, Microsoft's TypeScript, and Mozilla's asm, all of which essentially add types back to javascript, not to mention about two dozen other statically typed javascript compilers: https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/wiki/List-of-lang...

If types were approved 13 years ago, javascript apps could have been made to run much faster (fast enough for games even), perhaps negating a need for 'native' mobile apps that we have today, and either hastening the demise or spurring the optimization of competitors like Flash and Java and .NET/Silverlight.

(I'm already aware of arguments against static typing, and against having a VM in the browser or treating javascript like one.)

Also, there is choice. There is the Asus Transformer Book coming out, which is perhaps even more powerful (i7) and has a dockable keyboard with extra battery. Or if you want something not as powerful but lighter weight, without a noisy fan, and much better battery life, there is the Asus Vivotab TF810C out now, or the Samsung ATIV Smart PC, although they have the clovertrail atom processor which looks like may not allow installing Linux.

In cases where I've seen sites switch from Drupal to a custom-built ruby solution, the end result had less features (or were missing crucial features and user interface details that are trivial to enable in drupal), and they had more problems and bugs (and I would guess, have more security issues). Also, some of the reasons I saw posted for switching are not true, at least not anymore. For example, there are tools that allow for version control and collaborative development on drupal sites now.

examples: p2pu, mozilla drumbeat, cloudworks http://cloudworks.ac.uk/ which were all originally drupal sites

On cloudworks, it forgets that I'm logged in everytime now. And it can't link together and display connected posts and people as easily as you can in Drupal, it can't email you updates and activity you've subscribed to, the site isn't mobile friendly (and think how easy it is to convert a site to be mobile friendly now in drupal & wordpress), the links are ugly and not seo or user friendly, etc. The site went down several times last month.

"Perl5 is actually extremely readable"

@!&?

For comparison, Windows uses up about 20 gigs, as does OS X on a Macbook Air with SSD drive. The difference is windows also has a) recovery partition b) hibernate file c) the typical crapware that comes with every windows computer

This has got to be one of Marco's finest trolls so far this year

Well we know there are hundreds of millions of people who think a laptop is not portable enough anymore - look at all the ipad and android tablet sales.

They just want something that's as portable as an ipad, but can run windows software like Office, Photoshop, etc. These windows tablets also mostly have active Wacom digitizer screens for real stylus support, and include Microsoft OneNote, which is a full-featured note taking program that is nice for students. This has been the kicker, we want the tablet form factor, but we want to use productivity tools (which mostly depend on having a mouse, keyboard, and/or stylus).

Unfortunately, the windows tablets are overpriced, and lower cost Windows RT tablets can't run standard Windows software, and the more powerful tablets like Surface Pro with an i5/i7 processor need a noisy and hot fan, AND the design of Windows 8 is confusing to virtually everyone who is familiar with Windows 7 or older.

My ideal would be a tablet with detachable keyboard like an Asus Transformer but that can run Ubuntu (actually, you can install Ubuntu on an Asus Transformer, but it is too slow). The Asus Vivotab TF810C has the clovertrail processor which apparently isn't going to support linux, and the Asus Transformer Book is a heavier beast with a fan due to the i7 processor.

That is a much better article.

I try to think of writing as more like design or engineering, not (just) an art or skill.

No one would say: "coding a compiler is hard, so do it" or "curing alzheimhers is hard, so do it" or "teaching is hard, so do it"

Like in design/engineering, when writing or teaching or other similar activities there will be a lot of trial and error, you need to keep the audience/user/learner in mind, and it is critical to get as much feedback as you can. Not because you suck at it, but because it's essential to effective design of an argument or design of a lesson.

"The computing students, once gender effects had been eliminated, actually came out basically the same as medical and caring types: they had turned out to be normal, warm, caring human beings. It was in fact the physics-based classical engineers who were dead inside."

They also missed a key tidbit from the original news release. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/01/130117084854.ht...

The computing students (who were found to be as empathetic as others once controlling for gender) were taught using problem-based learning techniques - i.e., working in teams on real-world problems and projects. The other group was taught using traditional methods (lecture, rote memorization).

"For computer engineering students, the differences were largely eliminated. The researchers have a theory about why: the computer engineering students are taught with PBL, problem-based learning, which is not the case for the applied physics students. Chato Rasoal believes this can influence the degree of empathy."

Engineering (and math and science) professors need to improve how they teach. Here are 3 simple, research-backed tips for doing so: 1) incorporate everyday examples in your teaching, 2) use tools and techniques to improve student spatial visualizations skills, and 3) talk with and interact with your students (out of class and online): http://www.engageengineering.org/

This (decision by the White House, not your idea) is ridiculous, I'll definitely sign a petition to bring it back down to 25,000. It took an average of 18 days for petitions to reach the 25,000 threshold before it spiked after the election (because of all the secession petitions and Newtown and joke petitions like the Death Star).

Now if a petition doesn't cross the 100,000 threshold in 30 days they ignore it. Assuming the the number of petition signings falls back closer to what it was before the election, it will take an average of about 60 days to reach the 100,000 threshold, meaning most petitions will be ignored.

This work is valuable, but I personally would like to put more focus on improving teaching and learning - helping teachers do better, helping students do better, creating better learning environments and curricula.

For example the budget of this study came out to about $15000 per teacher. What if instead we spent $5000 of that for professional development / training for the teacher, $5000 for a classroom set of chromebooks, and gave the teacher a $5000 raise. That alone would cause some significant improvements, I believe (not that that is ALL that is needed, and there are so many bigger issues that need to be tackled as someone else mentioned, such as poverty and inequity).

But when we talk about "good" teaching and "bad" teaching, we are treating it like it is a simple craft that is mastered or not mastered. Teaching is like engineering, it involves design, and design is about making things better (see this prezi on learning design: http://prezi.com/b44jwdgvs8nl/olds-mooc-introduction/ )

Yeah futile like applescript - who ever used that. Or hypertalk, or wolfram alpha or even the google search engine - nobody can figure out how to use those. Visual basic was so unpopular because it tried to use more english keywords and less symbols. The best way for people to learn programming is with pure non-alphanumeric symbols, just like people speak on Twitter.

Pre-tenure, it all boils down to just being above average on 3 numbers:

* how many journal articles have you published

* how much grant money are you bringing in

* what is the average rating you get from students

Interestingly, there does not appear to be much validity behind those numbers. Higher student ratings, for example, actually negatively correlate with student learning: http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/scarrell/profqual2.pdf http://listserv.aera.net/scripts/wa.exe?A2=AERA-L;6767f510.1...

And the 'impact' of journal articles has been criticized more ways than I can count: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor#Criticisms I've seen blog posts with more impact than average journal articles.

Lastly research grant money - I don't know the research on the impact of grant money - but in many fields, when you have an original, new idea, you usually get a smaller grant, maybe even just a seed grant at first (just like how little money startups usually get), or you do it on your own in grad school. The large grants are for large scale collaborations and scaling up of well-trodden ideas. 55% of the grant money doesn't even go to the research project - it goes to the university's administrative overhead.

One day maybe Apple will invent a device for those few of us who have two hands

It's 4x cheaper ($250 vs. $1000), for one. If you realize you are spending 90% of your time doing work (or not) in the Chrome browser, why not just get a Chromebook then? A lot of people are arguing that Chromebooks are better for school kids, too, than more expensive desktops, laptops, or even ipads.

I have a mac laptop at work, which I only keep around for video editing, but you can even do basic video editing in the browser nowadays, with sites such as WeVideo and Pixorial.

Would be nice to see if this could be converted to javascript to run in the browser, just like markdown. I don't know Haskell myself, but there are javascript ports of the Parsec parser library here: https://github.com/weaver/ReParse http://code.google.com/p/jshaskell/

As well as several Haskell to JavaScript compilers here (Fay, ghcjs, & jshaskell seem to be more popular): https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/wiki/List-of-lang...

If mice are so useful, why weren't steering wheels replaced in the car market?