The Becker Blog

When advertisers realize how the web is different from print…

(thanks Todd Scott MacIsaac for posting this)

http://producten.hema.nl/

Food for the Soul

That explains a lot. But, how much of it is useful (i.e. productive) and how much is mindless chasing of lights? And what does this say about people who seem to have little or no interest in seeking? AND how do we use this to help motivate people when we are teaching?

Interesting article.

Seeking

How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting. And why that’s dangerous.

By Emily YoffePosted Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2009, at 5:40 PM ET

Saw this on the New York Times (Opinion) today:

http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/education-degrees-and-teachers-pay/?8ty&emc=ty

Do Teachers Need Education Degrees?

By The Editors

Robert Stolarik for The New York Times

In a Room for Debate forum in June on the value of liberal arts master’s degrees, one group of readers — teachers and education administrators — generally agreed a higher degree was well worth the investment. They pointed out that pay and promotion in public schools were tied to the accumulation of such credentials and credits, specifically from colleges of education.

But current teacher training has a large chorus of critics, including prominent professors in education schools themselves. For example, the director of teacher education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Katherine Merseth, told a conference in March that of the nation’s 1,300 graduate teacher training programs, only about 100 were doing a competent job and “the others could be shut down tomorrow.” And Obama administration officials support a shift away from using master’s degrees for pay raises, and a shift toward compensating teachers based on children’s performance.

Should the public schools reduce the weight they give to education school credentials in pay and promotion decisions? Is this happening already, and, if so, what is replacing the traditional system for compensating teachers?

Here are my initial thoughts:

Read the rest of this entry »

Just heard on Mark Guzdial’s blog that “Georgia Tech’s College of Computing is now considering a proposal to remove Smalltalk from the required curriculum in favor of C++.”

This is another nail in the coffin of CS.

There is great value to learning many languages, not the least of which is that those who do come to understand the concept of ‘language’ and ‘programming’ better than anyone who only knows one language ever can. This makes them better programmers and better problem solvers.

There are those who feel CS is a dying discipline, and the more that CD departments contract in their view of what they should be doing, the more likely it is to come true.

Interesting and creative people are leaving CS departments, leaving behind …. can you guess? Theoreticians, mathematicians, and academic software engineers who haven’t written a real program, well, ever. These are the kind who say we shouldn’t be teaching about and with games, because “It gives the wrong impression.” (I actually heard these words from influential members of my former department). I can tell what impression it gives if you do things like games: THAT YOU ARE INTERESTING.

I once gave an assignment to a 3rd year CS class that involved building a client side search engine. The 1st step involved getting a complete list of file names and creating a format that would retain the names and directory structures in as small a space as possible.
They could use what ever language they wanted to. They had all learned C/C++ in 1st & second year.
Almost all chose to write a 2000+ line C++ program, over learning how to write the 20 lines of SED and Unix that would do the same thing, only better.

That’s what happens when they only learn one language.

CS at the university level is not about job training.