Tag Archives: education

Restricted Access

By Mack D. Male ·

restricted access I’m rarely on the University of Alberta campus anymore, so I only heard about the SU’s Restricted Access campaign fairly recently. The main event takes place tomorrow morning at 7 AM, roughly an hour before the U of A Board of Governors’ meeting. Students will be gathering to send a message that access to education is an issue:

The cost of a full educational experience is rapidly increasing. Mounting financial burdens are preventing a growing number of hard-working, qualified students from completing or even starting their university education. Join the Restricted Access movement and protect the right to an education that all qualified students have earned.

If ratified at the meeting, tuition will increase 4.1% next year while residence rent rates will increase 8%. Dave Cournoyer, who may be live-blogging the meeting tomorrow, says that “residence rates at the U of A will have increased by $220 per month since 2006” when the increase is approved tomorrow. That’s quite a bit!

It sounds familiar. I remember all the students protesting tuition increases back when I attended the university. And yet tuition always seemed to go up anyway. The university isn’t immune to the current financial crisis either. By March, it is estimated that the U of A’s endowments will have declined by nearly $100 million.

The increases don’t affect me directly anymore, but I still find the issue important. I’m one of many former students trying to repay student loans to the federal government:

Investments in post-secondary education must be part of the federal government’s economic recovery plan, and it must help relieve massive student debt, which on Wednesday hit $13 billion, according to the Canadian Federation of Students.

According to CFS estimates, the average student graduates with a total debt load of $25,000 to $28,000. Big numbers, indeed.

Back to the campaign. The Students’ Union has distributed red scarves and handbills to students, hung posters, and manned information booths. They’ve also made use of social media tools to help spread the word. There are over 1900 members in the Restricted Access Facebook group, and nearly 400 have confirmed attendance at tomorrow morning’s event. The SU recently created a Twitter account, and they’ve been regularly updating their blog. The website also has a form that makes it easy to send letters to MLAs. Good stuff.

As this Gateway article notes, the campaign provides a platform for future discussions:

“This project is truly broader and deeper than the yearly tuition and rent increase debates that have happened. Access is a long-term project and it’s going to take a long-term push from a lot of students to make real, substantive, systematic changes,” [SU President Janelle Morin] explained.

They’re off to a good start, I think.

If you’re a student looking to participate tomorrow, meet at the tent in Celebration Plaza (outside the Admin building on the bus loop) at 7 AM for free hot chocolate and donuts, and don’t forget to wear your red scarf!

Talk Sex with Sue Johanson in Edmonton

By Mack D. Male ·

sue johanson Last night Sharon and I went to see Sue Johanson speak at the University of Alberta. She was brought to Edmonton by the Students’ Union as part of their Revolutionary Speakers’ Series. We decided to eat at SUB before the event, to ensure we had plenty of time. It’s a good thing we did, because the line was probably 100 people deep over an hour before it was set to start! I guess we shouldn’t have been that surprised – I’m sure everyone has seen her show at least once!

Sue spent most of the two hours lecturing. Unlike most of the lectures I attended during my time at the U of A however, I wasn’t bored to tears. Quite the opposite in fact – Sue is really funny! She manages to bring all the humor from her show onto the stage. And it wasn’t so much a lecture as a story. Sue essentially told us the story of how we grew up without learning about sex. She’s fond of saying, “there’s so much to learn!”

Some highlights:

  • She wasn’t afraid to act out the things she was talking about – very entertaining!
  • As expected she was very honest about everything. I particularly liked that she admitted that talking to her own kids about sex was incredibly difficult!
  • Sue said that most girls are told “nice girls don’t do that” when they are little, and that’s the main reason they don’t learn about sex and their own bodies as well as boys do. She repeated that quote many times as much of what she talked about related more to females than to males.
  • Another expression Sue repeated over and over was “but nobody told you that” or “we never told you that”. Really good for dramatic effect! She’s kind of like a motivational speaker in that regard.
  • Sue’s favorite sex toy is “the bullet” – she shared a bunch of them and listed the pros and cons of each.
  • She talked about fantasizing and said she likes Richard Gere and firemen!
  • By popular request, she demonstrated how to use a condom at the end of the event.

She didn’t talk much about homosexuality, only making reference to it once or twice. Though she did save time before the question period to express her concerns about anal sex (not specific to homosexuality of course). She called it “high risk” behavior and encouraged everyone to get properly informed before making a decision. That was the only topic that she got a little preachy about.

Sharon remarked that the talk wasn’t quite what she was expecting. Instead of a lecture, she anticipated something more like Sue’s show on TV (more question and answer). That would indeed have been entertaining, and it would have been good to have more time for questions. Still, I thought Sue did a great job of making everyone laugh while learning.

I thoroughly enjoyed the talk and I’m glad I went. If I could do yesterday over again however, I think I would have stayed home to watch the election results. It was pretty cool when someone yelled out “Obama won!” and the entire Horowitz Theatre erupted into applause and cheers, but I still feel like I missed something (though I was constantly refreshing the NYTimes on my iPod).

At least I’ll never forget where I was – listening to Sue Johanson talk about sex toys!

UPDATE: There’s an article on the event in the latest issue of The Gateway.

Green and Gold Day

By Mack D. Male ·

ualberta 100 years Today marks the 100th anniversary of the first day of classes at the University of Alberta. To celebrate, September 23rd, 2008 has been declared “Green and Gold Day” by the City of Edmonton and the U of A. And last Thursday and Friday the City turned on the waterfall on the High Level Bridge, lit in green and gold. You can see some photos I took of the waterfall here, and a video too.

Unfortunately, my first day of classes at the University of Alberta predates my blog (and Twitter), so I don’t have a record of it. Nor do I really remember what my first day was like back in the fall of 2001. I remember briefly attending Orientation and leaving early to hang out with friends. I spent a lot of time in the basement of CAB (Central Academic Building) and at the PowerPlant (the campus bar) in my first two years. I didn’t get very involved with any clubs or groups or anything though I did always vote in the Students’ Union elections. If I could do it again, I think might have gotten more involved. For example, I did have one article published in The Gateway, and I wish I had submitted more (surely you noticed I like to write! heh).

As for academics – I don’t miss any of that. The thrill of attending university-level classes wore off very quickly! I was an average student, and I was eager to simply graduate and move on. That’s probably why it seems like it has been a lot longer than just over a year since I finally graduated.

Still, I feel very lucky to have been a part of the University of Alberta’s first 100 years. I always say that I have no interest in going back to school, but as the saying goes, never say never!

To learn more about the University of Alberta’s Centenary celebrations, visit the website at http://www.100years.ualberta.ca.

Earth Hour: Lightcrime

By Mack D. Male ·

lightcrime I thought I was done with Earth Hour-related posts, but then I came across this article at the National Post while reading Larry’s blog. You really need to give it a read, but here’s a bit of a teaser:

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four invoked the nightmare of “thoughtcrime,” by which dictators sought to erase even the possibility of challenge to their rule. His Thought Police were based very much on the techniques actually used by the Soviets. They sought by surveillance and other methods to root out any trace of “unorthodoxy.”

On Saturday night, the awful possibility of “lightcrime” appeared on the deliberately dimmed horizon. Who among those who knew about Earth Hour did not feel an internal compulsion to turn down the lights for fear of public disapprobation, even if they believed that the whole thing was either a pointless or subversive stunt?

Author Peter Foster explains the metaphor further, and finishes by sharing this incredibly sad comment from a 12-year-old in Toronto:

“Earth Hour is important to me because my kids and grandkids will be living on this Earth,” declared Morgan Baskin, aged 12, at an event at Holy Trinity Church in downtown Toronto. “I don’t want my kids to be around for the end of the Earth.”

Like Peter says, this is child abuse. Instead of being taught to learn about the environment, to read and to think, children are being taught that unless you turn your lights off for an hour along with everyone else, the world is going to end.

Read: Lightcrime

U of A forces students to use ancient software

By Mack D. Male ·

frontpage I’ve written many times before about my disappointment with the state of technology education at the University of Alberta, most recently here. My biggest complaint has usually been that they teach outdated or otherwise useless concepts in Computing Sciences and other fields, but the tools and technologies they choose and use are often just as bad (and these influence the concepts).

Here’s an example from my friend Eric, who is nearly finished his MIS degree at the School of Business:

Our latest project requires us to develop a single web page using Microsoft FrontPage that includes an Access database we created last week. This is worth 10% of our course mark.

Microsoft discontinued FrontPage in 2006, two years ago.

Technically the product was discontinued in 2006, but the last release was actually back in 2003. Yes, nearly five years ago.

I remember FrontPage with a very tiny amount of fondness. It was the first web page building tool I ever used, back when I was in junior high. It was so fun! Then I got a little older, a little smarter, and realized that FrontPage was absolute crap. Microsoft did too, and decided they’d give up on the application that they had originally purchased for about $130 million. It has since been replaced with SharePoint Designer and Expression Web.

Eric asked his professors why they are being forced to use FrontPage, and was told that the university has a contract for support until the end of the semester.

This is completely unacceptable. Students are being taught to use a tool they’ll never use in the real world. A tool that hinders development more than it helps (due to some very strange functionality, such as not keeping code and design views in sync). A tool that generates such terrible, invalid HTML that Microsoft felt it was better to start over.

That point about standards is particularly important, IMHO. By using FrontPage, the U of A is essentially teaching students that generating crappy code is okay. The garbage that FrontPage generates (and that IE used to support) is part of the reason for this mess. Microsoft has decided recently that IE8 will interpret pages in the most standards compliant way it can, a welcome change (even if it doesn’t completely pan out).

Eric finishes with:

You wouldn’t pay $468.60 for a math course using slide rules, so why should we pay to use outdated software?

It’s a good point, but more important than the tool is the concept. You wouldn’t pay $468.60 for an accounting course that taught you how to create non-standard balance sheets, so why should you pay for a technology course that teaches you to create non-standard web pages?

Read: Soliciting Fame

Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope

By Mack D. Male ·

wwtelescope If you spend any time in the blogosphere, you probably heard about Robert Scoble’s sob session on Valentine’s Day. He said that he was shown a project at Microsoft Research that was so world-changing it brought tears to his eyes. Scoble said he couldn’t tell anyone what it was until February 27th, and he kept that promise. Today he explained:

Lots of people are asking me questions about what made me cry at Microsoft a few weeks ago.

If I told you “a telescope” you’d make fun of me, right? Tell me I’m lame and that I don’t deserve to be a geek and that I should run away and join the circus, right?

Well, that’s what I saw.

The project is called the WorldWide Telescope. Here’s how it is described on the official website:

The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a rich visualization environment that functions as a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from the best ground- and space telescopes to enable seamless, guided explorations of the universe. WorldWide Telescope, created with Microsoft®’s high-performance Visual Experience Engine™, enables seamless panning and zooming across the night sky blending terabytes of images, data, and stories from multiple sources over the Internet into a media-rich, immersive experience.

It does sound like a pretty cool project for astronomy, and like Scoble says, it could have a really huge impact on education and the way we view and understand our place in the universe. Scoble will have a video up on Monday showing it off, and it should be officially available sometime this spring.

Read: Scobleizer

DreamSpark: Free developer tools for students from Microsoft

By Mack D. Male ·

software DreamSpark is an awesome new program for students that Microsoft announced today. I wish they offered something like this while I was still a student. Heck, this might even be enough to sway some folks into going back to school for a semester or two! Here’s the description from Channel 8:

For once, something that sounds too good to be true really is this good and really is true. Starting today (or soon in some areas), students worldwide will be able to download our professional development and design tools for free! It’s called DreamSpark and it is upon us.

Nathan Weinberg sums it up nicely:

We’re talking over $2,000 in free software, just for being a college student. We’re talking a huge gift to students, letting classes teach this stuff without software costs, lettings students develop software without these costs, and letting any student pick up some stuff to play around with without a monetary commitment.

It’s important to stress that these are the professional versions of the software. You get Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition and Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition, for instance. You could quite conceivably start a company while in school using Microsoft technologies and not pay a cent.

Pretty darn cool!

The program is currently available in eleven countries: Belgium, China, Finland, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States. I suspect the only reason China is on that list is because so many people there get pirated versions anyway.

Microsoft has always been really proactive about courting students. Other programs include Academic Alliance, Microsoft Student Partners, and the Imagine Cup.

Read: Channel 8 (includes a video introduction with Bill Gates)

Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet

By Mack D. Male ·

International Week 2008 Tonight I attended a lecture as part of International Week 2008 on campus at the University of Alberta. The speaker was Jeffrey Sachs, who is probably best known as the Director of the UN Millennium Project. Unfortunately he was called away to a special meeting in Africa with Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and so he sent a pre-recorded video message instead.

His talk was very high-level and lacking in specifics. I suppose the idea is that you attend the lecture to whet your appetite, then you buy his new book (which, btw, he mentioned at least a half dozen times). All joking aside, I probably will buy it. I read his book The End of Poverty and thoroughly enjoyed it. I think his message is really important, and he’s great at delivering it.

Because Sachs could not attend, the organizers invited two other guests to make remarks and answer questions. One was Andrew Nikiforuk, a Calgary-based journalist, and the other was Dr. Rick Hyndman, Senior Policy Advisor for the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.

Nikiforuk presented after the Sachs video, and he delivered a great presentation with just some notes to refer to. Hyndman presented last, and he had a laptop with some PPT slides. There must be a law somewhere that if you’ve got two presenters and one uses slides, the person with the slides invariably has the crappier presentation! It just doesn’t flow as well, nor does it sound as convincing.

That said, Hyndman more than redeemed himself in the Q&A session, during which he was pretty much attacked. One guy who lined up to ask a question was wearing a bright green t-shirt with "Greenpeace" emblazoned on the front – how would you expect him to treat a representative of the oil companies!

The event tonight wasn’t long enough to delve into any details, but it definitely was an opportunity to think about some of the issues that Sachs is so passionate about.

Visit the U of A’s International Week 2008 website for more information.

Tuition is not the problem, books are!

By Mack D. Male ·

Post Image On Friday, the Board of Governors at the University of Alberta approved a 4.6% increase in tuition fees. That translates to an extra $215.55 for general arts and science students. Of course the decision made the local news and predictably the segments focused on the extra burden this places on students.

But more than teaching or deferred maintenance, it was the question of affordability that concerned Students’ Union President Michael Janz.

Janz stressed that every time fees are increased, the debt loads that students incur go up, as do the chances that someone will not apply to the U of A because they see it as financially unfeasible.

I mean, what do you expect the SU President to say? Of course he’s got to side with students on the issue, that’s his job.

I think the focus should not be on tuition, however. Looking back on my time at the university, I think the problem are textbooks. Sure tuition is expensive and I am repaying student loans now, but it was textbooks that were the real killer.

In my last two years, I avoided purchasing textbooks whenever possible. The idea of spending $175 for a 150 page book just drove me nuts. Especially since most of the content in the books can be found elsewhere. The other thing that sucks is when a professor requires the latest edition of a textbook, meaning students cannot purchase the less expensive old editions.

There’s no reason to force students to purchase ridiculously expensive textbooks. Hell, there’s pretty much no reason to have physical textbooks at all! Just offer digital versions instead. Or incorporate free materials.

I think getting rid of the expensive textbooks would help students far more than trying to prevent tuition increases.

Read: The Gateway

Six months with the day job – no thanks to school

By Mack D. Male ·

Post Image Today marks six months of me working at Questionmark. I started there in July as a .NET developer, and so far I’m really enjoying it. The work is interesting, and the people are great. After focusing mostly on Paramagnus for the last couple years, I was kinda worried that the transition would be painful, but it hasn’t been.

Of course, transition may not be the best word as I’m still working on Paramagnus too (along with Dickson). Not as much as I used to, obviously, but Questionmark has been very accommodating thus far. The first month or two was a bit difficult, but I have more of a routine now, so that’s good. The vacation last month was a nice break from everything as well.

I think part of the reason that doing both Paramagnus and Questionmark isn’t impossible is that I’ve never worked solely on Paramagnus. Until April of 2007, I was still a full-time university student! And all jokes about skipping class aside, it still required a fair bit of time and effort. So in a lot of ways I have just replaced school with the Questionmark job.

Those of you who know me well know that I do not look back on my time at the University of Alberta with much fondness. I really enjoyed the Economics courses I took and a few of my options were pretty interesting too. My computing sciences classes, on the other hand, were largely a waste of time. I always felt that the things we were learning about were entirely irrelevant! It still bugs me, because I love technology and I love software development but I absolutely hated most of the CS courses I had to take.

I’ve always wondered if any of the CS stuff I learned would be useful in a real job. None of it was at Paramagnus (except maybe the two database courses), but I don’t think that should really count, because I have complete control over our development and how it works. Questionmark should count though, right?

I can honestly say that if I had to rely on the things I learned in computing sciences for my job at Questionmark, I’d be completely screwed.

Instead of a Bachelor’s degree in Computing Sciences, I should have gotten the BFA in Software Development, as described at Joel on Software:

When I said BFA, Bachelor of Fine Arts, I meant it: software development is an art, and the existing Computer Science education, where you’re expected to learn a few things about NP completeness and Quicksort is singularly inadequate to training students how to develop software.

Imagine instead an undergraduate curriculum that consists of 1/3 liberal arts, and 2/3 software development work. The teachers are experienced software developers from industry. The studio operates like a software company. You might be able to major in Game Development and work on a significant game title, for example, and that’s how you spend most of your time, just like a film student spends a lot of time actually making films and the dance students spend most of their time dancing.

That sounds like it might have been useful! Better yet, screw university and just start a company. I mean it – I have learned so much from Paramagnus. I can’t imagine where I’d be had I not started the company. I certainly wouldn’t have a job at Questionmark.

Is it my fault for going to the University of Alberta instead of NAIT? No, I don’t think so. The U of A is supposed to give you the best education possible, but that shouldn’t come at the expense of preparing you for the real world. Will I look back twenty years from now and find value in the CS courses I took? Never say never, but I seriously doubt it. The tech industry changes too quickly.

I think the current education model for software development is horribly flawed. Very few people want to be computer scientists, charged with proving theorems and all that other crap. I think a lot of people want to learn how to develop software, from start to finish. I laughed at first, but I think the BFA in Software Development idea is actually quite good. It could totally work!

If I’m ever in a position to make it happen, I absolutely will try.