Tag: education

Earth Hour: Lightcrime

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

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 My biggest complaint has usually been that they teach outdated or otherwise useless concepts in Computing Sciences and other fields, but the tools and technologies they choose and use are often just as bad (and these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

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

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

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!

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

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.

Why teach cursive handwriting? A response

Post ImageBack in April I wondered why we still teach cursive handwriting in elementary school. The post generated lots of discussion at the time, and it definitely gave me much to think about. On Friday, I started thinking about it again after receiving a response via email from a reader known only as "The Bluebell Wood." It’s obvious a lot of thought was put into it, so I asked for permission to publish the response and received it. Here it is:

Being able to write a legible and pleasant longhand is an essential part of rational life. “Word Processing” (an abominable phrase) is no substitute. Marshall McLuhan wrote The Medium is the Message and there is a lot of truth in that. The flow of a pen in the hand over paper while composing sentences is a completely different experience from keyboarding and looking at a screen; physically, and in the tools used, and in the mind as well. There is an effect on the content of what is written; in the same way that seasoned craftsmen in the guilds of Renaissance Italy would say, “It is the trade entering his body” when an apprentice bruised his thumb or some such hurt while learning the use of his tools. Writing with ink on paper is an act by which our peerless English language enters us – through hand, eye, posture, and senses, into our thoughts, affecting the sentence structure and choice of words. Forming well-made letters with the hand while forming thoughts in the mind is not the same as tapping little plastic squares while mechanical fonts appear on a screen and the cursor blinks like a tap that won’t stop dripping.

The practice of handwriting also infuses many desirable character qualities. Regard for the reader in the striving for maximum legibility is foremost; the training and development of the aesthetic sense in the letters, spacing, and overall texture; discrimination in avoiding poor proportions; rectitude in avoiding excessive flourishes; in general the application of what Edward Johnston called “sweet reason” in his classic Writing, Illuminating & Lettering of 1906.

This applies to the slant as well, which ideally is not more than about ten degrees from the vertical.

The clarity and precision needed for good legibility schools us in our thoughts and the sentences which incarnate them.

Why would anyone use cursive handwriting in this digital age? The answers are many: pleasure; rational and aesthetic maturity; participation in a historical stream reaching far, to the very dawn of man; its warmth in personal letters; to improve our thinking; and, as one of your own respondents has commented, “Just because everything can be done by computer doesn’t mean that it should be.” (shermie, May 2/07) (Emphasis added). It is premature to call this a digital “age”; it is barely three decades old, and the common use of fonts and p.c.s has been with us for less than one on hundredths of the ages in which cursive writing has been used, in various alphabets and languages.

The very typeset from which the font in which the question was posed is founded on the Humanist Bookhand and its Italic derivatives, which has been in continuous use for six hundred years, and is still vigorous. It is not possible to participate in the “Great Conversation” without learning cursive handwriting and using it well. In postulating that it no longer be taught, one finds oneself in the position of the man sawing off the limb of the great oak on which he himself resides. It is of the utmost importance to retain this skill. We owe it to children and youth to pass on this priceless heritage.

IT IS NOT OURS TO WITHOLD.

A cursive script was used 3,500 years ago in Egypt, where the priests had a hieratic script with the same relationship to hieroglyphics as our longhand has to printing. Cursive Hebrew dates back to Moses (c. 1400 B.C.) and there are also examples from the times of Jeremiah and Jeroboam II (c. 760 – 570 B.C.).

The pleasure of handwriting has always been with us and it is not going to go away. It represents the distillation of human effort to record images of the mind and heart.

It’s a very good response, I think. The font-face I use on this blog is Lucida Sans Unicode, in case anyone was wondering.

Other universities should follow Stanford's example

I was less than impressed with most of the Computing Sciences courses I took during my degree at the University of Alberta. I found the majority of the courses either too boring or too out-of-date. Or quite often both.

Maybe the image I had in my head about what university would be like was just plain wrong. I always thought that universities were on the cutting edge, with lots of cool stuff happening. I thought I’d be exposed to some really interesting research, like that of Jonathan Schaeffer who worked on Deep Blue and teaches at the U of A. Sadly, my classes never ever reflected that image.

Today I was reading some blogs, and came across this article that says Stanford University is going to be offering a course this fall called Creating Engaging Web Applications Using Metrics and Learning on Facebook. I’m very interested and very jealous:

Students will build applications for Facebook, then gather and analyze detailed information about how Facebook users actually use them. Students will focus on using detailed numerical measurements to guide software iterations, just like developers do on thousands of existing Facebook applications.

They’ll be graded based on how many Facebook users they can get actively using their applications.

I wish I had been able to take classes like that when I was in university.

It’s important to learn about hard technology problems, such as searching, but I think it’s equally important to study the technology that people use every day, like Facebook. Kudos to the CS faculty at Stanford for taking a chance on Facebook and venturing into the relatively new area of Human Computer Interaction.

Read: VentureBeat

Edmonton's local media should embrace the web

Post ImageEarlier this evening I attended a panel event called Edmonton’s Image in the Media: A Fresh Perspective. The event was put on by Next Gen Edmonton, and took place at City Hall. I find myself becoming more and more interested in the Next Gen project, so I decided to check out the event. The panelists included: Bridget Ryan from CityTV, Mari Sasano from the Edmonton Journal, Jason Manning from Sonic FM, and Ted Kerr who is a freelance writer/photographer. Allan Bolstad from MacEwan moderated.

The subtitle was the only place a “fresh perspective” could be found at this event. I went in hoping for some great insight from these professionals, and instead I heard a bunch of mainstream media representatives who simply don’t get it. I twittered my disappointment – not that I’d expect any of the panelists to have a clue as to what Twitter is. I completely understand that Twitter is a fairly niche product at the moment, but the panelists talked about email like it was a brand new invention. It took over 45 minutes before anyone mentioned the web – Ted talked about blogs and websites in response to an audience question.

Some of the questions the panel was supposed to explore incuded: Is Edmonton portrayed fairly in the media? How could we improve Edmonton’s image to the outside world? Do Edmontonians themselves need to be educated about their city? What could the media do to help?

I took some notes during the event; here are my thoughts:

  • Jason loves Edmonton but apparently isn’t capable of answering a question without referencing “the music scene.”
  • Bridget thinks the media is doing a great job and is afraid to walk downtown alone at night.
  • Mari wants you to do her job for her – send her information about your events! She also was extremely annoying to listen to.
  • Ted claims his “online reading capacity” is no more than a single page.

Event organizer Daniel Eggert asked the last question, and it was about what kinds of media the “next generation” uses and trusts. He explained he was thinking about the web – “blogs, YouTube, Wikipedia, and others.” The panelists did an excellent job of not answering his question. Such a waste.

In my opinion, the biggest problem with Edmonton’s image in the media is that Edmontonians themselves don’t know enough about the city. How many Edmontonians, for example, know that Edmonton is the cultural capital of Canada? Probably not very many. I think the only way to solve this problem is through the web. Television and radio are great, but audiences are slowly disappearing, and the “next generation” spends far more time online. Newspapers are considered archaic by myself and many others my age (note to newspaper companies: move the content online, ditch the horrible format).

The local media and the city itself both need to embrace the web – they simply aren’t doing their jobs if they don’t. The Journal launched blogs a couple months ago and dropped the pay-wall, but there is lots of room for improvement. The City of Edmonton website contains lots of information but is a complete mess. In addition to fixing what’s already there, why not explore the unknown? Here are a few ideas:

  • Create a City of Edmonton sponsored group on Facebook and use it to create events. There are, after all, over 140,000 Edmontonians on Facebook.
  • Even better – endeavour to make one de-facto online event calendar.
  • Build a local news aggregation site – kind of like TechMeme for tech.
  • Learn how to use RSS effectively to monitor what’s going on in the city.
  • Make it easier for citizens to submit photos, videos, and other content all using the web.

To be fair, online local news and resources are a big problem everywhere (except for huge cities like New York). Embracing the web would not only educate Edmontonians and improve our image around the world, it might even make us a leader and trendsetter.

What do you think? I’ll post more on this later after I’ve given it some more thought.