During one of the first staff-training days, the district superintendent tells us that 10 percent of all high school education will be computer-based by 2014 and rise to 50 percent by 2019, the implication being how close to obsolescence our methods and we ourselves have become. No one ventures to ask what would seem to be the obvious question, which is what sort of high school education Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had and what they might have failed to accomplish without it.
October 1st, 2011 at 3:14PM
The University of Minnesota plans to continute to expand its online programs (and to reduce full-time faculty positions). See “Enhancement of E-Learning Opportunities” at pp. 53-54 of the June 2011 report of the U of M President on Financing The Future. There is a link to the report in section (1) of $tate of the University–A Parent’s Perspective at http://ptable.blogspot.com/2011/07/tate-of-u-parents-perspective.html#links.
October 2nd, 2011 at 1:37AM
Bill Gates started graduate work in theoretical computer science and published an article with Christos Papadimitriou.
This seems to suggest that we should expand the CS theory programs and enlarge my paycheck.
October 2nd, 2011 at 10:57AM
DM…yeah, but Steve Jobs was very influenced by courses in calligraphy and typography. Those guys want raises too!
October 2nd, 2011 at 11:02AM
There are an awful lot of people in our present era who define their roles in terms of particular TOOLS, where a tool can be a technology, a methodology, a technique, etc. It has been said that if you give a small boy a hammer everything looks like a nail….we have people running around with hammers looking for screws to tighten, and people with welding torches looking for sheets of paper to fasten together.
I do think there is a useful role for computer-based education, but it is not going evolve through the uncritical adulation of “technology”…and, by the way, it’s rather odd to see the way in which the term “technology” has become a synonym for “computer stuff.”