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2002-12-14Education and LearningEducational TechnologyThe teacher as burger flipper?Points of Learning and Teaching Systems (POLTS). Here's M.O. Thirunarayanan's initial ACM Ubiquity article on POLTS. I take the following passage as key: "Use of Cognitive Resources The complexity of operating systems, the need to learn something new whenever a system's hardware or software is upgraded, and the need to troubleshoot and fix problems that occur more often than not, stretch and even strain the cognitive resources of teachers and students alike. The cognitive resources that teachers and students utilize to learn how to use new technologies and to solve the problems associated with and presented by such technologies limits the availability of cognitive resources needed to teach and learn new content." What is noticeable to me is that this state of affairs is not questioned. Maybe we should do so. "Modern technologies, especially the Internet and the World Wide Web have also contributed a great deal to the phenomenon of information explosion. It is true that students can search and find practically any information on the Internet and the Web. However, the cognitive resources that teachers and students expend in order to find appropriate and useful information and to evaluate the worthiness and value of such information can be better utilized learning appropriate content." I find this odd. There is the matter of learning enough to be discriminating. That seems to apply in any situation. How does "appropriate content" become a given? Is this more a problem for teachers than students? The article on PEEK in the same issue of Ubiquity (cited below) gives anecdotal evidence for the inappropriate recommendation of "appropriate" content to today's Software Engineering students. I am not sure what to make of this. "Another component related to the use of modern technologies is time. The time that teachers take to learn to use the rapidly changing tools of technology also reduces the time that they have to use these tools to teach content to their students." Well, I guess now teachers get to see what it is like for their practitioner students. Somewhere, someone decided that educational institutions had to buy into this. It sounds like we are fueling the squirrel cage, running alongside the gerbil. Why are we afraid to stop the wheel and let the gerbil out? POLTS, it turns out, is an acronym for Points of Learning and Teaching Systems. The analogy is with Point-of-Sale (POS) systems. They are suggested as being what educators need. I wonder. I have this picture of an educator working at the supermarket in a heads-down dedicated operation with a highly-custom device and bar-code scanner. Or the touch screens at the burger palace. Or the headset and displays of an airline reservation clerk. And it is always delightful to watch three department-store clerks huddled around a single cash register puzzling out how to ring up a special sale item. And I suppose the Plain Old Telephone System (POTS) is the preferred point-of-sale device of many, based on the number of intrusions that I receive from telephone marketeers of various kinds. I am especially fond of those recordings that say they've been trying to reach me all day and don't offer a person that I can tell to put me on their do-not-call list. Not. The description of POLTS simplicity of operation appeals to more POS metaphors. I wonder which part of this metaphor is meant to be operative for educators. Maybe we should just take the science class for a walk down along the local estuary and see the kinds of questions they ask and they hypotheses and theories they have already absorbed from today's folk knowledge. Points of Learning and Teaching Systems (POLTS), Part II. Reads like a funding or research proposal, or a concept for a business without a business plan. I need to review the previous article to see if there is a way to make this less "teaching" centric and more "learner" centric, though I shudder at the idea of "learner" as a classification (being an adult learner myself). Breadth and depth for software engineersSqueeze It In or Spread It Out? Rick Duley, ACM Ubiquity. A look at Software Engineering Education Knowledge (parse that, I dare you). A great argument for focus and cross-disciplinary, cross-institutional cross-over across tracks and Body of Knowledge areas.2002-12-12Mentoring beyond competenceTechRepublic: How to set up a formal mentoring program. You may need to register to access this material.Here is more on mentoring, which relates to how one moves beyond competent to seriously professional, something that I am seeing discussed more and more. There are additional links. I will analyze further. 2002-12-10Loose ChangeSpybot - Search & Destroy by PepiMK Software. Since I installed Zone Alarm on my laptop, I have noticed all of the peculiar traffic that comes up. I am afraid to find out what my main desktop machine is up to. I will find out after upgrading it to Windows XP, but meanwhile, something like this looks handy. It was suggested by Dave Kirkman, one of my classmates in the on-line M.Sc in IT program.2002-12-08History of Computer ScienceAnnals of the History of ComputingSome gleanings made starting with the oldest issue and coming forward a little ways.Quick grabsBetter citations to be filled in later.Highlights of the History of the Lambda-Calculus. J. Barkley Rosser About BletchleyWe were all shocked when the work on Collossus was declassified. There were people who knew (like Harry Huskey, who had been over there for a time and recounted that Turing was a regular-enough chap and no one was concerned or even aware of anything about his private life). I went looking for this material because of references to Augusta Ada and to Thomas Flowers that I hadn't seen before and that I wanted to verify.The Design of Colossus (foreword by Howard Campaigne). Ah, Thomas H. Flowers.
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