Posts by BenWilson
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Stephen, I so agree, I couldn't even imagine what Lotus 1-2-3 was for when I was 16. If I wanted to add up some numbers I'd write a program? Ironically my first programming job was writing Lotus 1-2-3 macros. Funny old world, you never know what's going to be relevant.
The funniest part was the test that Unilever made me sit to get the job. I answered all the questions about manipulating the spreadsheet, getting this answer or that, and so on. But I'd never actually used Windows before at that point. Seriously, never. That was my first try. And I got stumped by the last question which said 'Open the brown folder and read the third line down and enter that in to cell C5'. I could not for the life of me work out where in Windows the brown folder was. Finally I cracked and asked the girl who was testing me. She pointed to a brown manilla folder sitting on the table between my hands.
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Kowhai, there's a lot to be said for just being taught by older kids. They're a lot cheaper too, and it's less dodgy when their students fall in love with them.
Touch typing: Despite apparently being able to type at 500 words a minute I actually was a 2 finger typist until I left university, due to the fact that you can't touch type most of the symbols I used most often. Then I got a job in sales, had to write dozens of letters, and decided to force myself to learn it if I was not to get shocking RSI. It took about 1 week. Maybe some of what the dear old biddie taught me about finger positioning helped, but honestly I could have got that out of a book in 1 minute, rather than wasting the 50-odd hours at school that I did typing meaningless strings and other silly typing drills.
Most useful thing I learned at school: Buses suck arse and should be avoided at all costs.
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Your 'backwardness' and 'uncoolness' as a teacher are the least of your worries.
Sure, which is exactly why they seem backward and uncool. Even teachers without such privation as you speak of have other priorities, like maintaining order and a professional level of contact with their students. Over familiarity can be quite dangerous. They've also got their other subjects to keep on top of, marking to do, sports teams to run, etc. I'm not saying teachers are hopeless nerds, just that kids will always see it that way. Teachers who are actually cool are rare birds. Do they teach better? Hard to be sure.
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Touch-typing has served me well, but all the other skills - like counting spaces and tabbing across to lay out a brochure - were virtually obsolete when they were being taught.
LOL tell me about it. The typing teacher at my high school didn't even fully grasp the concept of the electric typewriters we were using and was constantly telling us the best way to get optimal rapid downforce with your fingers so as to get an even print level. She was mighty impressed by how fast I could type, because she never cottoned on that I cheated by loading up the little screen buffer, and then mimed typing when she asked me to. She couldn't believe I never made any mistakes, and thought I was some bizarre prodigy.
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there's very little chance I'd be able to walk off the street and get a job as a GIS specialist, Photoshop monkey or web guy without formal qualifications.
Oops missed that. I don't agree. You just won't start at the top. What 17 year old could rightfully expect to anyway? Fuck it, I worked for no pay at all for the first 3 months of my career, despite having highly relevant qualifications. It was the exact work I wanted to do, and it took me a long way, right up to today.
My business partner left school (we were buddies) at 17 and worked in all sorts of IT related jobs before finally cracking it and making a fortune. His quals were all on-the-job. By the time I was an impoverished university-leaver with a big loan, he was already making very good money and had been for years.
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Tom, I learned a lot of BASIC at intermediate from a guy who was doing a course at University in the early 80s. An inspirational teacher for me who did guess what? Left teaching to work in computing. Funny that.
But really he just helped me down a path. I was made to feel that what I'd already learned a lot about was not just random whack stuff with no application, but something that someone I respected thought was excellent and righteous too.
And yeah, maths is deep. It's forever. The optimum encoding format for YouTube clips is like, this week.
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I remember the first computer training we had at school. It involved punched cards.
Doesn't it make you marvel at the 2GB SD stick? Think of it as the same thing, just with really small holes :-)
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But they're teaching kids to shoot and edit digital video using modern computer-based tools -- just not an important distribution (and-self-marketing) skill that would make the editing skills more relevant.
Teaching, or giving the means to teach themselves? That's really what I'm getting at. Again I ask: Where did you learn to do your tech stuff? Be honest now, was it at school or even on a course? Or did you just fiddle until you got it right, consulting snippets of information from many sources, pretty much like I do all day every day in my job?
And I really strongly believe that it's useful for kids to be encouraged to think and talk about the media they're most likely to be using.
Totally agree. I'd be very surprised if school teachers would have much to contribute to such encouragement, though. More likely they would just embarrass themselves with how uncool and backward they are, unless they are actual specialists in whatever field they are teaching. At which point my statement that such people seldom end up as teachers arises.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying school teachers are useless. I just think that what they have to contribute is some fairly general knowledge, and when it gets highly technical and specific they will cater only for a fairly average student who has little intent of continuing on in that field. Tech courses or university could take it further, but really even they are mainly for the purposes of getting access to the equipment and some marks that show where you fit in the scale of students in your field, and surrounding you with people of like mind and interests.
I'm not sure at what level of teaching you are talking, I read it as upper secondary school, correct me if I'm wrong. Personally I'd be very happy with any teacher who even knew what optimum way of encoding clips meant, and ecstatic if they actually knew the answer. Then probably bitter about 2 months later when they moved on from teaching to working in TV or movie making.
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Connecting people and giving them the opportunity to share and reinforce some very weird views to the point where they may act on them whereas in the past they might not.
I don't reckon. Yes, you hear some whack views online now. But the only difference between now and the past is that you hear them. The whack views have always been around. Usually the whackos are told to piss off and play by themselves (which they do). Online they don't have the controlling factor of people knowing who they are, so we hear more of their crap.
Does that 'reinforce' their views? Since online the whackos also get a constant verbal beating I doubt there's any more reinforcing going on. The only real reinforcement is that attention is giving to their sounding-off. Which reinforces the sounding-off, but does it lead to any more action? I doubt it - they're too busy sounding-off to act. They're also giving their IP address to the site owner, so the more they sound off, the less safe they are to carry out whacko actions.
Seriously. I don't think better and faster communication leads to more whackos being more whack.
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It's pretty tough to expect teachers to be at the bleeding edge of technology. Consider the demographic from which they are mostly taken (old). Then consider the demographic of the people who design the curricula (even older). Also consider how much they could be getting paid doing something else if they were at the bleeding edge.
Not saying they shouldn't be there, just that I think the delivery mechanism (teachers and school curricula) is not ideal. Where did you find out about the optimum way of encoding clips to play on YouTube and similar services? I bet it wasn't on any course, but rather from experimentation and net-research. And those skills are teachable. Or should I say learnable?
Can you teach this stuff? I'm often asked how I know how to do IT shit, and the answer is always "I worked it out myself". If schools provided me anything in my work it was that they gave me good facilities to play on. Well, to be honest, university did. School IT provided me with nothing except that they allowed me some time every week to use their facilities during which they didn't force me to do something else like PhysEd (which, as a sporty person, could only shit me off). The facilities were actually no better than what I had at home, but I wasn't at home during school hours, so computer studies was worthwhile, a bit.
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