I have previously made my kids use Khan Academy. I did try it once myself, and zipped through some of the early stuff. I really should go back and continue, especially after I just tried helping my oldest daughter with her math homework and discovered that I was much more rusty than I thought.
An interesting point, but a pretty thin blog entry. I think that everything I have done has benefited from practice. Even programming. The Pragmatic Programmers (iirc) even devised code katas to formalize the practice process.
No. That said, they do seem to be either making mistakes or getting their eye off the target.
The publicly admitted target is to provide social networking for people. The obvious business target is to make money. But they have to make money while not annoying their users. We know their users are not their customers, because the users do not pay to use the service. The customers are the advertisers. Thus the balance between making sure the advertisers get their wares in front of as many eyeballs as possible while annoying the minimum number of users. And it seems to me that they have this balance wrong at this point. This will happen and if they are monitoring carefully, they'll tune the balance and people will be happy.
The longer-term challenge is that nothing lasts for ever (thanks 2nd law of thermodynamics). Facebook do not need to turn into MySpace to no longer be the top dog. Google wants the top position in the social networking space and they have lots of money to spend their way into it. Or Facebook can drop the ball and get their balance of advertising to their users wrong (see above). Or a new service could come along that finds a way to survive without being beholden to advertisers. (Open-source projects to the rescue?) Or, people could just get fed-up of all the mindless banter on Facebook and decide that they have more important things to do. Or, new networks will arise that actually interoperate, so you can connect to someone on another network. My prediction is that some of all of these will take place.
I have no preference. I am a pastor, so I go where the people are (people business after all) and right now, the people are on Facebook. If MySpace successfully restarts, I'll go there as well.
I use a first generation Nook from Barnes and Noble. I have only 3rd party books on it purchased from publishers that make ebooks available without DRM. (O'Reilly, Manning, Pragmatic Programmers, Sitepoint) These are all backed-up up on my Dropbox account, so even if they hit the bit bucket, it would be straight-forward to restore them. This works well for me.
And, of course, gutenberg.org rocks my world with classic books available in epub.
I see where you are coming from, but some long-form writing is itself the research. Paul Graham (IIRC) said that his essays were a way of exploring ideas. In some of my writing, I have this to be the case also. And then, of course, there are writings where the actual banging words out is a tiny sliver of the total time taken, when compared to the research component.
It's worse than just females in tech, it's OMG men and women are different! Eeek!
I kinda like the difference myself. Not because I don't want women in tech, but because women should be able to pursue whatever they want that makes sense when you consider their differences from men.
Blacks and Whites are different. There's no discrimination, it's just that Blacks are more interested in basketball and driving taxis and making music then getting into Harvard or practising law. We should celebrate these differences instead of trying to tear down barriers that don't exist.
I know you're being sarcastic, but you bring up a point that I wonder about: there's certainly a difference in cultural values that contributes to the racial and gender profile of different occupations. Do we have a responsibility to change those values? Most ways of measuring progress on the problem have the unstated expectation that the difference in values doesn't exist, and you can't meet the measurement goals without eliminating that difference.
Let's switch from talking about race and gender and use the words "Insiders" and "Outsiders" and think of a big structure, we'll callit "The Keep."
I think the first and most urgent job is to change cultural assumptions amongst the insiders. If they are thinking that outsiders aren't biologically inclined towards living in a keep, not qualified to maintain a keep, &c., that's a huge barrier, a moat if you will.
So we remove that. The next problem is that even with the moat gone, the outsiders fear being uncomfortable inside, whether from being one of a very few outsiders amongst a lot of insiders or from other outsiders resenting them moving into the keep.
I think it's important to remove those sources of discomfort and to actively encourage outsiders to consider moving inside so that we get all of those who woud like to come inside but fear unpleasant consequences.
After that, I don't think we need to try to convince people who like living outside to come in. Let them be happy outside! But I do think we should remove barriers to coming inside and encourage coming inside to counteract any fears of negative consequences for those who would otherwise like to come into the Keep.
Yes, a browser version, even without the drawing stuff, would be great. A walled garden that I can let my kids use while they get used to that big old outside world. Not trying to over-protect, but expose gently.
