helloworld.bensonchu.com

The Chronicle: Putting lectures online

Benson — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 21:02:13 +0000

“Professors across the country are now wrestling with this issue. More and more colleges have installed microphones or cameras in lecture halls and bought easy-to-use software to get lecture recordings online. The latest Campus Computing Survey, which gathers data on classroom technology nationwide, found that 28 percent of colleges have a strategic plan to provide coursecasting equipment, and 35 percent more are working on a plan now.

Those plans raise a lot of issues. Some professors are camera shy—at least when it comes to their teaching. Others say they discuss ideas with their students that are not yet ready for prime time. And some administrators are nervous about giving away too much of their educational content as the cost of college continues to rise.”

NYTimes: Educated and Fearing the Future in China

Benson — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 20:41:11 +0000

“As China’s economy recovers, employers are competing to hire low-skilled workers, but many of China’s best and brightest, its college graduates, are facing a long stretch of unemployment.”

NYTimes: Depression’s Upside

Benson — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 15:03:28 +0000

“The persistence of this affliction — and the fact that it seemed to be heritable — posed a serious challenge to Darwin’s new evolutionary theory. If depression was a disorder, then evolution had made a tragic mistake, allowing an illness that impedes reproduction — it leads people to stop having sex and consider suicide — to spread throughout the population. For some unknown reason, the modern human mind is tilted toward sadness and, as we’ve now come to think, needs drugs to rescue itself.

The alternative, of course, is that depression has a secret purpose and our medical interventions are making a bad situation even worse. Like a fever that helps the immune system fight off infection — increased body temperature sends white blood cells into overdrive — depression might be an unpleasant yet adaptive response to affliction. Maybe Darwin was right. We suffer — we suffer terribly — but we don’t suffer in vain.”

NYTimes: Building a Better Teacher

Benson — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 15:00:32 +0000

“Lemov himself pushed for data-driven programs that would diagnose individual students’ strengths and weaknesses. But as he went from school to school that winter, he was getting the sinking feeling that there was something deeper he wasn’t reaching. On that particular day, he made a depressing visit to a school in Syracuse, N.Y., that was like so many he’d seen before: “a dispiriting exercise in good people failing,” as he described it to me recently. Sometimes Lemov could diagnose problems as soon as he walked in the door. But not here. Student test scores had dipped so low that administrators worried the state might close down the school. But the teachers seemed to care about their students. They sat down with them on the floor to read and picked activities that should have engaged them. The classes were small. The school had rigorous academic standards and state-of-the-art curriculums and used a software program to analyze test results for each student, pinpointing which skills she still needed to work on.

But when it came to actual teaching, the daily task of getting students to learn, the school floundered. Students disobeyed teachers’ instructions, and class discussions veered away from the lesson plans. In one class Lemov observed, the teacher spent several minutes debating a student about why he didn’t have a pencil. Another divided her students into two groups to practice multiplication together, only to watch them turn to the more interesting work of chatting. A single quiet student soldiered on with the problems. As Lemov drove from Syracuse back to his home in Albany, he tried to figure out what he could do to help. He knew how to advise schools to adopt a better curriculum or raise standards or develop better communication channels between teachers and principals. But he realized that he had no clue how to advise schools about their main event: how to teach.”

Google’s book search case mapped out

Benson — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 00:20:15 +0000

That clears up everything…

Originally found this gem in The Chronicle. Digitizing out of print books and making them available on the web- which will win? Utilitarianism or Kantian Ethics?

NYTimes: A Miniature World Magnifies Dwarf Life

Benson — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 01:45:16 +0000

“Critics say displaying dwarfs is at best misguided and at worst immoral, a throwback to times when freak shows pandered to people’s morbid curiosity.

…

But there is another view, and Mr. Chen and some of his short-statured workers present it forcefully. One hundred permanently employed dwarfs, they contend, is better than 100 dwarfs scrounging for odd jobs. They insist that the audiences who see the dwarfs sing, dance and perform comic routines leave impressed by their skills and courage.”

Is this plagiarism?

Benson — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 23:36:03 +0000

“An associate professor at a Chinese university has been punished after students reported finding an online test, from another college, that matched an open-book exam in his course.”

New DRM attempts to prevent video game piracy

Benson — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 04:50:03 +0000

“Last month the worldwide effort to thwart the illegal copying and sales of video games took a turn to the draconian, with a number of publishers introducing new measures that often seemed to impact legitimate gamers as much as pirates.

France-based Ubisoft rolled out a new form of digital rights management that require players of their PC games to stay online at all times to play. Japan-based Sony tested out a new system that would require people purchasing one of their Playstation Portable games used to pay an extra $20 to play online. And Nintendo, taking a page from the music industry, levied a $1.5 million dollar suit against an Australian for copying their games.”