71–80 of 84 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've spent some time thinking about what education should look like and how technology fits into that, I'd love to chat and bounce some ideas around.
Sure, I love to chat. What's the best way to get in touch?
I run a small R&D lab for an unnamed subsidiary of the company that owns Google. Our mandate is to come up with new technologies that change the economics of telecoms, which, if we are successful, may help get hundreds of millions of people online. My coworkers operate a carrier neutral metro fiber network in Kampala and other coworkers are busy building crazy fast internet for America. I like this job.
well, that sounds fun.
I help run an general purpose applied computation R&D lab for a medium sized non-profit. In the last year we've worked in fields as far reaching as bioinformatics to cyber defense to finance. In the meanwhile, we've helped develop faster disease detection assays to improving safety in transportation. We get to play with lots of big computers, pitch new ideas, and can have immediate impact on people's lives. I love th…
How did you get this into kind of work? I've been working in dev for 20 years, web dev since 2000, and it's pretty depressing that doing good work just means extra profit for a shareholder :(
If you are interested in it, I would highly recommend looking at working with National Laboratories, or companies that work with or manage National Labs. FFRDCs are another great place to look https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federally_funded_research_and_...
Be prepared to take a salary hit, but the work can be really rewarding (if you end up in the right place).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been working for a b-corporation that is in the ed-tech space. There are a lot of problems to solve here. After two years, I feel that educational software is more about production quality/entertainment value than about solving technological challenges. Poorly designed content that is not engaging can't compete with other resources on the web. Building a platform to facilitate learning is difficult, because the…
Thanks for your insight. I think the problem with a lot of educational programs (not all, though) is that they intend to replace live instruction. In my ideal world, computers would always remain _supplementary_ to the instructor. The idea of what a 'computer' is to most people is disappointing to me. More people should see computers as thinking machines, as machines that allow us to extend the reach and complexity o…
This is already a well established instructional strategy called Blended Learning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blended_learning). Blackboard even has a product page devoted to using technology to supplement face-to-face training (http://www.blackboard.com/k12/blended-learning.aspx).
Concepts are very difficult to understand from a book, so blackboards were invented.
This is not really the reason blackboards were invented: http://education.cu-portland.edu/blog/reference-material/the.... Many classrooms could still benefit hugely from low-tech solutions like leveled readers.
Computers offer us a chance to go one step further than the blackboard, without much additional effort from the instructor.
I disagree – creating effective blended learning is incredibly time consuming. It nearly doubles the effort of teaching a lecture-based class because teachers must also prepare digital content.
Introducing computers is also a huge logistical hassle (e.g. getting every student logged in, getting them all doing the same exercise/simulation, etc).
I have friends who are teachers at schools with well-equipped computer labs, and they claim that they regularly have to spend 20-40 minutes of their instructional time doing IT to get students up and running. This also echoes what I've found in my professional experience: most blended learnings require an additional instructor to help troubleshoot IT problems.
I agree, it's a matter of content. However, it's not that the content isn't entertaining enough, it's that it isn't participatory enough.
Agree to disagree, but the way I see it, if content is not entertaining (maybe intellectually stimulating is a better phrase), students will not participate in a productive way.
A little of everything, from printers to network/servers for the past 14 years(2 job switch so far). I love helping people resolve their issues, I would say I love my job but a recent switch to a oil and gas company seems to have been a bad choice.
Headcount cutting and all means I have a lot less support issues to deal with and more HN time.
I have this impression that most developers in any company would be more or less quite 'technical'. Is there any need for tech support role in bigger corporations?
I quickly got bored because of the lack of intellectual stimulation. Fourteen monad tutorials later the whole stack was written in Haskell.
I wish I had a job.
I'm a Software Engineer at Improbable ( http://www.improbable.io ). Before this I worked at Google for four years, and before that I ran a small game development studio ( http://www.mysterystudio.com ) for almost 10 years. Improbable gives me the best of both worlds -- the speed and the impact your day to day work has in a startup, and the world-changing ambitions of Google. I get to work on very challenging technica…
I'm a Software Engineer at Improbable ( http://www.improbable.io ). Before this I worked at Google for four years, and before that I ran a small game development studio ( http://www.mysterystudio.com ) for almost 10 years. Improbable gives me the best of both worlds -- the speed and the impact your day to day work has in a startup, and the world-changing ambitions of Google. I get to work on very challenging technica…
Hey, are you the guy who wrote some articles about lag prediction in game networking ? If yes, thanks. Helped me a lot. I'll send you cakes someday.
I did CRUD for some local shop as a solo developer. I quickly got bored because of the lack of intellectual stimulation. Fourteen monad tutorials later the whole stack was written in Haskell. I wish I had a job.