Well, that'd be an idea, but it puts the decision cost in the hand of the content creators instead of that of advertisers. They suddenly have to make decisions for what products are appropriate for their audience, or more likely, what'll result in the largest cut. They won't neccesairly be much more efficient at it either.
And it won't neccesairily lead to less obtrusive advertising.
Useless products seems a little harsh, since a truly useless product wouldn't survive for long. You might view them as useless, but then a high schooler might not know what to do with a cisco rack, and say the same thing. Which means cisco shouldn't advertise their products to highschoolers (for the most part).
The thing about that is that targeting, even with all the personal data advertisers get acess to, is still hard work and never 100% accurate. Also it assumes that most advertisers know how to work the controls, which sadly does not seem to be the case.
The best kind of advertising is invisible to those uninterested and visible to those that stand to benefit from the offer. Most good online advertising systems are incentivized towards that, but then schools incentivize towards good grades, and they don't produce one examplary student after another.
Part of the problem may be the esteem of the profession. No kid tells himself "I want to work on PPC optimization and better Ad Targeting". It's a terrible pity a profession that handles informing consumers about goods offered is so shrouded in ignorance. How many brilliant products designed by even more brilliant engineers failed in the cradle because nobody ever found out about them, or the ones that did couldn't make out their use? Because when you build a better mousetrap...you've got a better mousetrap and the world keeps using the ones they have.
Also that 2% cut of sales would be there if the youtuber were to post an affiliate link.
The discussions could likely be put on one page as well, allowing you to reference to the other articles without having to add links to other similar articles or other comment threads. That'd be pretty cool.
Also BAFöG does not need to be paid back for 5 years after graduation, with a years worth of extension if the student cannot affort the associated costs when requested.
Especially since students from a Hauptschule can do their 10th grade and students from a Realschule can get into the Gymnasiale Oberstufe as well as people being aged out of those options being able to do their Abitur at a later time.
I've always thought that measuring schools by student academic performance alone is an incredibly lazy way of measuring performance across the board because it doesn't take into account massive differences in the average student different schools get.
Measuring difference in student performance between two points in time would provide a better heuristic, and even using that as a measure for funding is silly as it creates a feedback loop. I'd rather see this data being used to identify and study top performing schools and the findings being applied to schools performing in the bottom percentile.
But then this entire problem hinges on how we as a society want public schools to work. Do we want them to act as an equalizer in the sake of social stability and mobility, or do we want them to amplify existing situations so that our top performers perform even better?
Whilst there is obviously already a deep relationship between teachers and their students, another method for taking weight off their backs in the regard of being mental health first responders could be having mental health responders on site, whether that be social workers or child psychologists which is how things are handled in Germany. At my previous school we had a psychologist that was shared across different schools in the area, who would be open to talk about any mental health issues a student might have.
Now in Germany we also have a 3 tiered system, where the lowest performing students go to a "Hauptschule", which focuses on putting students into trades, a "Realschule" which opens up moving into either higher reaches of the trades or moving into a "Gymnasiale Oberstufe", which is the conclusion of the "Gymnasium" that focuses on funneling students into universities to pursue further eduction.
Whilst this tiered system has its issues despite possibility to move into higher tiers later in your educational life, it also allows for dividing up certain problems. Students from a "Gymnasium" are usually assumed to come from a stable background, which means less social workers and stronger focus on academics, whilst students from a "Hauptschule" are usually offered more guidance in exchange for a less strict and more practice oriented scientific curricullum.
I was expelled, or rather "denied re-admission", which means it doesn't go on your academic record but for all intents and purposes is the same thing.
I think it was the right call though, it was the wrong place for me. Much MUN and Community Service, but the CS classes weren't strong, and that was the only technical class offered. I went on to go to an ITG, which is short for "InformationsTechnisches Gymnasium" which is a highschool with a curriculum centered around stuff like OO and microcontrollers and UML diagrams.
i'd second that and add that having a physical book also makes annotating things a lot easier, at least than with my kobo. If I'm going to spend any significant time with a book, i prefer it being a physical copy.
Well, in my case it was absolutely my fault. I angered some of the school administrators and i was academically underperforming. And in retrospect it was the right call. I got thrown into the K12 system in 9th grade from a German school, had a relatively weak academic track record before that, and the school was a private school looking to churn students into the Ivys. The 3 years I spent there were hugely eye opening in regards to what I could or could not do with my life, but ultimately, it was not the right place for me.
But for my brother, it's a little different. He was kicked out of a public school for altercations with another student, and I would say that the situation was not handled in a fair manner. The school claimed that the reason for the suspension was that the other parents didn't feel safe sending their children to the school anymore, which was bogus since my mother actually went and personally called every single parent in the grade. None of them had any concerns over the incident. I'm suspecting that the school was simply overly cautious since about 20 years ago one student (one of the pastors children) murdered another student by stabbing him on a staircase inside of the school building. Whilst I don't fault the school administration for overreacting and deciding to deal with the problem through sweeping it under the rug, I do think the issue could have been handled more gracefully than sending a 12 year old for police questioning AND a psychologist.
Also I was not making a point about whether my or my brothers expulsion was justified, I was commenting about the effects of expulsion, and how variable they can be depending on the student and their upbringing.
I believe that public school systems should act as an equalizer against how you're raised at home instead of compounding these problems.
On a related but no quite note, I've got a personal vendetta against sales pages that think buzzing and zipping jQuery is anywhere near to being a sensible idea.
<rantyrant>
So from a personal standpoint, if I'm on your sales page, I want to know what you're offering, and why I should be intrested in what you are offering. I'd be fine with that being a plain html site with nothing but a few paragraphs and some bullet point lists. Maybe a table or two as well, and a link to somewhere I can give you money.
Now the last thing I need is for that part of the page to zoom in, wiggle around or do any other bogheaded things a designer with just enough jQuery to be dangerous could think of whilst they're being "creative" with it.
Now from a marketing perspective, this is incredibly stupid. A sales page is a machine for turning prospects into customers. There's a single design purpose if there is one. If someone come over and tried to paint flowers on the tip of my soldering iron, I would cut them. If someone decided to replace my PSU with a music box because the music box looks a lot better, I would not be pleased.
So why did it ever become a thing to do that to one of the most essential parts of your business? The part you point your advertising money at. The part that can very well be the difference between you going the way of the ipod or the way of the zune. Go nuts on your About page if you really have to keep your designer busy, have your faces zoom into it and spin and put the text into maquee tags and what have. But please, for the love of god, don't, don't ever do that to your sales page, because you're wasting my time and your money on that.
I blame marketing professionals with an IQ of 50 and designers with delusions of grandeur, CSS3 on the holster, jQuery in their hands, trigger happy on anything customer facing, spreading more $ signs through the site than the rap business.
But then there's a difference in dropping out and being expelled, and as someone who was expelled from highschool, it can seem devastating at the time it happens, even if it has minor impact on your future life. Being ground through the wheels for school administration is a harrowing experience for any teenager.
Matter of fact, my little brother who also went through an expulsion has still not quite recovered. The school suspended him for months in middle school, and I think it has impaired his ability to function as a student. When we tried getting him into the German school system again, he failed his reentry exam out of anxiety (he most likely knew the answers, he just filled in nothing), and another year of schooling at a lower tiered school because he couldn't bring himself to fill in exams for the first half of the school year.
So I certainly would not discount the impact an expulsion can have on a student, and I think that school administrators should not use it lightly. It could work out just fine, or utterly demoralize a student that most likely is already marginalized.
I think there might be some mixing up of the morality of the situation and the legality of the situation. Were the Snowden leaks against the law? Yes. Were the Snowden leaks immoral? I'd say no, they were an incredibly brave thing to do.
Now a situation like that where the moral thing is against the law would require us reexamining and changing the law. Whether it's whistleblower laws, minimum sentences or sentences for minor drug offences, these things all require a good hard look, and most likely, a degree of retroactive pardoning. But believing one's cause to supercede the law is a dangerous road to be on.
Now ToS are completely different. ToS are set by private entities, and as a single user you have little power over their content, only whether you accept them or not. They're an offer, not a democracy. I personally think that if you choose to knowingly violate the ToS of a service, then you should face the consequences of that regardless of the moral standing you may have. If you were using the Twitter API to defeat african warlords and Twitter decides that you're violating their ToS doing that and bans your account for it, well...you're SoL.
Whilst testing like that seems to be possible for granular facts and most likely is a great way to handle these, what about conceptual understanding?
The only "surefire" way I've found to test that in myself is written condensing of the concept in a way that allows another person to understand the concept from my notes, or actually explaining the concept to another person.
That doesn't scale to 20-30 people in a class though since validating that number of explanations is not easy.
Random probing using application of the concept however encourages the cooking recipe approach. There's only a number n different types of problems you can generate, and by learning all of those is possible. They're easy to grade, but they don't guarantee full understanding.
Then there's using compound problems, where you start mixing concepts. If a student understands say momentum and friction, they should be able to work out a problem involving both. And those are the bane of students who did not invest in conceptual understanding since the number of recipes to learn suddenly increases exponentially. First midterm of physics 101 usually leads to a number of exasperated "This wasn't covered in class". Yes it was, just not this specific recipe. Now the issue with this type of problems is they cover a number of concepts, and pinning down the culprint/s isn't exactly straightforward. I guess you could tackle this through deduction based on a number of pairings (say momentum&impulse,momentum&friction&whatnot...), but noise would mess with that process.
If the idea of school is to teach students to learn, why aren't there courses on learning itself and the framework of things around the act of learning that enables students to efficiently do so?
Essentially, why aren't good study skills explicitly taught and practiced?
What I've experienced through school is that whilst there is some implicit teaching of such skills, a lot of study skills are either found by students themselves through experimentation(random), or passed down from their parents. More often than not, these are attrocious for students that did not have enough parental involvement OR parents that don't know how to study efficiently either. My personal hypothesis is that these are affected by and also affect socioeconomic standing. Just like wealth, education also perpetuates through generations.
Personally, through highschool my aproach to studying involved cramming, keeping almost no note of due-dates and very messy planning of long term academic projects. In fact, anything that took more than 2 weeks of foresight would leave me scrambling to finish at last minute.
What's worse is that this did not occur to me to be a problem until well into 10th to 11th grade, which put a dent into my college prospects to say in the least.
Since then, I've been working on aquiring these skills on my own, playing around with things like holistic learning, spaced repetition, learning how to structure projects and aquiring organizational tools such as org-mode or even something as simple as using a calendar habitually. And it helps immensely.
And whilst now I'm starting to put these things into place, I keep asking myself: "Why was this not pointed out to me back in ,say, 6th grade?". General education is a great social equalizer, but the assumption that these neccesairy skills are simply passed down seems to go against that very idea. My personal opinion is that teaching these skills would have an incredible impact, since often intelligence is not the problem, but methodology is.
No, I'd say that these don't really add anything to the quality of the piece except loss of clarity. Prose isn't poetry, and poetry isn't neccesairily made better by adding obscure wording.
I think being yourself all the time wherever you are is incredibly counterproductive. I don't view myself as perfect, which means there are areas of my own self I want to change, and without me consciously attempting to become different from my current self, absolutely nothing will change and indesirable personality traits will just continue to perpetuate themselves.
Some behaviours just clash with your environment, and there's always the decision whether a change to your environment or a change to your perception of your environment is the wiser path to take in resolving these conflicts. Maybe moving to a different place will solve your anxiety problems (toxic environment), or practicing to become more confident (internal change) will do so.
Telling someone to "Just be themselves, all the time, wherever they are" however tells them to ignore any of these conflicts and in my view is an incredibly pessimistic view in a certain sense. You're telling them that their environent is a certain way, that their self is a certain way, and that they might as well run head first into their environment without changing their trajectory, because that's the right thing to do, and that that is the obvious thing to do, that their attempt at changing either is futile. If they do happen to suffer due to these conflicts, then that is the fault of the character and environment lottery they just happen to have lost.
Now there might be character traits that you want to strenghten, and maybe your perception of your environment prevents you from doing so. I think that's the only case where a limited "Just be yourself (more)" is a step in the right direction. In any other case it's just encouraging virtues and vices in the same way, and due to that, blindness to which is which.
I'd just bite the bullet and install emacs. You don't need to move all your text editing work there immediately, doing [Alt]-x org-mode in a new buffer and playing around with features such as headlines (type * ) or todo's (type TODO in a headline) should be enough to get started. You can always refine your workflow in Org further, so there really isn't a minimum amount of things you need to know or learn.
Org-mode can be used without being an emacs geek though. The wife of the friend of mine who first showed me emacs and org uses it as a self-management / note-keeping application, and whilst she might be at least slightly geeky, she's not really a tech person.
Once I found out how much you can really do with it, I went on a prosetylizing spree and got a couple of friends as well as my little brother into it. Whilst they're somewhat tech inclined, they're by no means emacs geeks, but they got into it after me showcasing and explaining at least some of the features.
Personally, i think that the only thing that's really essential in getting people into it is a tutorial level to it, similar to interactive tutorials for programming languages (I recall a marvelous ruby one from a year or two back, but I'm unable to find it). Org-mode already scales beautifully regarding complexity, and i think the main thing that turns people away from it is that the manual is a literal textbook and only silly people study it back to back. Or that they're using vim and don't want to switch to emacs, but that's not likely the group of people you're targeting.
Yeah, a video of it in action would be incredible though. The single picture of it isn't quite convincing yet. Reading through articles on it it appears they're on the first iteration of the design though, which appearently suffers from problems with uniform lighting they're hoping to resolve in the comming months, so that might be the reason they're not showing any more proof of their claims.
And it won't neccesairily lead to less obtrusive advertising.
Useless products seems a little harsh, since a truly useless product wouldn't survive for long. You might view them as useless, but then a high schooler might not know what to do with a cisco rack, and say the same thing. Which means cisco shouldn't advertise their products to highschoolers (for the most part).