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"Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader™"?

Although this cliché'd phrase has definitely been overused, the premise of the show of the same name just screams volumes to me. I remember learning all of that information during my education in school. I most definitely don't remember the vast majority of it today; nor is there much reason for me to have to (save being on that show to win some money). Think to yourself: exactly what percentage of the things we learned are we truly using in our lives today? How much of it did we need to lead a fulfilling life, or to prepare us for our jobs?

It seems that kids are simply assembly line workers from a database repository. Let's see how much generic information we can fill them up with. Not only that, but we're telling them what to learn, we're not suggesting that they learn things that pertain to their own interests, the New York State Regents diploma doesn't really mesh well with that.

Even with the ideology of pushing as broad of a range of topics on to children so they'll know (or discover) what interests them, when we do need to know something that we learned in school, how much of that do we typically have to look up again anyway? I am here to say honestly and truthfully - I am NOT smarter than a Fifth grader.

Workforce Intelligence

But how does that work in to technology? I might not be smarter than a fifth grader, but I can find the information much quicker than most fifth graders that I know. Why? I've taught myself how to use computers, applications, and how to successfully navigate the internet (and which websites I should try first, second, or third). I'll be honest in that I have had official educational "training" in these areas, but 85% of what I know in this field is all self-taught, and that pertained to me pre-workforce as well as what I'm doing currently. However, this is me, not my entire organization.

Many of my coworkers have something called "book smarts", or "social smarts" (a people person), or they're able to apply knowledge logically to situations. It's interesting to watch the different types work to solve similar situations. However, out of each group, many of them are limited in their technical knowledge and experience. They were not exposed to computers in their education, and now that they're in the workforce (and have been for some time) they're lacking a serious tool for their livelihood in the workforce itself.

Is education to blame? Continuing education? The speed of technological advances versus required training and funding? Perhaps it's change itself which is to blame as some people just are not good at dealing with change.

Generation Gap

Perhaps it's actually a generation gap. I often hear that, "Kids grew up with that stuff," or, "I don't need it, I can do my job without it." Although both might be true, (1)you were engrossed in it while things were changing around you, and (2)you can do it better (more efficiently) with it. Alternatively, I've also heard, "Why do I need to know Algebra, I can use a calculator!" from the younger generation. Since I am part of that younger generation, I do agree with it. "Oh no!"

Think about it: if a company's computer system goes down entirely, does the business remain open or do they close operations? Can it be done by hand? It sure can! Do most managers want to take the risk of extra possibility for human error to occur? From my experience, not likely. So again I ask, what is the point? In an ever-increasing world of electronic media, answers, and communication, there's little need for advanced mathematics (algebra was a poor example, I use algebra all the time, but how about Matrices? They were fun as hell to me, like a math-based Sudoku puzzle, but I've never used it since). Obviously if you're going to be working as a mathematician you'd need to know it, study it, learn and re-learn it, but for the vast majority of us, why are we being force-fed this extensive knowledge when we could simply look it up on-demand after getting the simpler introductions to it instead?

Technology in the Classrooms

• No cellphones
• No computers
• No group work

So how exactly does this mimic preparation for the workforce?
Do I use my cellphone at/for work? Yes.
Do I use a computer at work? (lol) Yes. Only two departments don't use a computer, although every staff member has an account to access our system.

So again, I ask, why are we removing technology in the classrooms when we should be encouraging it? Even on tests, if we are in "crunchtime" on the job and need to be more efficient, we may use our computers; yet children aren't allowed? Sometimes proving that you can solve the answer in more important than how you solved the answer (keeping in mind copyrights).

College Capstone Courses versus Apprenticeship

Perhaps my colleges weren't as beneficial in this regard as other colleges, but the capstone courses were made to theoretically mimic a real-life situation in business. Rarely did it seem like a business. We had other "departments" (courses) we were working for at any given time, we only went to work 2 or 3 days out of the week, and the "boss" wasn't ever worried about a deadline or economic downturn. How much experience did this really give me? Well, it actually did give a lot of experience as the courses were made to mix topics learned throughout our years there in to a single unified curriculum for the semester...however, it is no where near the amount of experience that could have been gained had we had an apprenticeship instead. Being able to work under someone in the exact same field that you aspire to be a part of, see the actual causes and effects from things done (or not done), feel real pressures, and take home true lessons that couldn't be learned in a classroom. (This is all assuming the apprenticeship itself wasn't run by someone working out of their garage.)

Final Thoughts

I have to at least quickly mention "No Child Left Behind". I think the ideals behind it were magnificent. I think the actual implementation of it is the most dreadful thing I've ever witnessed happen to the public educational institution in a long time. Some people just will be held back. For instance: I am terrible at remembering Computer Networking topics. It was the hardest course I've ever taken. I managed to get a B-, and I was proud of that B-. Alternatively, I can sleep through other classes and get better than a B-. Some people are just better at certain things than others. If you force everyone to an equal footing, you've already failed your students.

Personally, I favor specialized career training such as what areas in Europe are doing. If we know we are bored out of our skull over History and we just want to work on cars to be an automotive technician, LET US. We'll be better at it, and you'll be better for it! However, we need specialized training for everyone. If only a small portion of the student body is given this opportunity, that minority will be ridiculed for being "different" by their peers. Yes, it's important.

Anyhow, getting back the main point: Specialized training in schools would go a long way to realizing a better system. We should be embracing technology and the changes that come with it, not sticking to old arbitrary thoughts of, "Well if I did it, you should too". I learned how to type at 120wpm by the time I was 16; you're 46, I think you should too. ...does that sound reasonable to you? No?

Whatever the case may be, our system needs a drastic look at how it's currently being implemented, and compared closely to successful systems overseas. I support teachers and the education system itself; but it also needs an overhaul. Example: Horrible tenured teachers should not be locked in to their jobs; they should be held accountable just like anyone else. I hope some day some more fruitful changes come around from great ideas through our politicians.

Note: My review is of version 1.02, and the current version is already at either 1.06 or 1.07, fixing a few of the issues I had described in my discussion.

I've had the luxury recently to test out an application recently built to make it easier to follow along with our Twitter conversations. It's taken me about 4 weeks to finally get my review up on the web. Why? Because video/screen capture recording programs suck, that's why. After trying 3 different applications and trying to fix the video from one of them after-the-fact (which I took 2 days alone trying to fix it), I gave up and downloaded the trial of Camtasia Studio. Ironically, Camtasia crashed on me during post-processing. Thankfully I saved the project moments before.

Anyway... I did a video review so that I could talk freely for as long as I wanted without posting 20 odd pictures and causing huge scrolling. Unfortunately because the video was 20 minutes long, I couldn't upload it to Youtube (I couldn't get Camtasia to recognize my Youtube account information to upload it for me anyway), so it's currently an external link hosted on my own website.

Check it out here!

Update: I'm happy to announce that since I've skipped 5 minor versions (1.02 -> 1.07), 20Couch now has the ability to mark posts as read by a set timeframe:
- all
- older than 6 hours
- older than a day
- older than 2 days
- older than a week

Still no individual markings, but this is loads better. Also, this week was a code-storm week for Matt, developing one minor release each day of the week. Thanks for all of the hard work, Matt. Might I suggest some documentation on plugin and skin support? :)

While developing an Adobe AIR application using CSS/HTML/JS, I decided I wanted to allow for templating of the application. The default template has the ability to switch view states (horizontal, or vertical). Since I'm building the application with CSS, HTML and JavaScript (with jQuery), I thought that in order to create this effect, I'd use a style switcher.

I then thought...hey, I wonder if this would work in browsers other than the WebKit version I've been testing under?!

It worked in Firefox 3.6.3, Opera 10.51, Chrome 5.0.342.8 beta, and Internet Explorer 6 (although my test CSS was broken in IE6). Opera 10.50 (tested first) had an issue with loading the secondary CSS on first attempt, but had it cached after that. 10.51 loaded everything just fine, but I can't be sure if it was still cached from the attempt with 10.50, or if 10.51 fixed an unknown issue to help fix it.

So, how did I do it?

Back in the day, Firefox had a little-known and not-often-used feature that allowed web-designers to incorporate multiple CSS layouts/designs right in the site, and the users could choose on-the-fly which UI they'd like to use (on each session) by going to View, Page Style, and then choose the style you wanted - if more than a single style was available from within the code. To give users this option, you include secondary stylesheets after the first, but in the link element, you specify that it's an alternative stylesheet, as so:
<link media="screen" title="horizontal" href="/css/horiz-style.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" /> <link media="screen" title="horizontal" href="/css/vert-style.css" type="text/css" rel="alternative stylesheet" />

I originally started with this concept and tried swapping out the primary for the secondary and vice versa. Unfortunately this had some issues during development that may have been related to some other problems, but I dropped this attempt (but if Opera has a problem with caching, this route would solve that). Instead, I simply changed the href property of the link element. It was easier to target with jQuery without using URL matching/REGEX, or arbitrary naming of the rel property.

Anyhow, here's the code that I used (in this example, I am clicking on a button with ID of "switch"):
//do the CSS style toggle change $('#switch').bind('click', function(e){ $('#application').fadeOut(200,function(){ var cssStyle = $("link[media='screen'][href]").attr('href'); if(cssStyle == '/css/vert-style.css'){ $("link[media='screen']").attr('href', '/css/horiz-style.css'); }else{ $("link[media='screen']").attr('href', '/css/vert-style.css'); } $('#application').fadeIn(200); }); });

What this is doing:

• Bind an onClick event to the element with an id of "switch"
• find the LINK element of a media type of screen that contains an href property and assign it to the variable "cssStyle"
• fade out the application (or a website wrapper?)
• swap the CSS style for another (inline), depending on what's currently loaded
• fade the application (or website wrapper) back in with new style

...and we now have our style swapped out (quickly and easily) for an entirely new style.