[Reader-list] the IT teacher shortage, speech generator for Prof. Hawking

[Arun Mehta]

 From RCFoC for March 12, 2001 - Consuming All Those 
Cycles,   http://www.compaq.com/rcfoc (a truly great zine):

"Demand for online courses is much greater than our ability to create and 
staff classes."

how true...
I have long maintained that our neglect of IT teachers training is nothing 
short of criminal. At the top of the IT food chain stands the teacher who 
teaches students how to produce software and hardware.

I am now exploring, together with the local Linux users group and Sarai, a 
new way (at least in India) to teach programming, in which we make 
extensive use of existing code as courseware (in fact, the idea for this 
came out of the discussion following Raj Mathur's presentation at the Sarai 
conference). After we cover the basics, we put the students into teams of 
Linux experts to improve or add to the existing tools and apps used in the 
open source world. I imagine that such teams would span nations, so no 
reason why the students shouldn't also be at multiple locations. Distance 
education becomes a part of the core design of the course, making it easy 
for us to handle large numbers of students without a proportionate 
expenditure on real estate.

Not that we dispense with conventional teaching. When confronted with a 
problem, the team turns to experts and asks them to take it to the bottom 
of the issue, possibly spawning a new online course -- let education be a 
"pull" rather than a "push."

Oh, and students growing up in this paradigm would smoothly grow into the 
role of teachers: as their skills improve, so does their ability to help 
new students joining the group, so we squarely address the root issue, the 
shortage of teachers.

This model addresses the financial needs of the students as well. 
Programmers are in such short supply, that anyone who can get the job done 
is quickly snapped up. In such a setup, the student doesn't have to be able 
to solve programming problems entirely by herself, as long as there are 
people in the group willing to help her -- so she can start making money 
sooner. The course continues, possibly lifelong, the student merely logs on 
from a different computer, one belonging to her employer.

In the process of helping others, students would acquire the kind of 
reputation needed to get to and stay at the top of the income pile. The 
good programmers will quickly make a name for themselves on the list, so 
advertising becomes a useful biproduct of helping other people.

Anyone willing to help? This is a serious project that hopefully will start 
enrolling students within months.

A project to kickstart this process has already been launched. Professor 
Stephen Hawking has entrusted us with developing a better speech generator 
for him. His input device is the equivalent of a two-button mouse, with 
which he constructs sentences, which the software then speaks in a 
configurable voice.

This project is worthwhile if it only helps our greatest living genius 
better bring out the fruits of his fertile brain. However, it has 
implications for a large number of other physically challenged people, and 
it also might allow us to improve the quality and efficiency of telephony 
by orders of magnitude: if we send sentences across, not the bitmap of our 
voices, what the other person hears is not limited by the bandwidth of the 
connection, and of course we consume far less bandwidth as well... This 
project is being discussed at radiophony at yahoogroups.com, a list you may 
join by mailing radiophony-subscribe at yahoogroups.com

Please forward to lists where persons interested in helping with these 
projects may be found.
Arun
>Online Learning -- is growing nicely.  In 1998, 710,000 students
>     took distance-learning courses.  IDC, in the March 2 EduPage, now
>     expects that number to grow to 2.2 million online students next
>     year.
>
>     What's preventing even more students from reaching out and touching
>     their higher education?  University of Colorado Online executive
>     director Bob Tolsma says,
>
>         "Demand for online courses is much greater than our ability to
>         create and staff classes."
>
>     Which suggests to me that there's a tremendous potential for
>     effective online courses.  Of course, a virtual classroom makes it
>     rather hard to butter up the teacher with an apple...

or put ink on her seat... ;-)


Arun Mehta, B-69, Lajpat Nagar-I, New Delhi -- 110024, India. Phone 
+91-11-6841172, 6849103.  http://members.tripod.com/india_gii To join 
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