As something of a technophile I applaud the launch of the first privately developed space ship.(Manned Private Craft Reaches Space in a Milestone for Flight)Now I am left to wonder “What do we expect to gain from this accomplishment?” I have no doubt that we will learn some useful things and come out ahead in some way from this, but I would love to hear what people expect from the push to privatize the space “industry.”
Now that the republican primary is over I can say difinitively who I am voting for in the governors race. I have spent months looking at everything I could find on the candidates and so far as I can tell the least promising republican candidate just won the republican primary so I’ll vote for Scott Matheson.In Utah that is not quite as bad as voting for a third party candidate because the democrats still have a slim chance of winning. This is not a state where every vote counts. The majority is overwhelmingly republican so that nationally both parties have eternally roped Utah off as being a given red state.
Right now I am voting for a change in the political structure of the state. We no longer have political dialog, we are stuck with republican diatribe. There is no discourse here. I understand that a huge percent of the population share common values on the largest issues, but that has stifled the discussion on what seems to be the second tier issues where there is not as much uniformity of opinion.
Somehow the political atmoshpere here has to change so that presidential candidates do more than fly over Utah on their way to California and, if we’re lucky, stop for fuel occationally. We also need to have more diversity of opinion so that there can be real discussion in our state legislature because of the uncertainty caused by neither party having an overwhelming majority.
With the same rules as the US Senate a democratic fillibuster on a key issue would last only long enough to count the first 60% of hands as 80% of the legislature voted to end the filibuster. In truth we have a one party state in a two party nation.
After a hectic couple of weeks I have noticed that my mind is returning repeatedly to a topic that I had not thought about very much before. I discover that I am interested in the proper balance of theory vs experience in education. My thoughts were sparked by a discussion that I had with a computer science professor here at Utah State, Dr. Greg Jones, and an article I read about the “Learning by Doing” CS Masters degree at Carnegie-Mellon. I have been a CS student so this seemed fairly relavant to my experience. I learned a whole lot through my work that I would not have learned in the classroom. I also know that my understanding of the work I was doing was enhanced by classroom discussions. I had a better understanding of why things were the way they were at work because of what I learned on campus. I thought a program that had no tests or classroom instruction was a little on the extreme side – classroom instruction can add depth to the experience of “Learning by Doing.” In talking with Dr. Jones I found out that the CS department here has talked about the competing goals of training students to be gainfully employed vs training students to further the field of Computer Science. It is my belief that, generally speaking, the focus of technical schools is gainful employment. Undergraduate degrees should have a greater focus on theory, but still be very heavy on practical experience. Graduate school should be able to assume that most of the practicle experience has been gained through undergraduate work and doctoral programs are their own practical experience already. I would not venture to guess how close this fits with any school or the system in general currently, but to my mind this seems to be the ideal balance to be sought. The lower the level of education the higher the focus on experience and practical job-skills. The higher you go the more useful the theory becomes because the job-skills are (hopefully) already in place.
Let’s kick this off with a little introduction. My name is David Miller and I am a graduate student at Utah State University in Instructional Technology. I have been waiting to start my Masters degree for two years now (finishing my Bachelors in Computer Science) and I am very excited to be starting now. My main interests in IT at this time are instructional design and instructional theory. I’ll have to link to some of the more interesting articles I have read when I get some time.