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Woz U is coming:
Steve Wozniak, who co-founded Apple with Steve Jobs, is launching a new online tech education platform he's calling Woz U, which is designed to promote technology jobs and the skills required to enter the industry. Over time, Wozniak hopes to expand the initiative to include as many as 30 physical locations around the world and courses on everything from software engineering and information technology to mobile app development and cybersecurity, among others. It's unclear whether courses will be offered for free, or whether Woz U plans on charging for any element of the online education platform. The website does not say.
Woz U also offers access to tech companies interested in using the tools and resources provided to recruit and train employees. The platform will be available to students K-12 through partnerships with school districts too. Down the line, Woz U wants to offer one-on-one instruction to students and, later on, to offer its own accelerator program for prospective startup founders. The overall goal is to increase interest in what Woz U calls STEAM careers, or science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics, with the addition of arts presumably a nod to Wozniak's role at Apple and fellow co-founder Steve Jobs' lifelong mission to blend technology with the humanities.
Also at TechCrunch, MacRumors, and Engadget.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday October 14 2017, @10:27PM (5 children)
I took shop in both seventh and eighth grade. My high school offered lots of different shop classes. Shop students could even bring their own cars to work on during class.
All the emphasis on STEM has resulted in shop classes being dropped from the curriculum.
Now a whole lotta people who cannot or do not want to college are unemployed.
A while back I signed an Oregon ballot petition that would have required the trades be taught in schools. That's where I learned of all the above. I never learned whether it was approved or not.
A master carpenter I once knew earned $35 per hour - and he was never out of work. He said the key to getting jobs was to own a whole bunch of obscure, rarely used tools such as stair gages - two threaded clamps that mounted on a square.
See, when he was on the job, no one ever needed to go to the hardware store to pick up such a rarely used tool.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Saturday October 14 2017, @11:02PM
Plumbers can easily make $300+ on a relatively simple fix. There are millionaire plumbers.
Truckers are never out of work and those with TWIC cards can make a lot of money. Also, there are companies offering $10k sign-on bonuses [schneiderjobs.com] for drivers, among other benefits. If a company like Amazon or Walmart doesn't keep its drivers happy, that company is AT RISK. It isn't clear when (if?) self-driving trucks will put truckers out of a job. Someone needs to unload the truck. Driverless trucks might be easier to hijack/steal from. The driver might be expected to respond to potential environmental disasters caused by a crashed truck. Etc.
Do you see a robot replacing plumbers within the next 20 years? I don't. When they do, then we can really start to fear the job-killing effects of automation.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Funny) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday October 14 2017, @11:30PM (1 child)
I took wood shop in seventh grade and there was a guy in my class who used to bully me. Since then, I had become bigger and braver, and sawed his fucking binder with all his homework and notes in half using the band-saw. It was the perfect opportunity to do so since that day we had a substitute teacher who was an oblivious moron.
Who's the big man now, Danny?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 14 2017, @11:36PM
Pro tip - when cutting someone's notebook in half, put a piece of plywood over it and make like you are just cutting the plywood. Then when you finish the cut you can apologize, "Oops, looks like you left your notebook on the saw table."
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 15 2017, @05:08AM (1 child)
STEM emphasis didn't kill shop. STEM came later, long after shop was dead. Shop died because:
1. liability, insurance, and all that -- modern American society has an unusually low tolerance for kids losing fingers and eyes
2. We didn't bother to mandate hours of shop, and we didn't include it in mandated testing. It thus provides no value to the decision makers running the school.
3. We started expecting college for everybody. Note that this happened long before the STEM push. I did high school 1989 to 1993, and the bad advice from guidance councilors was: follow your dreams, you can get loans, do what you love... and for many that meant silly unprofitable degrees. The later push for STEM is a reaction to this fuckup.
4. The federal government started demanding equality. This cut the shop class time in half, so the girls could take it and the boys could take home economics. This watered down both. My mom got to make a formal dress, with collar and sleeves and all, but I just stitched together a decorative pillow from a kit.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday October 15 2017, @05:26AM
No, not the demand of equality cut the shop class in half, but the way it was implemented did. Equality could also have been achieved by letting everyone choose between both, regardless of sex. Or by having both at full length at the expense of a totally different subject. Or by having both in full length, by extending the school time.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.