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.
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(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.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by requerdanos on Sunday October 15 2017, @12:09AM
This is a great opportunity to establish leadership in tech-education! Quoting from gnu.org [gnu.org] below:
This is just scratching the surface; there's lots more in the gnu article [gnu.org] quoted above.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday October 15 2017, @12:29AM (13 children)
Will people cut this shit the fuck out already?! I'm a huge proponent of non-STEM education but one of these things is not like the other. The woman who invented the STEAM acronym should be slapped in the titty with an empty plastic bottle and have wands of chewed bubble-gum thrown in her hair.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Sunday October 15 2017, @12:47AM (11 children)
Well, start your own U. Seems quite the fashionable thing to do. I mean, there's Trump U, Oral Roberts U, Carnegie Mellon U, and Stanford U. Why not Ethanol Fueled U?
(Score: 3, Funny) by MostCynical on Sunday October 15 2017, @01:07AM
Don't colleges already have fraternities for majoring in damaged livers (with or without a qualification)?
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday October 15 2017, @01:21AM (9 children)
Free-speech U, featuring guest lecturers such as David Duke, Al Sharpton, Benjamin Netanyahu, all 3 major generations of feminists, James Mattis, Karl Rove, Kim Jong Un, etc.
There is no discriminatory policy, positive or negative, in admissions and all are encouraged to apply. Students are vetted for their tolerance of free speech, especially speech they don't agree with, though violence or calls to violence will not be tolerated. Debate will be heavily emphasized and protests will be strongly encouraged as long as (1) they are nonviolent and don't contain calls to violence and (2) pro and contra champions of opposing sides agree to debate professionally rather than make noise. Protest of guest lecturers will also be forbidden, attending them will be mandatory, and all students in attendance will also later complete mandatory critiques of the lectures as assignments.
Student organizations (other than those directly related to the university, such as sports and the campus paper) will be forbidden due to their exclusionary nature. Students are more than welcome to form their own clubs outside of the university.
The first degrees will be awarded in Art, Law, Journalism, History, Philosophy, Political Science, and Public Policy. I'll stop for a second here to clarify that art has a very strong history of free speech which continues to this day, despite all the bad blue-haired Deviantart stereotypes and whatnot.
Hopefully the college would eventually offer STEM courses, and one of the required courses for STEM (and elective for the others) would be Free Speech in Science and heavily emphasize the political agendas behind modern science as well as the persecution of scientists (Copernicus, James Watson, William Shockley, etc.) who chose to speak freely albeit controversially about their work.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 15 2017, @01:31AM (8 children)
Ugh. He can come and give a talk about how Ameritards need to fund Israel for eternity and why the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement is not a protest but a literal Holocaust.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday October 15 2017, @01:45AM (7 children)
And you as a student can earn an A+ in your scathing critique.
When I was in karate many years ago, my sensei told me that when he attended sessions training under the grand master in Japan, the grand master would randomly walk up to his karatekas and drop them on the spot for no reason. The dropped karateka would then rise up and then both would bow to each other and the session would resume.
In other words, you must have the discipline to learn from certain situations rather than let them troll you. Of course we are imperfect human scum but we can be taught mental discipline without having to be randomly dropped to the floor. When I was in karate it was a cool experience during sparring because the sensei would deliberately put people out of their comfort-zones. Pitting kids against monstrous adults, boys against girls, boys against women. I remember as a kid getting my ass kicked by a woman because I kept looking at her tits. She kept yelling at me to look at her face (proper technique) motioning upward with her hand. I also fought against a girl my age, and accidentally kicked her in the tit which caused her to cry. Felt like total shit, because you ladies know that getting hit in the tit is like when men get hit in the balls. Actually later dated that girl, she sucked my dick in the bushes one time.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 15 2017, @02:09AM (1 child)
Mmm... I'd say 50%. So not fun but not incapacitating. Funny bone is worse than a hit to the boobs but not as bad as a nut shot.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 15 2017, @03:18AM
You don't even have a funny bone, so what do you know about all this?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 15 2017, @03:16AM
"but we can be taught mental discipline without having to be randomly dropped to the floor"
Literally, or figuratively?
Good luck with an entire generation of candy assed whiny babies.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 15 2017, @03:20AM
So, you kicked her titless, dragged her out in the bushes, and demanded that she give you head? No wonder there are so many Azuma Hakumis in the world.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 15 2017, @05:16AM
I picked a cute lady. I pulled her toward me, intending to toss her somewhere. I fell on my ass, and she fell on top of me... nice if not for the knee on my balls.
**CRUNCH**
full weight, pretty much
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday October 15 2017, @10:38AM (1 child)
At a guess, I'd say it probably hurts almost equally for men and women to be kicked in the groin. The nerves may not all connect to the same structures, but it's a nerve-rich environment in either body. I'll stay with that presumption, until multiple women tell me that it doesn't hurt to be kicked in the groin area. The biggest difference is, a male's most sensitive parts protrude further, so make an easier target.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday October 15 2017, @11:42AM
Citations:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Su3ZFJcYOW0 [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PW_PqcwHGqE [youtube.com]
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(Score: 3, Informative) by maxwell demon on Sunday October 15 2017, @08:38AM
Yes, it's science: All others are about creation. Technology and engineering is about creation of useful things, arts is about creation of pleasant or thought-provoking things, and mathematics is about the creation of mathematical structures. Science, on the other hand, is about discovering the rules of the world as it is.
No wait, I think you actually meant technology. Science, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics are things you do. Technology is the result of doing something.
Oh no, wait, you mean Engineering. Science, Technology, Arts and Mathematics were already known in ancient times, while engineering is a relatively recent thing.
Or maybe you mean mathematics: It's the only of them which happens purely in your mind.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Sunday October 15 2017, @12:50PM (1 child)
How about they teach the right things in the classes that already exist? Actually teach the scientific method in science classes. Show why it works, and put it in historical context so children understand why it works better than the alternatives. Teach kids critical reasoning. Teach them logical thinking skills. Teach them the classic logical fallacies using examples. Show them real life, contemporary examples of societies that value mysticism, dogma, and tradition over reason. Show how it's working out for them.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday October 15 2017, @03:41PM
Are you crazy? In the end, they might decide not to buy Apple's iWhatever!
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.