I will keep on feeding my thoughts about Education, trying new things born from awesome Internet technology, and will never stop sharing. Finally, I will reach out to the local and online community, teach what I can, learn as much as I can.
Steve Jobs: I used to think that technology could help education. I’ve probably spearheaded giving away more computer equipment to schools than anybody else on the planet. But I’ve had to come to the inevitable conclusion that the problem is not one that technology can hope to solve. What’s wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a dent.
It’s a political problem. The problems are sociopolitical. The problems are unions. You plot the growth of the NEA [National Education Association] and the dropping of SAT scores, and they’re inversely proportional. The problems are unions in the schools. The problem is bureaucracy. I’m one of these people who believes the best thing we could ever do is go to the full voucher system.
I have a 17-year-old daughter who went to a private school for a few years before high school. This private school is the best school I’ve seen in my life. It was judged one of the 100 best schools in America. It was phenomenal. The tuition was $5,500 a year, which is a lot of money for most parents. But the teachers were paid less than public school teachers – so it’s not about money at the teacher level. I asked the state treasurer that year what California pays on average to send kids to school, and I believe it was $4,400. While there are not many parents who could come up with $5,500 a year, there are many who could come up with $1,000 a year.
If we gave vouchers to parents for $4,400 a year, schools would be starting right and left. People would get out of college and say, “Let’s start a school.” You could have a track at Stanford within the MBA program on how to be the businessperson of a school. And that MBA would get together with somebody else, and they’d start schools. And you’d have these young, idealistic people starting schools, working for pennies.
They’d do it because they’d be able to set the curriculum. When you have kids you think, What exactly do I want them to learn? Most of the stuff they study in school is completely useless. But some incredibly valuable things you don’t learn until you’re older – yet you could learn them when you’re younger. And you start to think, What would I do if I set a curriculum for a school?
God, how exciting that could be! But you can’t do it today. You’d be crazy to work in a school today. You don’t get to do what you want. You don’t get to pick your books, your curriculum. You get to teach one narrow specialization. Who would ever want to do that?
These are the solutions to our problems in education. Unfortunately, technology isn’t it. You’re not going to solve the problems by putting all knowledge onto CD-ROMs. We can put a Web site in every school – none of this is bad. It’s bad only if it lulls us into thinking we’re doing something to solve the problem with education.
Lincoln did not have a Web site at the log cabin where his parents home-schooled him, and he turned out pretty interesting. Historical precedent shows that we can turn out amazing human beings without technology. Precedent also shows that we can turn out very uninteresting human beings with technology.
It’s not as simple as you think when you’re in your 20s – that technology’s going to change the world. In some ways it will, in some ways it won’t.
现场细节:Android 2.2 的众多演示一个比一个抢眼球,主讲人 Vic Gundotra 很能损苹果,乔教主眼皮必跳,喷嚏必照五百岁来;当宣布现场每位与会者将免费获得最新款 HTC Evo 手机(支持4G信号;800万像素;720p高清视频录制;内置 Android 2.2)时,现场响起了照死里拍皮厚不怕疼般的掌声和吾王万岁万岁万万岁般的欢呼声,Vic Gundotra 对这一反应很满意,笑容很猥琐;乐极生悲的道理再一次在西方的舞台上获得验证,Google TV 的整场演示只能用“像屎一般糟糕”和“史诗级大FAIL”来形容,很难想像 Android 和 Google TV 这两场演示来自同一家公司;最后以 Eric Schmidt 为首的 CEO 们的紧急集合再一次说明了 Google TV 是一场商业秀,因为 TV 是一个不容忽视的战场,因为 Google 要将自家的 搜索 和 广告 的旗帜竖立在那里,所以有了 Google TV。
Chrome Web Store – 借助它,将来的 Chrome 可以类比于 Apple 的 Safari + iTunes Store。为免费惯了的 Web 应用创造出一个可盈利(广告+收费)的分发平台,相对于 Apple 用心良苦的控制,在 Google 这里开发者可以使用任意语言来开发 Web 应用,比如备受争议的 Flash 或最具潜力的 HTML5。所谓的 Store,关键在于付费是否便捷,我希望它能够逐步采用尽可能多的付费方式,比如信用卡直接付款、Paypal、Amazon payment、自家的 Checkout 以及未来更安全、便捷、易用的新付费形式。同理,我希望,购买的 Web 应用不仅能在 Chrome 或 Chrome OS 上使用,在其他先进的浏览器里——比如 Firefox 和 Opera ——也能用。总之,Chrome Web Store 应在自由无序的 Web 云上构建出适合最终用户体验来自最优秀开发者的产品的网上商店。
VP8 and WebM – <video>是 HTML5 的重要组成部分,因此需要有一个高质、开源的视频格式与之匹配,VP8 便为此而生,它由 Google 收购的 On2 团队开发,这个团队在视频编码领域里相当抢眼,他们过去开发的 VP3\VP6\VP7 分别演化为开源的 Theora、被 Flash 支持的视频编码以及 Skype 多人会议视频编码,从数字迭代可见,这回的 VP8 是目前最高质的视频编码技术(更多技术细节见这里)。可喜的是,众多软硬件开发商和网络服务加入此开源项目,即 WebM(an open web media project),比如软件公司 Firefox(Mozilla’s) 和 Flash(Adobe’s)(相对的,没有Apple的影子),比如硬件公司 AMD 和 Nvidia(相对的,他们的死对头,Intel 和 ATI 没有出现在队列中),比如全球最大的视频分享网站 YouTube。WebM 的意义在于,在互联网技术的世界里,视频、音频和文本终于平等了。试用:Opera/Firefox/Chromium + Youtube HTML5。有迹象表明,IE 也会支持 H.264 和 VP8,不过得等 IE9 发布……
Google Buzz API – Google Buzz 我用的越来越不积极了,但我依然看好它的技术层,希望借助此 API,未来能涌现出更优秀的用户体验的 Buzz 客户端(包括桌面\网页\手机),至少目前来看,Gmail以及这些东西,不咋的。
Google Feed API with Push – 这个太 code 了,细节我讲不清楚,但我很喜欢它做的事——Push,即无需刷新页面实时推送新信息,其实这个 FriendFeed 老早就做到了,但它被封了不是吗,所以无法应用到我的blog上(在它被封之前,我曾经用过一阵子)。我希望未来有基于它和 Google Buzz API 的 WordPress 插件,这样的话,你——>我的博客(境外服务器)——>Google Feed/Buzz,就完美了。