As I travel around the world visiting Alison Learners and Graduates, now in 195 countries worldwide, I am often asked, “Is Alison your wife’s name?” or more simply “How did you come up with the name Alison?”. The story goes as follows: When I first came up with the vision of a website that could teach for free anyone, anywhere, on any subject, at any time, I knew that coming up with the right name was very important. As the old Chinese sage Confucius was reported to have said (and I paraphrase!) “Calling something by its right name is the beginning of all wisdom”. The name of the project/website had to have certain basic qualities:
(i) It had to be a simple name easily said. The name phonetically had to roll off any tongue in any language, as our goal from day one was to have a large global website with learners studying in every country.
(ii) It had to be a generic, benign word to begin with – something like “Google” that could morph into many things. What I did not want to call the website was “Free Online Learning.org” as what we were planning to build was so much more than providing free learning alone. (iii) It should begin with the letter “A”. It’s one of the most basic marketing strategies, as starting with “A” gets you placed naturally at the top of many listings. I remember some years later listening to an interview with Jack Ma at the World Economic Forum in Davos, in which he said he came up with the name Alibaba partly also because of the letter “A”! There was another reason for the “A” letter: the original company (which sold IT Desktop Training courses online) was called “Advance Learning”, so from there, I got the “A” and the “L”. When I thought of the “Alison” name, I had to look to see if the domain was taken, and indeed it was, by a very nice American lady by the name of: you guessed it, “Alison”. Not only is the right name important, but having the matching domain/URL equally so. I found out that “Alison” was living in New Jersey, USA. I reached out and got a speedy reply. No, she wasn’t interested. “I like having this domain name” she said, and who would not like to have their own matching namesake domain for themselves? Unsurprised, I persisted. Alison told me she had over 100 inquiries from China alone trying to buy the name. Then she asked me the golden question after some friendly exchanges: “What do you want it for?” I knew I had a chance when she asked that question. As carefully as I could, I wrote out my vision for educating the world for free. I shared with her some of my background; that I had already started a number of web-based businesses, and how the social mission and impact of what we could do was what excited me most. She asked for some time to think about it. She really did like having that domain name! Sometime early in 2007, I received the email I was hoping for. Yes, we could have the domain name. A month later, for a once-off payment of $10,000, and a dinner and show on Broadway (Yes, how theatrical!), the domain was ours. While we notched up our 13 millionth registered learner a few days ago, we are still at the beginning of our free global learning journey. I have not been in contact with Alison for many years, but I hope she is happy with how we have used her precious domain name around the world. It reminds me how many acts of goodwill around the world have helped us to get this far. What’s in a name? Well, everything. You make it become something that in time stands alone. We hope the Alison name will become even more synonymous with free learning and empowerment in the years ahead. For my part, I invite you too to help build the brand of Alison by telling someone new about Alison when you can! Hope you enjoyed the story! You can follow me on Twitter and Linkedin. Best Wishes, Mike
The following course in Creativity and Innovation is provided in its entirety by Atlantic International University’s“Open Access Initiative” which strives to make knowledge and education readily available to those seeking advancement regardless of their socio-economic situation, location or other previously limiting factors. The University’s Open Courses are free and do not require any purchase or registration, they are open to the public.
The course in Creativity and Innovation contains the following:
Lessons in video format with explaination of theoratical content.
Complementary activities that will make research more about the topic , as well as put into practice what you studied in the lesson. These activities are not part of their final evaluation.
Texts supporting explained in the video.
The Administrative Staff may be part of a degree program paying up to three college credits. The lessons of the course can be taken on line Through distance learning. The content and access are open to the public according to the “Open Access” and ” Open Access ” Atlantic International University initiative. Participants who wish to receive credit and / or term certificate , must register as students.
Lesson 1: WHAT IS NLP?
Neuro: Our experiences are stored through our nervous system and our five senses. Memory is constructed of images, sounds, tastes, sensations. Emotional states are determined by these sensations (the quality of our mental cinema). ·
Linguistics: and manifested through our verbal diction as well as our nonverbal language. Indeed, it is through language that we give meaning to what we experience. Thus each language is a new way of organizing the world.
We define management innovation as the invention and implementation of a management practice, process, structure, or technique that is new to the state of the art and is intended to further organizational goals. Adopting an intraorganizational evolutionary perspective, we examine the roles of key change agents inside and outside the organization in driving and shaping four processes—motivation, invention, implementation, and theorization and labeling—that collectively define a model of how management innovation comes about.
The motivation phase refers to the preconditions and facilitating factors that lead individuals in a company to be motivated to experiment with a new management innovation. It addresses the question “Under what conditions, or in what circumstances, do executives deem existing management practices to be inadequate for their needs?” The answer to this question is far from straightforward because it is necessary not only to identify the conditions under which executives search for new management innovations but also to specify the circumstances in which they choose not to adopt one of the existing solutions that can be obtained in prefabricated form from the so-called management fashion-setting community (Abrahamson, 1996). For management innovation to occur, in other words, the market for management fashions has to fail.
Lesson 4: History of Innovation and Entrepreneurship in a Global Economy
When Peter Drucker wrote about innovation and entrepreneurship in the mid 1980’s (Innovation and Entrepreneurship Principles and Practices, 1985), America employed 10 million more people than had been predicted, and its dynamic economy was headed toward a primarily entrepreneurially inspired, innovative business culture. There was an abundance of young risk takers who were willing to endure the ruthlessly long hours required by entrepreneurial opportunities, especially because of the potential success they offered. At the same time, big business dominated the corporate world and benefitted from a highly loyal workforce.
The story of leadership begins not all that long ago in the late 1800s. Common thoughts back then suggested that leaders were born and not made. These perceptions originated out of an observation that many great leaders possessed something out of the ordinary—natural, inborn characteristics that allowed them to excel above the rest (what was ultimately called the “Great Man” leadership theory). This perception translated into limited opportunities for leadership among the common people, as they were not endowed with these “special” leadership characteristics.
Enhancing the innovative ability in organizations is one of the most important levers to increasing profitability and growth in organizations. To illustrate this, three separate studies undertaken by top American consulting organizations, one done by Strategos (2004) and another two published by Arthur D. Little (1994, 2005) suggest that there is huge untapped potential to improve profit growth through innovation management.
Lesson 7: What is Creative Training & Development?
The goal of training is for employees to master the knowledge, skill, and behaviours emphasized in training programs and to apply them to their day-to-day activities. Recently it has been acknowledged that to impart a competitive advantage, training has to involve more than just basic skill development and training to gain a competitive advantage.
Creative Marketing is defined as the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large. Kotler and Armstrong also defined marketing as the process by which companies create value for customers and build strong customer relationships in order to capture value from customers in return. In this case marketing can be considered as “an organizational effort to create and retain profitable customers through positive relationship building between the organisation and its internal as well as external customers in a socially responsible manner“. In order to create and retain profitable customers, the marketing concept has become the way of thinking with the customer located at the centre of the business.
This lesson deals with the first two components of a marketing mix: product strategy and pricing strategy. Marketers broadly define a product as a bundle of physical, service, and symbolic attributes designed to satisfy consumer wants. Therefore, product strategy involves considerably more than producing a physical good or service. It is a total product concept that includes decisions about package design, brand name, trademarks, warranties, guarantees, product image, and new-product development.
A business model articulates the logic and provides data and other evidence that demonstrates how a business creates and delivers value to customers. It also outlines the architecture of revenues, costs, and profits associated with the business enterprise delivering that value. The issues related to good business model design are all interrelated, and lie at the core of the fundamental question asked by business strategists how does one build a sustainable competitive advantage and turn a super normal profit? In short, a business model defines how the enterprise creates and delivers value to customers, and then converts payments received to profits.
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Atlantic International University 800-993-0066 (Gratis en EUA) 808-924-9567 (Internacional)
A través de esta iniciativa, la universidad Atlantic International University (AIU) busca eliminar las barreras que existen actualmente en el acceso a la educación, información y trabajos de investigación. La universidad AIU le da mucho valor e importancia al conocimiento y aprendizaje de los individuos y espera que este curso pueda tener una gran repercusión en las vidas de nuestros estudiantes y la humanidad en general alrededor del mundo, quienes tienen la inclinación natural hacia la búsqueda de nuevo conocimiento. Esperamos que este curso en Historia de la Arquitectura 1 y otros cursos gratis, disponibles por parte de esta iniciativa de acceso abierto, permitan el avance y actualización a quienes lo deseen.
El curso Historia de la Arquitectura 1 contiene lo siguiente:
Lecciones en formato de videoconferencias con las que se explica el contenido teórico.
Actividades complementarias que le harán investigar más acerca del tema, así como, poner en práctica lo estudiado en la lección. Estas actividades no forman parte de su evaluación final.
Examen final para evaluación global del curso.
El curso de Historia de la Arquitectura 1 a puede formar parte de un programa de titilación abonando hasta tres créditos universitarios. Las lecciones del curso se pueden llevar en línea através de estudio a distancia. Los contenidos y el acceso están abiertos al publico en función de la iniciativa “Open Access” o “Acceso Abierto” de Atlantic International University. Participantes que desean recibir crédito y/o certificado de termino, deben registrarse como alumnos (Conocer mas de AIU Acceso Abrierto).
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Atlantic International University 800-993-0066 (Gratis en EUA) 808-924-9567 (Internacional)
Codecademy’s very own Nick Duckwiler (left) and Ryan Tuck from Warby Parker (right) in our office. (📷: Mitch Boyer)
Last month, Codecademy and Warby Parker came together to work on a special Learn SQL from Scratch Capstone Project. It was during this time when I met Ryan Tuck, a Data Engineer at Warby, who played a major part in this partnership. So when he decided to drop by our office for the final QA round, I had to break out my notebook and ask some questions. Enjoy.
Hey Ryan, let’s start off with a question I’ve had for a while — what is a Data Engineer? (Is it similar to a Data Analyst or a Software Engineer?)
At Warby Parker, data engineers are responsible for creating and maintaining the plumbing required to support the data and reporting needs of the business. We use software engineering practices to automate the work of data cleaning, normalizing, and model building so that data is always ready to be consumed by data analysts in every department.
What languages/frameworks do you use at Warby?
On data engineering, we use Python as our general purpose programming language, as do most of the other teams in our Technology department. When it comes to databases, we use PostgreSQL for the majority of our SQL needs, and are beginning to use Amazon Athena and Google BigQuery for some of our larger datasets. We use Looker as our exclusive business intelligence entry point to all of this data.
What are some of the projects you worked on?
I’ve had the privilege of working with a lot of of smart people in every department at our company to help them solve their varied data needs, from reconciling financial data with the Accounting team to automating and modeling standardized performance metrics for our team of over 200 customer experience advisors.
As part of a team of five supporting the data needs of a rapidly growing company, I’ve tried where possible to focus on helping our analysts solve their own problems. This includes helping people learn Python and commit to our codebase, guiding the creation of data models in SQL, and encouraging people to submit pull requests to add features in Looker, our BI tool.
Seeing dozens of otherwise “non-technical” colleagues opening up PRs on a daily basis, and consequently being part of the democratization of tech that we value at Warby Parker, is probably the most rewarding “project” I’ve been a part of.
One project finished recently during our first annual “Hackweek” is called Pipes, which allows anyone at the company to easily move large amounts of data from wherever to wherever (Looker, Google Sheets, PostgreSQL, BigQuery, etc) on a regular cadence, or manually through a simple one-line chatbot interface. The adoption has been overwhelmingly positive and we’re looking to grow this sort of tooling out even more.
“We use software engineering practices to automate the work of data cleaning, normalizing, and model building so that data is always ready to be consumed by data analysts in every department.”
What got you into the data field?
I’ve always been drawn to analytical fields like math, and became pretty proficient in Excel during some internships in college. Once I had learned to program and learned more about data science and its applications in artificial intelligence, I knew that anything I could do to immerse myself in the world of data would be a step in the right direction.
Three and a half years ago, I landed a job as a junior software engineer at Warby Parker not fully knowing what I was in for, but am so glad I got the opportunity to help build tools to support an interesting and ever-changing data-driven culture here.
Where did you learn SQL and Python?
I had a background in C++, and was exposed to Python through an Intro to Data Science course. When Warby Parker hired me onto the Data team in 2015, I had never written a SQL query in my life, but picked it up quickly and within a few months started up internal SQL training classes, which I still teach on a monthly basis.
What does your tattoo say?
The ultimate cheatsheet.
This is Bayes’ Theorem, which is an equation that describes how to update probabilities given new evidence. Two summers ago I worked on building a tool to help predict weekly fantasy football performance. Some colleagues suggested a Bayesian approach would be appropriate, since there aren’t really enough data points in an NFL season to be able to use statistical approaches that require larger datasets, and I’d want to regularly update my predictions after each player’s latest performance.
I did a deep dive into understanding the (simple) math underlying Bayes’ Theorem and came out of that experience with a whole new worldview, understanding my entire knowledge of the world as a big and intricate probabilistic model that I was continuously updating with every experience I ever have. It was pretty transformative, and I figured that was worth a tattoo.
What is a concept in SQL/Python that’s essential to your work?
Donald Knuth said, “Premature optimization is the root of all evil.” I’ve generally found this to be true, and try to live by it in my work. For example, I’ll generally prefer to keep a data model simple by rebuilding it for all time on a daily basis using a single SQL query instead of making a more complicated model that requires iteratively adding to a table, keeping track of state, updated timestamps, when something last ran, etc.
A wise man once said, “Duplicating data makes things go fast,” but databases are already impressively fast to begin with, without implementing anything to improve performance. Ultimately, I almost always approach a problem thinking about optimizing for my time over machine time, for readability over performance, and for introducing as little cognitive overhead as is required by the problem at hand. Only once performance issues or readability issues present themselves will some code be worth a rewrite.
Last question! Since you wrote Warby Parker’s internal SQL training courses, I know there gotta be some inner Curriculum Developer in you. Can you teach a SQL concept in 2 minutes?
Sure! Have you ever written a query that yields some result set and you think, “I’d love to query the stuff I just produced like it was a table?” Enter the WITH clause.
Suppose I have a mega query that gives the transaction summaries:
select
transactions.date as transaction_date,
sum(items.price) as total_cost,
count(*) as number_of_items
from
transactions
inner join
customers
on
customers.id = transactions.customer_id
inner join
transaction_items
on
transactions.id = transaction_items.transaction_id
inner join
items
on
items.id = transaction_items.item_id
Using WITH, I can create a temporary table within my query that I can SELECT from and treat it just like a regular old table.
I will put everything from the previous query in a parentheses and use WITH to give it the name transaction_summaries.
Then I’ll apply the date and customer filtering down below for a more readable query, to separate out all the JOIN logic from the actual WHERE filters that I want to apply on that data.
with transaction_summaries as (
select
transactions.date as transaction_date,
sum(items.price) as total_cost,
count(*) as number_of_items
from
transactions
inner join
customers
on
customers.id = transactions.customer_id
inner join
transaction_items
on
transactions.id = transaction_items.transaction_id
inner join
items
on
items.id = transaction_items.item_id
)
select
*
from
transaction_summaries
where
first_name = 'beyonce'
and
transaction_date > '2018–01–01'
order by
total_cost desc
limit
5
If you’re familiar with subqueries, this does a similar thing but makes the SQL far more readable, even if your query isn’t quite as performant as it would have been. This is essentially an implementation of the mantra “Don’t Repeat Yourself” that’s common in the world of programming.
Incredible. And love the SQL styling! 😍
Huge shout out to Ryan and the whole Warby Parker team for making this partnership happen. Special hat tips for behind-the-scenes support from:
A Day in the Life of a Software Engineer (via Life of Luba)
With Airbnb came a revolution of sorts in the world of vacation travel and culture. We sat down with Luba Yudasina, a YouTuber, an opera singer, and a Software Engineer on the Airbnb’s Homes Platform team, to discuss software engineering and her programming journey—from Codecademy to Airbnb!
Hey Luba, let’s start with the basics! What does a Software Engineer on the Platform team do at Airbnb?
Homes Platform’s mission is to create the building blocks to power all Homes categories. Any project undertaken by our team should be reusable and extensible in some way. This means that as a backend engineer, I have a lot of opportunities to work on impactful technical projects that create systems and services to support Homes, as well as collaborate across teams to come up with the best architectural decisions and designs.
Recently, our team wrote a blog post on classifying Room Types into categories using Machine Learning and computer vision. The room-type classification problem largely resembles the ImageNet classification problem, except our team’s model outcomes are customized room-types.
After a few experiments with various models, the team chose ResNet50 due to its good balance between model performance and computation time. To make it compatible with our use case, we added two extra fully connected layers and a Softmax activation in the end.
Let’s rewind a little bit. Coming from a chemical engineering background in college, how did you make the switch into programming?
I went to the University of Waterloo in Canada—a university with the biggest co-op program in the world. Co-op means that to obtain a bachelor’s degree you must complete a certain number of internships. If you are in Engineering at Waterloo, you must complete 5 internships to graduate.
In my first and second years, I interned at chemical engineering companies and afterwards I couldn’t see myself working in the field full-time. That’s why I’m particularly grateful that I studied at Waterloo: if not for co-op, I probably would not have realized I didn’t want to work in chemical engineering until getting a full-time job after graduation.
I happened to have a lot of friends in Computer Science and Software Engineering right when I realized Chem Eng wasn’t for me. They really encouraged me to try coding, and when I decided to follow their lead I never looked back! My first online programming course was Web Development on Codecademy 🙂
“It’s a really cool time to be a software engineer and even cooler to be a female software engineer, because this is the time when women start to embrace their own unique identities and be ok with not being ‘one of the dudes.'” -Luba Yudasina
When I decided I wanted to learn computer science on my own, my goal was to get an internship in the field because working as a software engineer at a tech company would be the best test to really know if it was for me.
I happened to be in Munich, Germany on academic exchange for a whole year when I was learning how to code, so I hustled as much as I could while being there to get experience to learn quicker and have something to put down on my tech resume.
Almost immediately after arriving in Germany, I got a part time job as a developer at a game publishing company. I had a good friend in Computer Science at my German university: her and I ended up working on an Android app as a side project, etc. When I was ready, I started preparing for technical interviews. I then leveraged my network to refer me to companies and do mock technical interviews with me.
Yelp was really random though—a Yelp recruiter looked at my LinkedIn profile and didn’t even message me, but I messaged them anyway asking about internship opportunities, and that’s how I got my interview there!
Airbnb HQ in San Franciso
What is an essential app/item in your day-to-day?
Code searching! A lot of software engineering is problem solving and a lot of it is understanding other people’s code and the reasoning behind writing it a certain way. Searching through the codebases is almost essential to my day to day. Whenever I build something new or build on top of already existing tech, I need to understand how it works and is written, and code search is vital to this.
At Airbnb we use Google’s Codesearch for these purposes, but developers (myself included) also frequently use their IDEs to search for relevant code. I mostly use RubyMine or IntelliJ (depending on the codebase I’m working with).
In your videos, you’ve mentioned the intersection of gender and technology. Can you speak a bit more about that?
It’s a really cool time to be a software engineer and even cooler to be a female software engineer, because this is the time when women start to embrace their own unique identities and be ok with not being “one of the dudes.”
I think it’s particularly important to redefine the stereotypes, and I hope that with my own example I can show young girls and women interested in the field that you don’t have to give up your feminine side to be a software engineer and still be into fashion, or makeup, or art (I personally sing opera) and have other interests outside of coding and be successful in the field.
Before we wrap up, do you have anything else you would like to say to our learners?
Don’t be discouraged, learn and absorb as much as you can! If you don’t understand a concept or can’t build a project right away, know that with practice, perseverance and concentration you will get there!
Take advantage of such amazing tools as Codecademy that are there for you to take and learn. Learning anything new can be frustrating, but knowing that you can do it, staying curious, asking questions and not losing your motivation is the key to success.
Huge shoutout to Luba for this insightful interview. It’s always incredibly moving to see a Codecademy learner go on to do bigger things. Go subscribe to her YouTube channel, Life of Luba.
And thank you to the whole Homes Platform/Engineering team at Airbnb for the support. Check out their wonderful open source projects on airbnb.io.
Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.
Last August, I was struck by a news article reporting that a historical marker near Glendora, Miss., honoring Emmett Till had repeatedly been vandalized. Erected in 2007 at the spot on the Tallahatchie River where the 14-year-old Emmett’s body was recovered after his brutal lynching in the summer of 1955, it was first replaced in 2008, after someone tore it down. Then, over several years, more than 100 rounds of bullets were fired into it. In June 2018, it was replaced a second time — and by July it had been marred by bullets yet again.
Thinking about the juxtaposition of the vandalism with the historical significance of Emmett’s murder — which shook America and profoundly shaped the civil rights movement, spurring Rosa Parks to refuse to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Ala., three months later — I became interested in how the local community felt about Emmett Till and how he was remembered in the Mississippi Delta region.
As a video journalist on The Times’s Immersive desk, I am constantly looking for new ways to tell deeply reported stories through the emerging mediums of VR (virtual reality) and AR (augmented reality). So I teamed up with Lauretta Charlton, The Times’s Race/Related editor, and Audra D.S. Burch, a national enterprise correspondent, to explore the issue of cultural reckoning over public memory.
We soon learned that in recent years local Delta residents had been fighting to preserve Emmett’s legacy. Many were focused on the future of Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market in Money, Miss., where Emmett’s encounter with the white shopkeeper Carolyn Bryant led to his kidnapping and killing by her husband, Roy Bryant, and Roy’s half brother, J.W. Milam. While groups have fought for years to restore the building — now a ruin — they have not been able to reach a deal with the owners, whose father served as a juror in the murder trial.
But there are several other sites with physical structures related to the case, including the barn in Drew, Miss., where Emmett was beaten and tortured, and the bridge in Glendora from which his body is believed to have been thrown into the river. As Audra described it to me, Emmett’s kidnapping and lynching “unfolded in a terror trail across three towns in three counties.”
To examine Emmett Till’s legacy in those three towns, we took a multimedia approach — combining present-day on-the-ground reporting with archival research, and overlaying 360-degree video with images from the 1955 case, for an interactive article; and also producing a virtual reality documentary.
VR and 360 video are experiential tools that we use to create a sense of presence, space or scale. As this project was focused on the physical remnants of Emmett’s story, and how these sites are being memorialized — the presence of the past — we chose to use immersive elements to illustrate that concept.
This was Audra’s first time working with the medium. “I had to put away years of distancing myself from stories and open myself to a more intimate storytelling experience,” she said. “That meant actually appearing in some footage but also learning how to quickly move or duck for clean shots.”
“What’s so powerful is the ability to carry us back to 1955, beyond the printed words,” she told me after watching the footage. “I felt like I was completely immersed in a history that happened before I was born.”
We began by exploring what archival news clippings, photos, video and audio were available for each of the sites connected to the case. Audra and I then traveled to Mississippi for most of a week with my Immersive team colleague Tim Chaffee, who filmed the sites so we could match the archival photos with 360 video.
For the VR documentary, we created a composite of the archival material to remind viewers of Emmett’s story and its impact on history. Designing and editing this part of the project took months of work by Nicole Fineman, a Times graphics producer, who physically cut up and arranged news clippings and photos before transforming her vision via Adobe After Effects editing software and employing line animation to grab viewers’ attention.
We hoped to convey how the debate over Emmett’s memory has “played out over the decades,” as Audra put it in her article.
The Mississippi activists we interviewed remain committed to preserving the historical record despite the vandalism. Patrick Weems, co-founder of the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, told us, “It’s been a struggle to keep those signs up, but we think it’s part of the front line of this tug of war between memory and how wenegotiate our past and future.”
Follow the @ReaderCenter on Twitter for more coverage highlighting your perspectives and experiences and for insight into how we work.
What is the most important thing you have learned in school? How has this knowledge affected your life? How do you think it will help your success in the future?
A few years ago, the leaders of the College Board, the folks who administer the SAT college entrance exam, asked themselves a radical question: Of all the skills and knowledge that we test young people for that we know are correlated with success in college and in life, which is the most important? Their answer: the ability to master “two codes” — computer science and the U.S. Constitution.
Since then they’ve been adapting the SATs and the College Board’s Advanced Placement program to inspire and measure knowledge of both. Since the two people who led this move — David Coleman, president of the College Board, and Stefanie Sanford, its chief of global policy — happen to be people I’ve long enjoyed batting around ideas with, and since I thought a lot of students, parents and employers would be interested in their answer, I asked them to please show their work: “Why these two codes?”
Their short answer was that if you want to be an empowered citizen in our democracy — able to not only navigate society and its institutions but also to improve and shape them, and not just be shaped by them — you need to know how the code of the U.S. Constitution works. And if you want to be an empowered and adaptive worker or artist or writer or scientist or teacher — and be able to shape the world around you, and not just be shaped by it — you need to know how computers work and how to shape them.
With computing, the internet, big data and artificial intelligence now the essential building blocks of almost every industry, any young person who can master the principles and basic coding techniques that drive computers and other devices “will be more prepared for nearly every job,” Coleman and Sanford said in a joint statement explaining their initiative. “At the same time, the Constitution forms the foundational code that gives shape to America and defines our essential liberties — it is the indispensable guide to our lives as productive citizens.”
Students, read the entire Opinion piece, then tell us:
— In your opinion, what are the most important things students should learn in school?
— Do you agree with the leaders of the College Board, as explained by Mr. Friedman, that knowledge of coding and the U.S. Constitution are the most critical skills and knowledge young people will need to be successful in college and in life? What aspects of their argument do you find most convincing or effective? Which aspects are less so?
— How much do you know about coding and the Constitution? Does the column persuade you to pursue these subjects more fully? Why or why not?
— Does your school currently teach or emphasize these subjects?
— Mr. Friedman proposes two codes for success in college and life; are there other skills or knowledge that are equally important, in your opinion?
— What are the most important skills and knowledge you have learned in school? What class has been the most beneficial to you?
— How much is your school preparing you for your future?
— Mr. Friedman concludes his column with the following paragraphs:
Sanford grew up in Texas and was deeply affected as a kid watching video of the African-American congresswoman Barbara Jordan arguing the case against Richard Nixon in Watergate. What she remembered most, said Sanford, was how Jordan’s power “emanated from her command of the Constitution.
“Understanding how government works is the essence of power. To be a strong citizen, you need to know how the structures of our government work and how to operate within them.” Kids are getting it: An A.P. U.S. Government and Politics class at Hightstown High School in New Jersey was credited in a Senate committee report with contributing content to a bill, the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Collection Act, which was signed into law last month.
Sanford cites it as a great example of her mantra: “‘Knowledge, skills and agency’ — kids learn things, learn how to do things and then discover that they can use all that to make a difference in the world.”
How important do you think the last part of the equation is: agency? Has your school encouraged you to use your knowledge and skills to make a positive difference in the world? If yes, please explain. If no, do you think your school should?
Students 13 and older are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.
On Feb. 15, thousands of students across Europe walked out of schools in a coordinated protest to demand action on climate change. These demonstrations were inspired by an unlikely role model: Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old activist, who has been cutting class weekly since September to stage sit-ins at the Swedish Parliament and demand government action to address climate change.
In December 2018, Greta was invited to give a speech at the United Nations Climate Change COP24 Conference. Watch it below, and then answer the following questions:
• What stands out to you about Greta?
• Which lines in her speech did you find the most impactful and why?
• Do you think youth activists, like Greta, can make a difference in the world? Why or why not?
1. The author begins the article by writing, “It’s complicated being Greta.” What evidence does she give in the following paragraphs to support that statement? Why is being Greta so complicated?
2. What cause is Greta advocating and how is she promoting it?
3. What are some of Greta’s most notable character traits? How do these traits make her an effective leader? According to her, how do they also make being a leader hard?
4. Why did Greta become an activist for climate change?
5. Greta has suffered from depression throughout her adolescence. What has helped her through it?
6. What kind of impact has her activism had on her family and the world?
7. How has Greta’s public role changed her life? Give three examples.
Finally, tell us more about what you think:
What do you think about Greta and her fight to stop climate change?
What issues or causes are you most passionate about? If you were to organize a campaign to bring attention to one of them, what might that look like? What changes would you be willing to make in your personal life to support your cause? How could you spread awareness about the issue to your family, your community and the world? What actions might you take to bring about change?
What impact do you think your efforts could have on your own life? On the world?
I’ll be watching on Sunday, when the Grammys air on CBS, but with thoroughly limited expectations. The Grammy show strives each year to keep up with what just happened in music and to ameliorate its past errors. But after a while, blundering along just isn’t funny anymore.
… Music is the most nimble of mass-audience art forms. Now it can be recorded alone on a computer and released immediately online, and it evolves fast, constantly pulling in ideas from the cultural margins, whether that’s beats from Caribbean sound systems or murky, disconsolate SoundCloud rap. The Grammys’ mandate is to sift through the welter of music released every year, rewarding merit and recognizing innovation (though not, strictly speaking, from the past year, but from the preceding Oct. 1 to Sept. 30, which can make some nominations seem ancient).
