I'm always curious about what audience Stephenson thinks he's writing for. Snow Crash and Diamond Age are pretty accessible and obviously have had a large influence, but starting with Crytopnomicon, into the Baroque Cycle and culminating in Anathem, his books seem to have become more and more an obscure fusion of modern sci-fi and western philosophy that I can't imagine caring about without a background in ancient Greek through renaissance period natural philosophy and mathematics, and there are very few schools catering to this kind of education anymore. I hope he has inspired other geeks like myself with an interest in these subjects. His books have interested me in reading the classics like Aristotle, Apollonius and Euclid, Newton, Galileo, Huygenz, Leibniz, Descartes etc.

I can't speak to his ability to inspire or dissuade young people from an interest in engineering and science, but they engendered in me a love for classic western thought that I probably would never have even been aware of otherwise.

Just doing a casual bit of research into this topic, and Monsanto seems to be the dominant force in the farming seed market and has faced lots of scrutiny over anti-competitive practices, and is currently under investigation by the DOJ.

A large portion of a farmers annual budget goes towards seed purchasing. Traditionally, farmers would save a portion of their harvest as seed for their next crop (I have no citation for this, but have heard this number is traditionally around 25-30%). Monsanto forces its buyers to sign an agreement to not reuse any of their seed from harvesting, and must buy entirely new seed each year. Traditional farmers using their own seed are having trouble with neighboring farmers GE strains infecting their own through cross pollenization, resulting in their being forced by Monsanto to purchase entirely new seed or face lawsuit, etc.

Vanity fair has a good article about the history of the company, their current influence on the farming economy and some of their more questionable practices.

Here's a blog by one of the teachers implementing Khan Academy in Los Altos - fairly interesting reading. http://lasdandkhanacademy.edublogs.org/

This has more to do with climbing a pay schedule than anything else. For example, the average starting salary for a teach with a Masters degree is about 10k higher than only a Bachelors. Most of the teachers I know who have gotten their Masters on the job have done it online and claim to have learned little to nothing useful for their occupation - it's a cheap, fairly non-time consuming approach to a massive pay bump.

As others have said, the question is too ambiguous even by normal /. poll standards. I'm interpreting it to mean a traditional 20-25:1 student to teacher ratio K-12 classroom (although we obviously have many broken districts where an insane ratio of as high as 60-70:1 exists).

At the moment, most teachers who are provided with laptops, electronic whiteboards, digital projectors and document cameras tend to use them as analogous replacements for - or supplemental to - traditional teaching methods.

The standardized curriculum enforced in most public school districts according to state and federal guidelines haven't changed much in the last fifty years, except to become more restrictive in the material that has to be covered and the manner in which it is covered. When teachers are forced to cover all of this material in preparation for the multitude of standardized tests their students have to take each year, they have little time to learn new technology or how to employ it in creative and fruitful ways. Exceptional teachers can always shine, even under the current system, but from my experience they see these curriculum guidelines and all of the attendant bullshit as obstacles to overcome in teaching their students.

I'm fascinated by the Khan Academy's approach, as in the example of the Los Altos, CA district that is experimenting with using the KA website and software (http://www.khanacademy.org/video/the-gates-notes--teachers-in-los-altos?topic=talks-and-interviews). Their idea was to have the students be given accounts on the website, and to largely replace in class instruction by the teacher with assigned videos as homework. The students would then be able to perform practice problems on the website in the classroom with the aid and supervision of a teacher, and learn new concepts at home. In this way, every student becomes more directly responsible for their own education, working at their own pace. In a more traditional teaching model, students who fell behind remained behind, as the teacher could not hold up the pace of instruction for them, and the students who easily grasped the material would be bored with nothing to do. Under this system, the teacher can easily see where each student is, helping the ones with problems on certain concepts while everyone else moves ahead according to their own abilities.

To my mind, this solves two of the major problems under the current system. It removes the pandering to the lowest common denominator, where instruction is aimed at a fairly low level for every student in the classroom, still missing those who really need help and holding back the rest who are easily capable of more challenging material. It also allows for extremely detailed analysis of where each student's capabilities currently lie, which is largely the function standardized testing purports to serve, but grossly fails at. A teacher can look on the classroom reporting suite, and see at a glance where the trouble spots are, how far the advanced students have gotten, and detailed breakdowns of practice sessions, such as how many minutes were spent on which videos, how many practice problems were answered correctly or incorrectly, how many times the student asked for hints, etc. With standardized testing, you only get a hazy snapshot of a students abilities at a given moment, influenced by how alert they are at the time they took the test (are they well fed and rested?) and how seriously they take the test (which is hard to do when they take as many as 20-30 a year). With the Khan Academy, the badges, points and awards offer an almost MMO achievement/leveling feel of entertainment and addiction, and a report at any given time exactly reflects a student's participation,

The problems are obvious.

Not all students have ready access to devices for viewing the videos outside of school, though many districts have adopted the one laptop per child initiative, and I think in the near future we'll easily be able to provide each child with a cheap tablet type computer such as the Rasberry Pi that can easily handle youtube videos.

Unmotivated students will possibly remain equally as unmotivated. But I think Salman Khan's opinion on the true nature of unmotivated students is largely correct. Once a student falls behind, and is unable to catch up on previous concepts, he loses any desire or motivation to pay attention. In Los Altos, he claims they saw that most of the students who started out struggling and behind the rest of their class eventually caught up or even passed the average by the end of term. It seems to me that there are few legitimate excuses for students failing in this setting, and little else that can reasonably be done for them - save holding them back a grade, which is now almost unheard of under No Child Left Behind.

This method of instruction is helpful for the hard sciences, but seems harder to implement with subjects like English/Grammar, History, Art, Music, which I feel are equally important for an educated citizen, but unfortunately seem to be viewed more and more as non-essential to preparing students for "entering the workforce".

No kidding. Just downloaded and played with it for a bit, this program is awesome! I think it serves as a great introductory step towards 3D modeling for children, learning how to navigate a simple 3D space in the context of positioning pieces, and most kids are already very familiar with lego pieces, not so much with vertices and polygons.

we're in for a bigger problem, where all of the lobbyists from the RIAA/MPAA et. al. realize they're better off tackling their goals in smaller portions, getting their congressman to tack on various pork projects scattered through different bills down the road that can avoid the kind of mass media attention we're able to bring to bear at the moment against a large, focussed piece of legislation - in other words, business as usual. Part of the dialogue going on at the moment needs to be about lobbying, and which congressman are in the pockets of various interests. They may realize SOPA is not worth the political backlash at the moment, but have no problem a few months down the road helping their boys out when the radar is clear. How do we parlay the current mainstream attention on this issue into a longer term vigilance against such attempts?

[Apologies for formatting, mod please delete above if possible, I'm new to /. posting and not sure how to do it myself]

I work for the local public school district as a tech responsible for setting up and maintaining computer labs and classroom and staff equipment, and every year we keep piling on more and more equipment -- for example, our classrooms now have two Macbooks for every teacher, one for their digital projector/whiteboard and one for their desk, document cameras, clickers, ipads/ipods and the like.

The majority of the teachers, save some of the younger under 30 crowd, tend to only use equipment that has some analogue to previous technology they grew up with (think using document cameras and digital projectors as replacements for the old projector overheads), and the vast majority goes unused or only infrequently used for the most rudimentary purposes. The amount of money being spent on technology for teachers that won't make use of it is staggering.

Even the younger teachers only scratch the surface of what can be done to engage their students with the technology they've been provided. In my opinion, some (most?) districts have a fire and forget attitude towards technology: they provide the equipment, but very little in the way of instructional support and software to use, such as device specific applications and online courseware.

And when you look at the ridiculously high prices for district wide purchases of licenses for these things, it's no wonder. Aside from Smartboard/Interwrite whiteboard lessons, there's little in the way of cheap or free and widely available instruction material developed for interactive classrooms, and until that changes, and the trailing generations of teachers retire, a lot of taxpayer money is being wasted - though a lot of this money comes from grants and government programs where the money needs to either be used or lost, and so unneccessary equipment is purchased.

I work for the local public school district as a tech responsible for setting up and maintaining computer labs and classroom and staff equipment, and every year we keep piling on more and more equipment -- for example, our classrooms now have two Macbooks for every teacher, one for their digital projector/whiteboard and one for their desk, document cameras, clickers, ipads/ipods and the like. The majority of the teachers, save some of the younger 30 crowd, tend to only use equipment that has some analogue to previous technology they grew up with (think using document cameras and digital projectors as replacements for the old projector overheads), and the vast majority goes unused or only infrequently used for the most rudimentary purposes. The amount of money being spent on technology for teachers that won't make use of it is staggering. Even the younger teachers only scratch the surface of what can be done to engage their students with the technology they've been provided. In my opinion, some (most?) districts have a fire and forget attitude towards technology: they provide the equipment, but very little in the way of instructional support and software to use, such as device specific applications and online courseware. And when you look at the ridiculously high prices for district wide purchases of licenses for these things, it's no wonder. Aside from Smartboard/Interwrite whiteboard lessons, there's little in the way of cheap or free and widely available instruction material developed for interactive classrooms, and until that changes, and the trailing generations of teachers retire, a lot of taxpayer money is being wasted.