Meghan Daum: Bound by conventions of neither spelling nor grammar, nor by the need to put anything (plot, theme, typeface, anything) in context, the customer reviewer is so enthusiastic about his own opinions that he not only reviews diffusely and emphatically (showing no fear of the Caps Lock key), he reviews just about every person or thing he comes in contact with.
The whole phenomenon is supposed to coalesce into some kind of equal-opportunity jubilee. It’s supposed to be a healthy, if occasionally gratuitous, manifestation of democracy itself. And as much as I gripe, I’ll admit that it can be helpful to read what others have said about various products and services, though too often it seems as if it’s one guy with an ax to grind or a lot of guys who never quite explain themselves enough for me to figure out whether to believe them.
Joe Lynch is absolutely right about the sad decline of decent computing education in Britain. Qualifications in Britain are really subject to Gresham’s Law: bad A-levels drive out the good. When I was taking A-levels, it was pretty widely acknowledged that mathematics and law were the hardest. Now, put yourself in the position of a headteacher, faced with deciding whether or not to offer Applied ICT or Computing. The former is an absolute joke of a course, requiring little more than a pulse to pass. The latter requires familiarity both with standard applications like operating systems and officeware, but also relatively advanced use of databases, and basic programming in a high-level language. Which one would you, the headmaster, choose to offer, considering the potential success rates? Pick wisely - your decisions will be reflected in the league tables. Nobody seems to be making much of a fuss over the Key Skill-isation of British further education. Which is a shame. I previously wrote about this on 2007-03-01.
