These are the position papers and critic profiles I have in electronic form for the first diverse perspective debate in EDE 601. (If you are in EDE 302, see my previous post on this blog.) Click the thumbnail image to download them as needed. If you have an additional one for the first debate, please send it to me.

Case 1 Teacher Position Paper

Case 2 Teacher Position Paper

Case 3 Teacher Position Paper

Horace Mann Bond

Catharine Beecher

Allan Bloom

Madeline Cheek Hunter

Alfie Kohn

I was working with Jaime on the Fair Labor simulation, and we ran into this problem:

There will be multiple games, each with multiple users, but a user may belong to more than one game. She wanted to use a checkbox list to add and remove users from a game. So far so good -- it's a classic "has_and_belongs_to_many" problem, and the code is very concise. We made a join table, games_models, using the migration in my previous post. Then:

In the Game model:

has_and_belongs_to_many :users

In the User model

has_and_belongs_to_many :games

In the view (edit_game.rhtml):

<% form_tag :controller=>'main', :action=>'update_game', :id=>@game.id do %>

 <% for user in User.find(:all) %>

   <%= check_box_tag "game[user_ids][]", user.id, @game.users.include?(user) %>

   <%= user.name %>

 <% end %>

 <P><%= submit_tag 'Add' %></P>

<% end %>

In the controller:

	
def edit_game
  @game = Game.find(params[:id])
  @users = User.find(:all)
end
	
def update_game
  @game = Game.find(params[:id])
  @game.update_attributes(params[:game])
  redirect_to :action=>'edit_game', :id=>@game
end

So we made a join table the usual way and used "has_and_belongs_to_many" in the models, and everything was fine and dandy...except she needed to identify some of the roles as "leader" roles -- in other words, the HABTM relationship needed to contain additional information.

So we made a model called Member to hold the join table, and that was fine, but we no longer could use the magic that comes with HABTM. Instead, we needed to set up the relationships in the models manually, like this:

class Game < ActiveRecord::Base
	has_many :members, :dependent => true
	has_many :users, :through => :members
end

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
	has_many :members, :dependent => true
	has_many :games, :through => :members
end

class Member < ActiveRecord::Base
	belongs_to :user
	belongs_to :game 
end

That worked, sort of, but it turns out that the "game[user_ids][]" nomenclature goes with HABTM, and when we did it manually, it choked. Thankfully, we're not the first people to get stuck on this (see http://railsforum.com/viewtopic.php?id=803). We can write our own user_ids method, as follows, which we put in the Game model declaration (game.rb):

def user_ids=(user_ids)
  members.each do |mb|
    mb.destroy unless user_ids.include? mb.user_id
  end
     
  user_ids.each do |user_id|
     self.members.create(:user_id => user_id) unless members.any? { |d| d.user_id == user_id }
  end
end 

Whew!

Until now, if you wanted to get your hands (or your kids' hands) on one of the laptops being made for the "One Laptop Per Child" program, you basically had to be the government of a developing country. But for one week in November, individuals in the U.S. can buy one through the Give 1 Get 1 program: For $399 you buy 2 laptops, one for yourself, and one that is donated to a child in a developing nation. (The donation part is even tax deductible.) The laptop itself looks, well, really great, so it's a good bet they will sell out in far less than a week.

A particularly interesting and relevant column from web design curmudgeon extraordinaire, Jakob Nielsen. He gave test users the task of going to the U.S. Census Bureau homepage and looking for the current U.S. population. (Go ahead, try it now.)

It turns out that the information is right there in huge red numbers, but an amazing 86% of user could not complete the task successfully. (One even left the site and searched for the information on Google instead.) Nielsen attributes the low success rate to the violation of a couple simple but important design principles. Definitely worth keeping in mind!

I've been threatening Susanna with the prospect of becoming a full-blown coffee snob, but I haven't quite mustered the energy, not to mention the money. I think I may have a compromise, though: One day in Geneva a group of us happened across a Nespresso showroom, and lo and behold, the stuff is pretty good. And couldn't be easier. And not terribly expensive.

Of course, I had to see what the real coffee snobs on coffeegeek.com had to say, and amazingly enough, most liked it. The best was this review, which may be enough to seal the deal for me.