Computer scientist and educator. Creator of ChessCraft. Senior scientific programmer at Environment Canada.
Posted by Stuart Spence in Blog
There's a lot of serious and legitimate concern lately about the development of autonomous weapons.
Humanity nearly has the technology to mass produce machines which can target and choose to kill humans, all without human intervention. So a factory worker turns on a machine, and then it …
Posted by Stuart Spence in Blog
Prepare to be amused and blown away. If you're a university student you may think your department is bad, but McGill's education department is worse. For several years now McGill education students report having the most boring, most random, most tuition-wasting, and most impossible-to-fail courses. This makes me really sad …
Posted by Stuart Spence in Blog
This post gives more details on the surveys and methodology, if you're interested. I decided it was too boring for a general audience so I cut it out of my original post. But you are an eager beaver! So here you go. And feel free to send me a message …
Posted by Stuart Spence in Blog
I recently got an email from the dean of education. Essentially he says that I'm annoying:
Dear Mr. Spencer
It has come to my attention that you have written repeatedly to our Associate Dean, among others across the university, about technology issues in the Faculty of Education, and also about …
Posted by Stuart Spence in Blog
Have you ever noticed that for-profit companies often advertise free or cheap software licenses to students, teachers, and schools?
Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, and countless others all offer deals on their software and services to schools. Why do they do that?
This post is written for educators, not tech experts …
Posted by Stuart Spence in Blog
In my previous post I talked about the McGill education students that cannot calculate an average, but I glossed over talking about the lecturer for that course. We've all heard about bad professors, but I have proof this professor was beyond merely bad. This story also includes what happened when …
Posted by Stuart Spence in Blog
This is a story about McGill education students that cannot calculate an average, and the professor who admitted he didn't care. Finally, I explain why this is important.
I hope that by telling this embarrassing story I will contribute to raising the standards at McGill and for Quebec teacher certification …
Posted by Stuart Spence in Blog
There were some concerns about my aggressive approach in my post where I complain about how poor the education technology courses are at McGill university. Before making noise, did I talk to my professors? What about the department, or the dean?
Well that's exactly what I did for two years …
Posted by Stuart Spence in Blog
Get ready to go on a magical journey where we discover just how old a "modern" textbook on education technology is. It says it's published in 2012 but don't let that fool you! Here it is:
This is the textbook currently used by McGill's "EDPT 200 -Integrating Educational Technology in …
Posted by Stuart Spence in Blog
Before I put this post online I sent a draft to the professor, Sam Bruzzese, so he'd have a chance to respond. He did!
Seeing as I brought these issues to his attention while I took the course, I originally made a list of possible reasons …