Saying that EdX is “the biggest change in education since the invention of the printing press” ignores the fact that lectures are often the least educational aspect of college.
The flipped classroom has arrived in higher education.
Posting this here because TED won’t post it on their site.
While overestimating the value of competition can lead to less, not more, innovation, underestimating the value of cooperation tends to discourage the exploration of possibilities for creative interaction. With escalating costs, limited resources and growing political concern about student debt, institutions should be developing innovative ways to cooperate that will prove to be mutually beneficial, in the same way that companies merge and become more efficient.
Mark Taylor, “How Competition is Killing Higher Education“
This is one of the (mostly-overlooked) points I made a few weeks ago in my post “More Universities Should Shut Down Their Computer Science Programs“. It’s by the same author I cited in my post, Mark Taylor of Columbia University.
In a world in which information-sharing is easier than ever, it should not be necessary for students to tolerate a mediocre academic department. Instead it should be possible for students to take advantage of the best instructors and curricula no matter where they happen to be located.
So the funny thing about the 140-character attention economy is that it causes people to hit the comment button first and think later, maybe, if at all. This was definitely the case following my post More Universities Should Shut Down Their Computer Science Programs, which became by far the most popular and commented-upon blog post I’ve ever done in nine years of blogging.
Some people got what I was trying to say and agreed that there could be a more practical balance in undergraduate CS programs. But most commenters (especially those on Reddit and MetaFilter) completely misunderstood the point of the post, defending the discipline of computer science even though I had stated explicitly in the post that I wasn’t attacking the discipline of computer science or basic systems programming, but rather the way it was being taught to undergraduates by universities.
But people see what they want to see, I guess, and it would have been easy (particularly if you just read the headline or first few sentences) to come away with the sense that I was some kind of self-interested troll bent on destroying the academic discipline that may readers had devoted four years of their young lives to follow. I assure you, I am no troll! I come not to destroy the discipline computer science, but to reform it.
(Related: I’m going to recommend that CS majors take a few more upper-division English courses. There is this thing called “close reading of a text” that you may find useful, and most universities are pretty good at teaching it.)
Anyway, we’ve got a business to run and developers to train. And coincidentally, back in March we received a suggestion from an intrepid CodeLesson user to do a course on data structures and algorithms. We thought this was a peachy idea, so we’ve promoted the course to our catalog and added it to our Instructors Needed page. If you feel passionate that software engineers need computer science fundamentals to do their jobs and you have a few spare hours to devote to teaching (and want to make some cash), please sign up or talk to us.
I will attempt to write one or two witty and incisive rejoinders to Mitt Romney’s dumbass tweet-of-the-day every day between now and November, when I fully expect that the skinny guy with the big ears will crush him in a historical electoral landslide. Here’s a taste:
.@MittRomney Wow, half of new college grads are unemployed! I assume you’ll fix that by reducing the number of college graduates, right?
— Jeffrey McManus (@jeffreymcmanus) April 24, 2012
You can follow me on Twitter to be subjected to more of these.
This may get me in an assload of trouble but I think it needs to be said. Following the announced restructuring of the University of Florida CS program and this classic quote about how Yale shouldn’t be in the business of teaching “trade skills” (meaning, applied software engineering), I’m going to argue that more (not all, but more) academic computer science programs should be shut down or reorganized. Here’s my rationale:
I’m going to pre-empt the inevitable Hacker News countertrolling by responding in advance to the arguments that always come up when I talk about the way that software engineers are trained:
I started giving tech talks at conferences at for corporate groups back in the mid-90s. Back then, I’d do several different formats: conference talks in which I’d have 45-90 minutes to talk, all-day workshops (7 hours), and corporate sessions (two to four days in which I’d be teaching for seven hours a day).
At one point someone asked which format was more difficult. You’d think that a four-day format would be, but it’s really not. The four day format is an endurance marathon, but you can do it if you’re very well prepared. And I can talk forever if I have to. Plus, in a four-day format you have a lot time to adapt to your audience, and if you screw up day 1 you can make it up on days two through four.
Shorter formats are much harder. I’ve often described the 45 minute conference talk as similar to landing on an aircraft carrier. The time window is tiny, and the margin for error is pretty much nonexistent. You have to do a lot more planning to ensure that your talk doesn’t go overtime, and if you inadvertently end early the conference logistics can get screwed up.
This week I’m working up a talk about the business side of CodeLesson that we’re proposing to a tech conference. (I’ll name the conference later, assuming my talk is accepted; it’s a competitive process and there’s a good chance we’ll be cut.) I have to give the talk to the conference organizers using a screen share on Friday, and then they’ll decide if it’s worth having me for the in-person conference. The format? Three minutes of me talking, followed by ten minutes of Q&A. Rough! This is going to be the smallest aircraft carrier I’ve ever landed on.
I’m a pretty good extemporaneous speaker, but there’s no way I’d do a three-minute talk without extensive preparation. For me, the big risk is that I’ll run overtime; three minutes is really nothing. So to prepare, I started by locking myself in my office. I went through my demo using the stopwatch function on my phone without really looking at it. The first run-through, I got up to four and a half minutes and I was about half-way through my slides. Whoops.
I backed up and deleted about 25% of my slides. Then I scripted what I was going to say on each slide. Normally I hate doing this because it slows the talk down and can make the talk seem stilted (you know, like you’re reading from a script). But even if your talk is pretty tightly scripted you can still make it sound like it’s extemporaneous. It’s not necessary to say every single word on the script, as long as the sentences that are coming out of your mouth still make sense. And, most importantly, varying the tone of your voice while reading (emphasizing the important words and the last word of a sentence) can go a long way toward making your talk seem more natural and unscripted.
After doing this, I got the talk down to about two minutes and forty seconds, which I think is where I’ll leave it. But there’s one more step to polish the talk up a bit more. I recorded the talk (using ScreenFlow) and put it on DropBox for members of my team to review. That way they’ll be able to tell me if my talk missed any important points, or whether I should take something out.
I’ll still need to give the talk live via screen-sharing (and in person at the conference if the talk is accepted), but having a recorded dress-rehearsed version of the talk will also help in case something goes wrong (like I get sick that day or the screen sharing doesn’t work). One of the keys to being a good public speaker is to use belt and suspenders on everything — you want to rely upon as few external variables as possible, particularly technical aspects that aren’t in your control.
Fingers crossed for Friday.
Kind of embarrassing to read this AP story about the campaign to get Rush Limbaugh off the air. The story couches the debate in terms of his misogynistic attacks on law student Sandra Fluke versus Limbaugh’s “first amendment right” to free speech. But Limbaugh doesn’t have the constitution on his side here.
The notion that the first amendment gives you the right to say whatever you want is a common misinterpretation. Coming from the pen of a news writer, it’s particularly egregious; I would expect a reporter to know better. The first amendment doesn’t actually provide the right to say whatever you want in whatever context. (It certainly doesn’t give somebody the constitutional right to be on the radio or to accept payments from sponsors.) Instead, the first amendment exempts a very narrow class of political speech against regulation by the government.
But the government doesn’t have a dog in this hunt; the tussle is between Limbaugh and his corporate sponsors, who have come to the conclusion that his show is too toxic to sponsor (at least for the moment).
What Limbaugh is experiencing is not some horrible injustice but the not-so-invisible hand of the free market. If he’s really on the site of liberty and free markets, you’d think he’d welcome this market-enforced course correction. But it’s clear that this is just another example of how conservative money-men like Limbaugh only believe in their principles when those principles happen to coincide with their agenda.
