Want to get an interview with one of the world’s top IT companies? Facebook or Microsoft.
Perhaps you think they only look at folk with top degrees from top universities. Wrong. In fact, you can get an interview without having a degree – you just have to be good (really good) at coding, and be able to demonstrate that.
Say hello to Interview Street:
I first started writing this post over a year ago, but it has sat as an unfinished draft for a long time.
I found myself wondering whether universities are going to experience a (likely painful) rebirth, one that leaves many in a very different shape going forward but with surprising echoes of the very earliest of medieval universities (unlikely as that may seem). It is a while since I read Charles Homer Haskins’ The Rise of Universities,but recall some of the details. Before universities came into being, anyone wishing to study would have to seek out a tutor or master and pay to join his classes. Over time certain towns (such as Bologna) became known for having many tutors, and hence attracted increasing numbers of students. In Bologna, the students who traveled to the town to study formed societies in order to be able to obtain citizen-like rights for living in the city and used these societies for collective bargaining with tutors over how much tutors should be paid and what they should teach. Thus the first European university was formed by the students themselves. (As per usual, Wikipedia has more on this)
Almost exactly two years ago, I wrote about how awful an experience it was browsing Jorum to find useful Open Education Resources. When I’ve met Jorum folk at conferences they have agreed that improving this experience is a priority.
So how have things changed?
George Siemens has a nice set of slides up on MOOC as a new educative practice which do a very good job of capturing the differences between MOOC and the free online courses now offered by the likes of Coursera (the new home of the Stanford free online courses, plus some from other partner universities), Udacity and MITx. Where that latter are offering free online access to a very traditional form of education (based on lectures and learning a set content syllabus), MOOC are quite different. As George states in the introduction to each of his MOOC courses:
“the learning in the course results from the activities you undertake, and will be different for each person”
MOOC use a far more distributed model of learning and interaction, where most of the content is itself generated by the students as they share their learning.
Outside of education, I would say that the closest thing we have to MOOCs are probably Alternate Reality Games – which have been posited as a form of Collective Intelligence. Some (not all) MMO games also require very large scale collaboration (Eve Online is the one that springs to mind).
I was talking about Massively Collaborative systems in my Collaborative Virtual Environments class this week, and seeing this link between MOOC and ARG, I appended some of George’s slides (properly acknowledged of course) to the existing slides on ARG as collective intelligence (Why I love bees: ARG and Collective Intelligence, and below).
I would also say that while I totally agree with George on the key differences between MOOC and the other offerings, and that MOOC are more interesting to think about because they are a genuine attempt to do something different in a different way, I should say that I don’t feel that MOOC threaten the role of teaching universities nearly as much as the likes of Udacity.
Things have been very quiet over at the SLOODLE project for a while, but Edmund Edgar and Fire Centaur (Paul Preibisch) have been continuing to work on SLOODLE, contributing to the open-source code base while also developing their own supported solution for end users – Avatar Classroom. There will be a chance to see what they are up to coming soon (SLurl/URL to follow). From Edmund:
Class on Avatar Classroom: Edmund and Fire’s SLOODLE-based classroom, Tuesday March 20th at 8PM Pacific Standard Time
Some people may have heard of the hosted service Edmund Edgar and Fire Centaur have been working on, built on the latest SLOODLE 2.0.
This gives you a pre-fabricated classroom integrated with a fully hosted Moodle website, with all the SLOODLE tools, designed to get you up and running with SLOODLE as quickly and easily as possible.
We have all the usual SLOODLE tools, so you can:
We also have a few additional touches, like a shark pool to attack your students if their quiz chairs drop too far.
Fire Centaur will be holding an informational tutorial on Tuesday March 20th at 8PM PST for all those interested.
Hope to see you there!
Paris in November… what are you waiting for?
The theme for the 2nd European Immersive Education (iED) Summit is:
Immersive Education: combining creativity, art and pedagogy
I have OLDaily to thank for discovering this excellent resource…
Saylor.org are building a library of high-quality free online texts for a wide range of university courses. These all follow US based curricula outlines, but of course most will be equally useful anywhere in the world. The courses are arranged and grouped according to degree subject areas. So, for example, substantial progress has been made towards a complete set of texts for Computer Science degree level education.
There is also a current text-book writing competition, the Open Textbook Challenge, with prizes of $20,000 for accepted texts – and a number of job vacancies. I’d be very tempted to apply other than the requirement to attend monthly meetings in Washington D.C. (a big commute from Scotland!)
Two recent calls, Virtual Worlds III (Paris in July, papers by 16th Feb.) & IEEE VS Games 2012 (Genoa in October, papers by 18th May)
Virtual Worlds III has Craig Reynolds and Ken Perlin lined up for keynotes (two incredibly influential academics, Reynolds work on ‘boids has had a huge influence on agent based AI in games, and Perlin’s impact in graphics has been immense).
No keynotes announced yet for VS Games, but is supported by the EU FP7 GALA network of excellence, so will be guaranteed to bring along many of Europe’s top games and learning researchers.
Earlier today I was watching a video interview with Grace Hopper’s biographer, and at one point he discusses how some academics disliked Grace’s work because she involved the users in developing programming languages, and from her attempts to take programming away from the mathematicians and make it something that ‘normal’ folk could do.
This point is pretty much the central theme of Ted Nelson’s 1974 classic ‘Computer Lib‘ – with “You can and must understand computers NOW” emblazoned on the cover.
It has resonance today with the flurry of recent activity highlighting the need to drastically improve computing education in the UK – Next Gen and Royal Society reports, recent government statements, and so on.
Appropriately, CodeAcademy have declared 2012 to be the Year of the Code – the year in which everyone should try to learn and program.
Here are some good start points for complete novices:
http://codeyear.com/ – CodeAcademy’s Code Year site. This uses interactive online lessons that build your skills with JavaScript – the scripting language used in web-browsers (and some other places besides).
Even more basic, the School of Webcraft will introduce you to HTML – not a programming language as such, but the basic markup language used to create simple webpages.
One of Stanford’s free courses is CS101, and this will introduce you to some of the fundamentals of computing and will allow you to practice programming online. The course starts in February, so still time to sign up. I think this course will be using Python – another easy to learn, beginner friendly language. The course leader, Nick Parlante, also runs the CodingBat site which has a range of programming challenges that can be completed online to test your skills in either Java or Python.
There are many other free online courses on computer programming, from a wide range of institutions and available through iTunes U, YouTube or elsewhere – but what these courses offer is exercises you can complete online and the opportunity to learn alongside other learners and mentors.
The IFIP International Conference on Entertainment Computing explores the application of computational technology to entertainment. The conference brings together practitioners and researchers interested in the art and design of entertainment computing applications. ICEC welcomes submissions on the design, engineering, application and theory of entertainment technology. We solicit paper, poster and demonstration submissions, as well as proposals for tutorials and workshops. Papers will be published by Springer and archived in the SpringerLink digital library.
Download here the whole Call for Papers as PDF.
