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What I Learned In College

blackhole12.blogspot.com

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Re: What I Learned In College

#71

Post by eli_gottlieb »

blackhole wrote: post #56
sopooneo wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Realize, please, that many as passionate as you, and with many of the same opinions, have gone into education to try to improve it. Not just now, but for decades.

That is exactly the point that I raised in the essay. Education is a really hard problem . I don't claim I know how to fix it, but while everyone seems to agree that everything is broken, we are heading in the wrong direction.

I wouldn't say education is that hard on any fundamental level. It is, however, quite heavily constrained by factors that have nothing to do with actual education.

Imagine someone told you to build a robot out of wood and brass and whatever you could dig out of the ground, as a one-man effort, in a workshop. You might come up with steampunk and completely impress "someone", but more likely you'd just fail utterly because "someone" has given you loads and loads of extraneous constraints that have nothing to do with "build a robot" and everything to do with "I've dropped you into the late 19th century".

That is how education gets constrained.

Re: What I Learned In College

#72

Post by tehwalrus »

This is an excellent critique of large-scale education systems. But what we need is a better large-scale education system - telling everyone to think for themselves all the time is fun for us geeks, but most people (teachers/school administrators) just don't have the time or energy.

(even if you do invent a way to get, for want of a better word, lazy teachers to actually teach real knowledge, it may still be impossible to persuade political systems to actually act on this.)

I must also contrast this experience of university with my own. Cambridge mocked answerable questions and wrote-learning. In addition to (semi-optional) lectures, we learned in weekly one-on-(three to five) sessions with professors and grad students who would grade your problem sheet and then talk you through it (normally while firing off hard questions to probe how well you understood the material.) I had three or four of these sessions per week, excluding time towards the end of the degree where we were working on an independent project and that took up some time slots.

Cambridge (+probably Oxford) do this in spite of the prevailing education climate - they are largely autonomous and no British politician would ever try and impose an education system on them. Everyone else, however, suffers.

Re: What I Learned In College

#73

Post by caw »

Crake wrote: post #41
zanny wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do (usually). You can even get credit for it, at least in the US, it called CLEP - https://clep.collegeboard.org/ . Cheapest year of college I ever had - was around $200. I skipped an entire years worth of useless general ed courses to get my "requirements" to graduate out of the way at my college on 6 CLEP tests. I think the notes I took for those tests reading the wikibooks and wikipedia articles on the variou…

A lot of colleges won't allow you to CLEP out of things anymore, sadly. :( There's too much money to be made off of you.

Now you can take AP courses, or "Advanced Placement". Through my high school each test was about $80, you're graded on a scale of 1-5 which is on a percentage basis (X% of people get a 5, etc). Schools can determine what sort of credit they want to take, but general rule is 3 or higher. My college only took 5s in sciences, but it was an engineering school.

I skipped out on 26 credit hours of 140ish for the degree. It basically allowed me to change my major a year in without impacting my graduation date.

Re: What I Learned In College

#74

Post by azurelogic »

I had a very similar experience in undergrad. I skipped all sorts of classes and got great grades. I didn't care. I put off studying weeks of material until days before the exam. I'd even have a beer or 2 before exams. It wasn't stimulating. For me, part of that was because I was doing the wrong thing the whole time. I was studying biochem when I should have been learning to code. When I went back for my masters in CS, I actually tried and cared. I think I missed 3 classes the whole time and only because I was too sick to go. Passion for becoming the best programmer I could be drove me to try harder and harder. While I know that school doesn't teach you everything you need to know about software development, I refused to let anything that I could learn slip by.

Re: What I Learned In College

#75

Post by dizzystar »

kenferry wrote: post #60
Ixiaus wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hacker News. Khan academy discussions. That's about it for what I've been able to find though.

Email me for an beta invite at ken@understudyapp.com. This is exactly the problem we're trying to solve! With our iPad app, you pick a material (e.g. http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/ ) and work through it, talking once a week to someone who has already been through it. As you progress, you begin to mentor someone else who is less far along in the same way that you were helped. The collaboration environment in the app is…

One of the reasons that autodidacts are autodidacts is because many are working $10/hr jobs and we didn't have an honest or fair shake at getting into college.

Given that, why would someone want to spend three week's salary just to download your app?

I also disagree that determination is the the problem for many autodidacts. Many of us really do enjoy the experience of learning and there is a mile of difference between slacking off and quitting. Personally, I would never pressure someone into learning that isn't into it. The Autodidact brain is not built like this.

With the iPad requirement (too poor for that + refusal to buy Apple anything and no I won't change my mind when I have enough money) and an apparent misunderstanding of who I am, I'm probably not in your target audience.

This really should be a web-based business. What is the obsession with making everything apps these days?

Re: What I Learned In College

#76

Post by cafard »

Useless facts are useless if not not organized (by the learner) into a useful structure. My impression is that a lot of schools have responded to this not by helping the students to organize the facts but by going light on facts instead.

Re: What I Learned In College

#77

Post by unimpressive »

dizzystar wrote: post #75
kenferry wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email me for an beta invite at ken@understudyapp.com. This is exactly the problem we're trying to solve! With our iPad app, you pick a material (e.g. http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/ ) and work through it, talking once a week to someone who has already been through it. As you progress, you begin to mentor someone else who is less far along in the same way that you were helped. The collaboration environment in the app is…

One of the reasons that autodidacts are autodidacts is because many are working $10/hr jobs and we didn't have an honest or fair shake at getting into college. Given that, why would someone want to spend three week's salary just to download your app? I also disagree that determination is the the problem for many autodidacts. Many of us really do enjoy the experience of learning and there is a mile of difference betwe…

Re: Determination

I was asking for someone to talk to, not a stick.

With that in mind, if you would like to talk to me my email is included in the public key on my profile. (You don't have to use the key if you don't want to. You can just import it and read the email address. I do that to stop spammers from finding it.)

Re: What I Learned In College

#78

Post by e3pi »

blackhole wrote: post #65
selimthegrim wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could not manage to find one special silo, one narrow topic, one unsolved research problem to pique your interest in this so called wretched hive of scum and villainy? If I may bluntly ask, what the hell were you doing in academia? Grad school would have flossed its teeth with your bones and spit out the marrow. Freeman Dyson is indeed on record saying the worst invention of mankind is the PhD system. However, me…

What are you talking about? There are lots of problems I'd like to work on. I even asked a professor about them. The problem is that none of the problems I wanted to work on were problems the graduate students were working on, so there was zero support for them. They weren't interested in the kinds of problems I was interested in, which had to do with rasterization and raytracing graphical techniques. Grad school pro…

Camp in 3rd floor Padelford Library.

If your code compiles, it's proved.

Oreilly titles, Stack Overflow, net et al >> `non-coder friends, chuckles, and puppies'.

Play computer chess against `chess', not human limbic systems.

Original discovery is greater than a paycheck.

Have fun.

Re: What I Learned In College

#79

Post by Ixiaus »

kenferry wrote: post #60
Ixiaus wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hacker News. Khan academy discussions. That's about it for what I've been able to find though.

Email me for an beta invite at ken@understudyapp.com. This is exactly the problem we're trying to solve! With our iPad app, you pick a material (e.g. http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/ ) and work through it, talking once a week to someone who has already been through it. As you progress, you begin to mentor someone else who is less far along in the same way that you were helped. The collaboration environment in the app is…

This is solving the wrong problem (for Autodidacts, at least). Kind of no different than Khan's discussion boards, coursera's forums, and what have you.

You must realize, for a very human experience (learning and social/peer bonding around the topics) - technology is only an enabler and not whole pony show.

What's lacking is a platform for genuine collaboration and discussion on the topic of learning qua learning for people that are creating their own formal process of learning.

I have a feeling that this will manifest as a conference or weeklong retreat - rather than an app or discussion forums.

Re: What I Learned In College

#80

Post by Crake »

caw wrote: post #73
Crake wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of colleges won't allow you to CLEP out of things anymore, sadly. :( There's too much money to be made off of you.

Now you can take AP courses, or "Advanced Placement". Through my high school each test was about $80, you're graded on a scale of 1-5 which is on a percentage basis (X% of people get a 5, etc). Schools can determine what sort of credit they want to take, but general rule is 3 or higher. My college only took 5s in sciences, but it was an engineering school. I skipped out on 26 credit hours of 140ish for the degree. It…

Yes, my school had AP courses as well, but only two of them. :( I think it's because my school was rural and poor. I've always been jealous of people who got to go to schools where they could take seven or eight AP courses and get a massive headstart on college.
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