Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years

There are two types of programmers; one who has learned programming in 21 days and then there are those who can program.

A very well written article by Peter Norvig on this phenomenon of “learn all” programming languages in fewer days than you can possibly finish reading the books.

 

UDACITY – reinventing higher education

Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig, professors at Stanford University did an experiment by  offering their Artificial Intelligence class CS221 online for free. They expected few thousands to sign up and that few thousands was close to 160,000.

Thrun prophesies that in about 50 years, the world will have about 10 global online universities offering higher education. They want their university, UDACITY – it’s a play on 2 words – audacious and university, to be one of them.

They recently held an online conference using Google Hangout where they invited Salman Khan of Khan Academy, about whom I have mentioned in one of my earlier blogs. It was an interesting conversation and listening to what I believe is shaping the future of the higher education.

I wonder if someone can bring the same enthusiasm and quality to school education – K12. The challenge is for lower grade levels; education for pre-k and for elementary school children . This opens a new argument all together, what should be taught at that level? How should it be taught? The impact of educating the children through an equally innovative method and style can have a bigger impact than the impact created by mass education through higher education.

The future of education

Khan Academy, couldn’t have asked for a better ambassador than Bill Gates – someone who has touted it as the “future of education”. Salman “Sal” Khan, who started to post video tutorials trying to help his nephews and nieces with their Math and Science studies has found a global audience who love his fluid and easy to understand style of teaching.

He has now amassed an amazingly talented group of people who are taking his efforts to mainstream classrooms and around the world – establishing a truly global school. But it still came as a surprise that the #3 guy of Google – Craig Silverstein, left Google today to join Khan Academy.

The best of education brought to you by a group of extremely talented people at your leisure for free of cost. I am excited at the prospect of what Khan Academy can achieve.