The article is shallow. It starts by casting doubt on the current crop of MOOCs - “if the lecture was such a bad format in the industrial age, why does it suddenly get celebrated once digitized and streamed into a web browser in the information age?”
The problem was not the format, it was the accessibility: cost, geographical limitations, time spent going through a full 4 or 5 year program. But the article is worded in such a way as to make MOOCs seem just online versions of the old system.
They are not. There was no possibility to listen in small batches, replay, consult hundreds of forum topics on the subject and do it from any computer in the world for free before.
In my opinion the only missing thing is coaching. There is something to be said about the psychological impact of a person standing in front of you, giving you his/her full attention. Instead of teachers and TAs we need educational coaches - people who could help us carve a path through the jungle of courses, discover and encourage our strong points, and just plain watch our progress.
We are so addicted to the net, even though we just started in the last 10-15 years, that Hollywood will have to content with the breadcrumbs. The argument that people still enjoy passive content consumption is weak - for example, I personally spend more time on reddit and ycombinator than watching video. It's more fun to be connected in the social web than just to ingest content alone. We can cope with the social net, we don't "need" the content Hollywood produces. Moreover, there are alternatives - Japanese TV, Korean, Indian, African - they are all fresh and interesting for a person accustomed to the American productions.
On the other hand, the Internet eats everything that stands in its way. There is no way to stop it. Every time a paradigm shift in communication happened to the human society (speech, writing, printing press), a 1 million fold increase in content followed. The old establishment can't do anything about it.
Society itself changes - with speech came superior hunting, oral culture. With writing came much more extended repositories of knowledge and the evolution of cities. With the printing press came humanism and the scientific-industrial revolution. Now we are in the making of the 4th revolution in communication (TV and radio are just like the press - one to many, so they are not part of the information age, they are part of the mass media age).
So, in a contest between Hollywood and Silicon Valley, the latter will win.
When I was learning for the theoretical part of the test for my driving license, there were questions like:
You are approaching an intersection form a secondary road and you see the "Stop" sign. Do you:
1. reduce speed
2. stop
3. go ahead without reducing speed
4. yield to the traffic on the main road
The "correct" answer was 2.
But I argued, in order to stop, don't you have to reduce speed?
Well, the policemen understand that "reducing speed" means just slowing down without stopping, not slowing down. You see, they have hidden domain knowledge that is not present in the question, making its meaning ambiguous. The theoretical questions were all like this.
I'd say the biggest problem, at least with Apple, is that App Store advertises only a few lists containing 50 apps each and that is too narrow.
Why don't they allow people to make lists of apps and share them through the App Store? The top-down classification in 20 or so categories is too limiting.
I would need an iPhone version too, in order to make it an equivalent of DropBox. Also, it's beta - there are going to be problems, bugs, etc. DropBox is polished. When AeroFS will be as polished, then it will be attractive on account of the ability to have much larger storage space and privacy.
It would seem I am alone in saying that for Bucharest, Romania the iOS6 Maps is better than Google Maps was because Google Maps was not able to look up houses by number - which means it was unable to guide me to any address. It was just the satellite imagery with roads overlaid, so, if you wanted to go to say, West St. 23, it could find you West St. and put the pointer right in the middle of it, even if it was miles long.
You have no idea how intense is the desire of women aged 25-35 to have children. It's like a fever. If they have problems, they do all sorts of dangerous therapies in order to get pregnant.
I am developing an English learning course for Romanians. I was thinking of a similar motivation system. At the beginning the user would deposit an amount of money, more or less, depending on his station in life, but large enough to motivate him to finish. At the end he would get the money back. This would also work with parents depositing money or gift cards for children taking the course. Making the attribution of the prize independent of their will is the key.
Technicalities. It still doesn't sit right to hog the default web browser handler. Safari for iOS is pretty rudimentary. I am mostly annoyed by the constant refreshes, even when I hit the back button.
RBM video presentation from 2007 by Hinton. Unsupervised learning is just amazing - imagine a neural net capable of "understanding" things it sees, but has never had direct instruction about. Just watch pictures, videos, let it "read" books and it learns. No human necessary.
I'm wondering how long until police drones patrol our highways, collecting more data on us.
Or worse, a hacker building a trojan face recognition targeting system. Integrate that with GPS tracking the victim's cell phone and you got a lethal weapon blending in the traffic as an innocuous self driving car.
Or worse, if terrorists program such cars to carry bombs?
Copyrights are restrictions on the rights of everyone. We can do without restrictions today. What we need is a system for reimbursing the authors, not a system for restricting copying.
In my opinion we need a flat anual fee (a tax) levied on everyone, then we could do away with all restrictions on all media. The only problem would be to count the usage and distribute the money. This could be achieved by some technological system.
it needs more speed and better results, though using Bing as a source this might not be possible. The lack of image, news and video search is a problem too. Actually, I use quite often book search, scholar and maps too. In order to be a complete search solution, you need more than web search today.
I completed the course too. It wasn't a programming course, but a machine learning one, so I don't think it was bad they hand held us on the programming part.
The homework played an important part in assimilating the new concepts - even though I felt I understood right from the lecture, until I put it in code I wasn't quite there.
From what I got - they are replacing complex hardware with bare minimal hw. I would like to have such a thing that would connect 10 or 20 HDD together, cheaply, and have good speeds too.
The problem was not the format, it was the accessibility: cost, geographical limitations, time spent going through a full 4 or 5 year program. But the article is worded in such a way as to make MOOCs seem just online versions of the old system.
They are not. There was no possibility to listen in small batches, replay, consult hundreds of forum topics on the subject and do it from any computer in the world for free before.
In my opinion the only missing thing is coaching. There is something to be said about the psychological impact of a person standing in front of you, giving you his/her full attention. Instead of teachers and TAs we need educational coaches - people who could help us carve a path through the jungle of courses, discover and encourage our strong points, and just plain watch our progress.