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> - are courses like this available here? any good? cost? where to find more info?

I think it was a reasonable question .. the only info on open.gov.uk appears to relate to computer camps for the blind. I think you've missed the point of asking the online community .. it makes hard to find information easy to find (though its at a large overall time cost which is partially out-weighed by the entertainment value).

Your right - there should be something - but it seems there isn't.

As for OU, they don't do anything (I'm one of their students), as far as I know, where you get hands-on practice with a network (for example), or repairing PC's (although some courses like T223 have hardware components, a serial port temperature measurement module in this instance, that they post out).

Anyone got anything useful to add. I'm interested in this topic too as I'm currently wanting to set up a community computer project.

Google.co.uk list a few "computer camps", for example the ICC (have to be blind) and one in Ottawa (have to live in Canada or be prepared to travel!) and I think theres one about someone who went on a camp in 1998. The only useful doc notes that:

Although often expensive in practice, the idea of the computer camp offers another community-based initiative little seen in the UK. In the USA this provides children from 7-18 with hands on training in a wide range of computer and Internet skills. Given the frequency with which British children - admittedly many of them middle-class - attend swimming, dancing or sports clubs after school and at the weekend, the expectation of attending a local extra-curricular club is already present in most families. Hence there is considerable potential here for further development, particularly if public funding were available.

pbhj

Guys, instead of trying to do something whose only purpose is to allow people to rip off games, why not do something noble that will help humanity. Here are some suggestions:

1.) Seti@Home
2.) Cure Cancer
3.) Evolution@Home
4.) Entropia
5.) eOn
6.) Climate Prediction
7.) Particle Accelerator Design
8.) Analytical Spectroscopy Research Group

See a complete list here: http://www.aspenleaf.com/distributed/distrib-proje cts.html

And no, I don't consider cracking encryption "noble". Especially when people don't seem to get the point that if it takes tens of thousands of computers months and months to crack some encryption, it is GOOD ENCRYPTION.

If you are just going to end up quitting again, remember you'd be depriving someone else of your place. I'm not saying you shouldn't do this, but given you've quit twice already due to lack of interest, and that you haven't needed a degree to succeed in business, it's worth thinking hard about your motivation. If, this time, it's due to genuine, sustained interest in the subject, then apply and good luck; if it's just a nagging feeling of "I need a degree, everyone else has one" then don't waste your time, it's evidently not true.

If you decide to go ahead the best thing in order to balance work and study might be to find a correspondence course (like, in Britain, the Open University).

I am surprized that I haven't seen others mention this, but make sure you are getting the right education for you. People learn different, and you may of had a problem with the learning / study methods used at university.

There is a difference between difference schools, state vs. private universities, two and four colleges, polytechs, and distance education vs. correspondence. Research the options, and pick the right one for you.

In this day and age you do not need to attend classes in person to earn a meaniful degree, in UK, the Open University leads the way, and in Canada there is Athabasca University, I am not as familiar with US schools, but there is the University of Phoenix as well as many others.

Define your goal(s) of attending a post-secondary school. Also an idea for your career goals might be useful, but you need specific education goals. Write them down. I said, write them down. This is how you will evaluate schools, programme and course choices.

Is it just to have a degree? Do you want more a fundamential understanding (i.e. theoric) of computing? Do you want business skills? To become a better rounded software engineer? Understand business, so you can grow your own business? Get a MBA? Meet women? For technical training? To earn more money? Continue doing what you already do, or so you can do something new? Certification?

An university degree is suppose to be based upon a theorical understanding, which while being less specific (i.e. more abstract), is more lasting and will not be outdated every 3 years. That is the #1 source of frustration and confusion I see from young computer science students. An university degree is not a career training programme. You get to do the career training in your own time.

Make use of your electives, do not choose courses because you think they will be easy like "Rocks for Jocks" and "Clap for Credit", find introductary courses you will be interested in, and will benefit you either personally or professionally.

Most schools have some means of providing tours of their facilities, especially in the summer. Since this is an investment that will cost approx. $40,000, you should research this investment as being right for you. If possible, arrange a talk with someone from the department that you are looking at majoring in.

Bone up on time management and planning skills, and study skills if you find studying difficult. University is about learning, but unfortunately very little is taught about how best to learn (for you). Read Stephen R. Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People it will help in setting your priorities, and planning. To help learn about learning, John L. Adams book Conceptual Blockbusting: Care and Feeding of Ideas, and George Polya's How to Solve It.

Practice reading, seriously if you do not do a lot of non-fiction book reading, start doing some more. A list of books any /.er should enjoy is Steven C. McConnell's Top 10 Reading List.

Not sure where you live, but if you are in western Europe, you can always sign up with the Open University.

I am getting a bachelors degree in computer and mathematical science myself right now, while working for a tech company as a software engineer. This is working out pretty well, although I am only studying half time.

I think it would have been very difficult for me to do it any other way. I mean, I don't think I could have handled full time uni and work at the same time. One of my co-workers tried to do it, and after 1,5 years he quit. Basically, he just couldn't keep it up and in the end he choose uni over work.

My advice to you, try to study on distance, and don't throw yourself at it too hard. I mean, start by studying half time. If it goes well, then try full time. Good luck :)

It all depends on how much time your business needs. However if you can't fit in a large ammount of time for the course then there's always distance learning for example Open University it all depends what you wish to study. Or if you're only in it for the social life.

This is the path I would take. The UK's Open University (www.open.ac.uk) - which was founded in the 1960s by the British Government to pioneer distance-learning courses - takes students from Switzerland for all its courses.

The degrees - both arts and scientific - you get from the OU certainly are not "toy" degrees - they are run and marked by top academics, and given full weight by (UK) HR deptartments. For example, the OU regularly wins prizes for the quality of its students. It also has taken great pains to combat the disadvantages of distance learning by encouraging online collaboration.

Drew

Mozilla is still unreliable and doesn't render some sites properly (they were designed for IE; live with it)

Very few - at least I have few problems with Koqueror and very few with Mozilla. I ahve had problems with IE 5 (which i sue at work) not rendering some sites properly (e.g www.w3c.org. The other browsers have advatages that more than outweigh the better testing sites get on IE - e.g. cookie management, seurity, supressing pop-ups etc.

StarOffice is still nowhere close to Microsoft Office.

Only really an issue for those doing Large spreadsheets. For wordprocessing Open Office is just as good for short documets. For long documets I find Lyx a lot better. Even for spreadsheets it is close, if not quite there.

GIMP is no substitute for Photoshop

How many people need photoshop? GIMP is more than adeqaute for most people (may be not professionals).

I use only Linux at home. I have done everying I would do in an office environemnt (excpet alrge spreadsheets. Neither I nor my wife (very much a naive user) ahve had any problems.

Having used Openoffice, Lyx, Mozilla, Konqueror fairly heavilly and a number of other programs lightly we have generally found no disadvantages over Windows. Lyx is wonderful and has definitely won me praise for good presentation on an Open University Course I am doing at the moment. There is a lot of very productive software that Linux encourages one to try even if (as in the case of Lyx) it is also avaiable for Windows.

Friends who use Windows and MacOS have had little diffculty in using Linux when visiting us

the default window manager on Linux and Solaris is mwm (Motif Window Manager), which is absolutely horrible

So your example shows that Linux and Solaris do not work when set up with an unfirendly user manger as default! How informative!

The biggest advantage is that I do not ahve to worry about all those email visuses friends who use windows keep sending me.

There is a world summit coming up (a 10 years later follow-up to the Rio Summit) in which many issues related to this topic will be discussed.

I've been working as a contractor on a website project recently for a UK university. The site uses the Slash code, and is aiming to focus discussions between special interest groups in the time before the summit (groups like Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, etc).

The site is called Earth Summit for All, and there is quite a lot of background information there relating to sustainable development in general and the summit in particular, as well as the discussions powered by the Slash software which are only just starting to take shape...

Regards,
Denny

I teach a final year Software Systems development course for one of the largest universities in the world, and the majority of the courseware we use is available online. The university is The Open University, the course is M301: Software Systems and their Development.

The course includes a number of aspects of development, including ethics (links from the main student website to other ethical institutions), project management, java, UML, and concurrency. Most of the materials are on that site, except of course for the two set books - a java book and a concurrency book.

The open philosophy of the Open University predates that of MIT, although has a lot in common with academia in general - that of a meritocracy where knowledge is shared, and the importance is placed on what you do with it and how you do it, rather than where you come from or what you look like.

I find the MIT angle to be very interesting, because they say they are not giving the "experience" or "education" away. This is true, and probably the only thing the OU lacks is regular face to face tuition. Having said that, I gave a tutorial just yesterday, and met my students for the first time this year, and we are in regular communication via email and webchat, so we are not losing that much!

I am very interested in seeing how MIT perform in terms of materials - because we in the OU don't have a large face-to-face component, the materials have to read very well, and I feel they do (check it out).

I teach a final year Software Systems development course for one of the largest universities in the world, and the majority of the courseware we use is available online. The university is The Open University, the course is M301: Software Systems and their Development.

The course includes a number of aspects of development, including ethics (links from the main student website to other ethical institutions), project management, java, UML, and concurrency. Most of the materials are on that site, except of course for the two set books - a java book and a concurrency book.

The open philosophy of the Open University predates that of MIT, although has a lot in common with academia in general - that of a meritocracy where knowledge is shared, and the importance is placed on what you do with it and how you do it, rather than where you come from or what you look like.

I find the MIT angle to be very interesting, because they say they are not giving the "experience" or "education" away. This is true, and probably the only thing the OU lacks is regular face to face tuition. Having said that, I gave a tutorial just yesterday, and met my students for the first time this year, and we are in regular communication via email and webchat, so we are not losing that much!

I am very interested in seeing how MIT perform in terms of materials - because we in the OU don't have a large face-to-face component, the materials have to read very well, and I feel they do (check it out).

It's been my luck to know a couple. However, one of the funniest things I remember was a rather patronising social experiment, done in a psychology course for the Open University. I caught this programme on television - I wasn't part of the course. It's all quite a few years ago now as well - maybe 90/91? Don't know for sure.

The experiment gave an internet connection, via modem, to three women - one in her early twenties and a member of the women's darts team, one a working professional single mother in her mid-forties, and the final one looked like everybody's favourite grandmother.

The woman in her twenties discovered internet chat rooms (yes, plenty were there then. Anyone remember Cheeseplant's House?). The woman in her forties spent time with her child doing educational things. Next came the grandmother.

Of course, everyone expected her to have used the machine as a tea-cosy or something, so it came as rather a shock to find she had been participating in various freeware projects, running technical simulators and tweaking her connection parameters to get better throughput. You could feel the researcher slipping into shock...

Completely without knowing, the team had accidently picked one of the original Colossus team members, and she was putting her sudden luck to good use...

Cheers,
Ian

It takes three years to get a degree (minimum). Do you honestly want to be poor for three years?

If you are currently hacking in C++, you are probably paid quite well. Trust me, you don't want to be poor again.

I had a similar problem. Went to university to do maths, ended up doing astrophysics, ran out of money, had to get a real job.

A few years later, I discovered you couldn't get a job without a first degree. So, I enrolled with the Open University. I signed on for the MSc in Computing for Commerce and Industry program. I can't speak highly enough about this course.

If you *really* want, you could get the MSc in three years. That would leave you no spare time whatsoever. Four years is attainable. Five years is the most usual.

The great thing is, you don't have to stop working. The hard thing is, it takes 1-3 hours a day of deep concentration.

You don't need a first degree before you start.

It is a *real* postgradute qualification. It's hard. You'll learn about operating systems, software engineering and programming in ways you hadn't thought about. You can do modules in anything from business and marketing to telecoms switching.

It's fun and demanding. At the end you get an MSc from a University that is highly respected globally for it's teaching.

It costs about $9000 over five years.

The best bit is, you can say to a prospective employer "I'm currently working for my Master's degree. Any chance of you helping with money/time?". This defuses the "Why haven't you got a degree?" question.

If you do the Objects couse, you get to learn Smalltalk as well. What more could you want?

It takes three years to get a degree (minimum). Do you honestly want to be poor for three years?

If you are currently hacking in C++, you are probably paid quite well. Trust me, you don't want to be poor again.

I had a similar problem. Went to university to do maths, ended up doing astrophysics, ran out of money, had to get a real job.

A few years later, I discovered you couldn't get a job without a first degree. So, I enrolled with the Open University. I signed on for the MSc in Computing for Commerce and Industry program. I can't speak highly enough about this course.

If you *really* want, you could get the MSc in three years. That would leave you no spare time whatsoever. Four years is attainable. Five years is the most usual.

The great thing is, you don't have to stop working. The hard thing is, it takes 1-3 hours a day of deep concentration.

You don't need a first degree before you start.

It is a *real* postgradute qualification. It's hard. You'll learn about operating systems, software engineering and programming in ways you hadn't thought about. You can do modules in anything from business and marketing to telecoms switching.

It's fun and demanding. At the end you get an MSc from a University that is highly respected globally for it's teaching.

It costs about $9000 over five years.

The best bit is, you can say to a prospective employer "I'm currently working for my Master's degree. Any chance of you helping with money/time?". This defuses the "Why haven't you got a degree?" question.

If you do the Objects couse, you get to learn Smalltalk as well. What more could you want?

I have a degree, it comes in useful, it allows you to put letters after your name and looks good on your CV. And I would actually say they were the best 3 years of my life, and I would have no hesitation recommending University to anyone. Although a Degree with no experience is a pain, job experience with a degree will put, maybe, 20% onto your salary.

But if university is not an option have a look here where if your are good enough I suppose you could qualify with a BSc in 2 years, and then go on to an MSc.

Also have a look at the BCS as their qualifications are to degree standard (although you would have *BCS after your name instead).

Pride and Prejudice: Four Decades of Lisp

http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/snw2/papers/prejudice /prejudice.html Floating Point Performance of Common Lisp

http://members.home.net/vogt/fft-paper.html John McCarthy's Home Page (the creator of Lisp)

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/

One issue though: Funding. The page says that they're seeking partners for the funding.... How would this work exactly? This engineering course was brought to you today by..?

It'd be interesting if this was extended into an 'Open University' model, which would allow distance learning. Especially if other Universities jumped on the bandwagon (as Mordred indicated), Harvard, Yale, Oxbridge - or even my old Uni, Birmingham, UK.
--
Murky

Putting the coursework online for free is fantastic. The next logical step would be to publish curricula and allow anyone who wants to take exams to obtain MIT-approved qualifications.

Obviously this sort of thing couldn't be free, as there would be costs involved in exam locations, supervision and marking, but I bet it would be popular.

Two problems, however.

Firstly, I bet that MIT's management would fear that something like this would dilute the perceived quality and value of MIT degrees, but at the end of the day, if the Open students are taking the same exams and being marked by the same criteria, as the "real" MIT students, then there's no real difference.

Secondly, tutorials, labs, workshops and ongoing/coursework assessment are being used more and more in educational institutions. However, the UK's Open University holds tutorials in countries other than the UK, so there's no reason why MIT couldn't follow suit.

D.

While we're at it, the LGM grad student's name was Jocelyn Bell, now added Burnell, and here's her homepage.

The above is a great idea...except for one thing. Private, "charter," for-profit schools are certainly not going to help educate the disenfranchised, especially not online. Contrary to popular belief (and you can see a little evidence for it in the C-Net article where they mention the number of people with whom the child is interacting online), online education is often more capital-intensive, and expensive than classroom education.

Online education is definitely more labour-intensive for the teachers and the institutions, and has much higher maintenance costs than many people suspect. That's why, in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education Live Colloquy, Dr. David Noble suggested that most online education is really only for the rich, at least at this point.

For more information, see Hara & Kling on student frustration with technology
http://www.slis.indiana.edu/CSI/wp00-01.html
and LaRose, Gregg, & Eastin on "low-tech high-tech"
http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol4/issue2/larose.html ;
Mason on online education at http://www-iet.open.ac.uk/pp/r.d.mason/GlobalEdu.h tml ;
Morgan on online learning economics at http://multimedia.marshall.edu/onlinecosts/distanc elearning.pdf (you will need a PDF reader for this one!);
and Noble's famous and justifiably critical "Digital Diploma Mills" series -- One--The Automation of Higher Education, Two--The Coming Battle Over Online Instruction, Three--The Bloom Is Off The Rose, and Four--Rehearsal For the Revolution.

In any case, charter schools are just a bad idea whose time has come. They take money and authority away from the state, whose job it is to provide education and some sort of societal standard...which is why Canadian universities don't have entrance exams. Canadian schools are strictly enforced by a centralized, federal government, so school in one place is much like school in any other. Don't you wish you could say the same thing about US schools?

Anyone with a little perl knowledge can go a long way towards making a slashcode site into a customer support, file download, or of course a news and events website.

Anyways, here's the slashsites in case anyone is interested.

• Media-Mixer
• RadioTiki
• ipv6news.org
• PRIME Wrestling
• Knowledgerush
• High Performance Hunting
• marketseat.com
• ExtraCrispy.Net
• YourOfficeGeek
• ITCouncil
• Morrissey Solo
• The Cedar Valley Linux Users Group
• EastVan
• earthDot
• meepdot
• Love9
• MedMeta
• jazz-flute.com
• jazz-sax.com
• SigKill
• University of Utah College of Engineering Computing Facility
• Mr. Lego
• FuelCellTalk
• Portland Geekly News
• The Golden Horde Network
• use Perl;
• MacSlash
• bottomquark
• We Have No Product
• TQY3
• gildot
• Tar Heel State Online
• SlashHosting (Hosting for Slash sites)
• slashhost (Hosting for Slash sites)
• IDM Newsbase
• gosports.org
• Anime Station
• NetGAMES
• OnTopofIT
• Web Crush
• HairyPALM.com: The PDA InfoQuarters
• Myworkflow.com
• Techdirt.com
• Be Route (French)
• Yourtown CLN
• DNS Policy
• BarraPunto (Spanish)
• isrec.org
• AbsolutChaos
• Extreme XL Linux News
• Spam Roaster's Club

Given that you see failings in the current system (as indicated by your desire to set up a private course), can you speculate on how you see the tertiary sector evolving. Perhaps you have some views on how private institutes or providers might foster the quarternary education sector (which can be broadly defined as post-post-graduate, professional life-long-learning, university of the third age, or adult free-thinking depending on the buzzword-du-jour or mental biases). Proto-examples I'm aware of vaguely heading this direction are University of Phoenix (US), Open University (UK/Europe), and Universitas21 (Austrasia).

In short, what do you believe the future holds for the next organised stage of research-intensive learning/teaching?

LL

Their qualifications are well-respected, and their audio, video andprinted course material is top quality, but it is not a cheap thing to do. Firstly the production costs of good material are high -- they employ top lecturers and professional TV production crews and a much higher level of display equipment and technical support than you'd see in a "face-to-face" lecture, and the course material has to be revised every 5-10 years depending on subject -- if nothing else, the lecturer's clothes and hair styles start to look rather laughable.

They also employ tutors all over the country to run face-to-face small group tutorials (I think most students get about 2 per month) or, where people are very scattered, audio, video or internet chat conferences.

You can make distance learning work really well, and the internet helps a little, but it is not dramatically less work, or cheaper, than a conventional university.

Only problem I see is they have exam centres in Europe only. The USA and rest-of-world is handled by "affiliates". I'll try and find out who these are.

Regards, Ralph.

My wife has one degree from the OU, and is currently studying for a Masters.

Paul.