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ArsDigita University
Philip Greenspun, whose name you may recognize from photo.net or Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing, is founding a tuition-free program in computer science that's intended to provide the equivalent of four years' worth of CompSci in a single, 6-day-a-week, 12-hour-a-day year. You heard it right: tuition-free. And they're accepting applications. There are a few catches: you'll need a bachelor's degree already, and you'll need to be so bright that people put on sunglasses when you walk into a room. But even the rest of us can eavesdrop with lectures and course notes to be made available online. See this column about the program, or visit ArsDigita University.
There are 3 "basic" computer related degrees.
- Computer Engineering: Those fine people who help build computers. They know the insides and outsides of the microprocessor by heart, and enjoy every minute.
- Computer Information Systems: These are the great people down the hall who call themselves sysadmins. If you have a problem, you go and ask them. What? You don't know how you use a spreadsheet? Ask one of them. Not necessarily programmers, but they can shell out a VB program pretty fast, and can teach us techies a thing or two about user-friendlyness.
- Computer Science: Computer Science is a mix between the above two. They have to know how the system works at the processor level if they want to write really great programs, but they also have to know the CIS stuff in order to write usable programs. This area probably has the largest range of what people do because it is a mix between the above. They may end up writing an OS and be friends with the processor, or may end up having to write the spreadsheet that no-one can figure out how to work. "Software Engineers" are normally put into this catagory.
Yes, some schools do just shell out "stupid MCSEs." But I would be surprised that "most CS programs" in a four year university do.As for the scientist part. It is an applied science. Mathematics, Physics, Philosophy. Problem solving at its very finest. I think you would find it very hard to write a 3D engine without a hard background in both Math and Physics. You would also find it hard to write an operating system without a good knowlege of processor and hardware design.
It also has grounds in complexity theory. Computer programs are by their very nature complex, and cannot be simplified. Physics is moving closer and closer to a unified theory, but no matter what you do, programs you write will be complex.
I'll shut up now.
the long winded AC
I went to a CS degree from a Physics/Math and some Chemistry background. I would agree that computer science is less a science than engineering profession. Now, that said, I would also say that with some improvements and more focus on theory than "implementation". Saddly, this is not what is happening. When I started my degree it did have a strong theoretical base but, by the time I finished, the Public university had pretty much taken a defacto buy-out from the largest employer in the area. Now the program is little more than a degree mill. Future CS students:
Look for a program that emphasises data structures, OS implementation, compiler construction, and Mathematical aplications. Don't wind up a slave to someone elses proprietary program and don't work on any thing that you could not re-implement yourself given adequate time.
I mean, can you imagine what the people that have spent 6 years getting a MSCS have gone through? Let's see, in 1994 they were using Win3.11/Dos5. 1995, Win95A. '96-Win95B. 1998 - Win98. 1999 - Win98SE. Toss in the changes made to Windows NT/2000 (That would be from 3.51 to W2K) and all of the different *nixs and look what you have... People with a lot of knowledge about outdated, mundane, obsolete technology. I guess you could argue that they still have that knowledge and can use it towards modern stuff, but I would still rather have the education in things that can help me get a job today...
A university degree in CS is not about knowing how to use an operating system. It's about the concepts and the theory behind it. If you want to learn to use a specific technology, get a MCSE or equivalent.
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The two most valuable lessons I learned in college was to never turn down free food or free beer...
I think the program is aimed at smart people with bachelor's degrees in a non-technical field. I got out of college with a bachelor's in political science from MIT, and nobody was offering me a $125k job.
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"But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
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I'm wondering if the reason why they need a bachelor's degree is because they aren't accredited. They could get a lot more students and the class would be more meaningful if the course was accredited. Without accredidation, the course is meaningless for those without a previous college education.
However, it is a good brush-up course for those who already have a degree. It would also be a way to reach to the people who can't afford college or can't get into it for some reason.
US businesses that currently accept chip and PIN/signature
Considering the time span of the course, do you think it makes sense that all students (at least the on-campus ones) should already have a background in programming (not necessarily professionally, but they'd be able to write a reasonably complex program in some language)? It doesn't take very long to learn how to program, but it certainly does take a long time for someone to become fluent. It's the difference between being able to speak French by translating an English sentence you've already constructed, and eventually just forming the French sentence without even thinking in English first. That's the kind of apprehension you need to be a good programmer -- and it takes more than a few months to apprehend this.
It really surprises me that you'd think that an MIT/Stanford-style CS curriculum can be apprehended within just one year. I'm a senior CS student at CMU and while I don't doubt that all of the CS lectures I've had could fit into the schedule you specified, I don't imagine that a student would retain much of that knowledge.
You simply don't get a good knowledge of CS from just listening to a lecturer tell you about CS. You need to go off on your own and struggle with the problems. You need to spend days at a time banging your head against a wall until you can find and then prove your algorithms correct. And you need to do that over and over again, until, upon getting a new problem, you immediately say to yourself: "I can use such-and-such a theorem to reduce that problem to finding a true quantified boolean formula -- darn, that's P-SPACE complete!" (or "wow! I've proved that P=P-SPACE" if you're a supa-genius)
And what's more, this knowledge is cumulative. You simply WON'T get it in 3 months, or 4 months, or 2 years. You might be smart enough to recite every single proof you've ever encountered so far (perhaps you were an accomplished actor) but I seriously doubt that any of your students will magically transform themselves into creative computer science students within the period of just one year of listening to someone else talk about computer science or solve problems for them.
If you think it'd be fun, go ahead and teach whatever curriculum you'd like, but I have a feeling you'll lose your students after a month or two if you don't give them any time to let them struggle with difficulty. And heck, beyond just learning the formalism in CS, when are they even going to have time to hack on large projects? You don't learn software engineering by attending lecture. You learn it by building horribly unmaintanable programs (unintentionally, of course) and reflecting on that after the fact.
If this program will be valuable to anyone, it's probably for people who write about technology and want to get a sense of the depth of CS (beyond programming), but don't expect to become proficient in it.
Mills College in Oakland, California, where I teach, has had programs since the mid 80s to teach computer science to people who already have a bachelor's degree in some other field.
In one program, students take computer science courses and then go into industry or CS grad school. Last year, one student went on to graduate school in CS at University of Washington, another to University of Virginia.
Another program leads to a MA degree in Interdisciplinary Computer Science, in which students take computer science courses and do an interdisciplinary thesis combining their old area with computer science. We've had some really interesting people come through.
While our programs aren't free, we do offer teaching and research assistantships. As at MIT or ADU, your teachers will be from MIT and comparable schools. (Like philg, I'm MIT^3.) Unlike MIT, classes are small (generally fewer than 20 students).
For more information, see the web page or send me email.
You could also argue that if you're smart enough to get into this program in the first place, you're probably smart enough to figure out most of the stuff by yourself anyway. Computer Science degrees are really about teaching you how to approach solving computer-related problems. A vast majority of the classroom content is either out of date or has little practical application for most graduates. So whether you get that in a year or 4 is irrelevant. What you're missing is the years of training your brain to look at and solve problems that are fundamentally different from most other disciplines.
I don't believe you can compress that experience into one year, and I certainly wouldn't consider hiring someone who claimed to have accomplished it in that timeframe.
Shut up and eat your vegetables!!!
I have done all of the above, and am happy to say I am merrily on my way to a fulfilling career as yet another cubicle dwelling valued employee and productive human resource.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Well, I guess this is the fundamental point I disagree on. I too had pipe dreams of magical self-exploration and actualization. But, at least at Big University, it turns out to be pretty much high school all over again, except that you now pay through the nose for being told what to do. You are free to explore all sorts of alternative education avenues, as long as you do it on your own time, or "any color as long as it's black" (so what does college buy me, then?). As for being learning-resistent I have interests in many different topics, with varying ranges of depth, but certainly not things I'd have time to pursue if I were doing rote work. I'm pretty much entirely disillusioned with college in general. The fantasy that it is some enlightening journey of self-exploration is utter bs.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
The most valuable thing I learn't at University was about interaction with others, I've found since that the most productive team members are not always the best read, but the best able to communicate their ideas.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
To the extent that we have a "business model" (I don't even like to use the phrase when talking about ArsDigita Corporation), it is.... Open Source. All of the materials that we develop, including the video lectures, will be available free of charge to other schools worldwide. So it is true that we're too poor right now to make a huge difference by ourselves (teaching 30 students). But remember that the world is full of rich people and companies who might like to do this but have not because they can't get the curriculum together or don't know enough PhD CS nerds. If 100 other organizations worldwide pick up our courseware and use it, that would be 3000 people/year. That would be a lot more than MIT and Stanford together educate.
Not only have we open-licensed all of our content but we're going to spend summers inviting people from around the world to come learn how to teach our curriculum.
Basically the world right now is floating in money. And many of those with money are in fact quite generous. What is in scarce supply is knowledge and human resources. By showing other people how to do what we're doing and helping them do it, we hope to encourage imitators.
You've a bright future in business, Tom, but only if you learn that businesses don't need tax writeoffs. Businesses aren't taxed the same as individuals. Virtually everything that a company buys is 100% deductible. I can hire a personal masseuse for every programmer here (currently we only have one masseuse). Her fees are deductible. A donation to the Boston Symphony Orchestra is no more or less deductible than the salary of the masseuse, the salary of a programmer, the rent on the building, the pencils in the stock room, etc.
As for whether this is a recruiting pipeline for us, it isn't a very effective one. We need to hire 200 developers in the next year or so. The first ADU graduate won't be available for more than 14 months. Many of them will return to their professional lives (some are university profs or MDs or PhDs in other fields). Some will wish to start their own businesses. Some will wish to work for large companies. We might end up hiring a couple. That would be $500,000 per person in recruiting expenses. Plus a lot of distraction. So it wouldn't be very good business.
Oh yes, the most interesting question you raise is actually answered in a cut-and-pasted excerpt from my Tcl for Web Nerds intro. Why weren't there any good Lisp-based Web servers in 1995 (or now)? Lisp programmers were too busy congratulating themselves for being smarter than C programmers. So the C programmers sat down and figured out what the real problems of publishers and end-users were and came up with practical stuff like AOLserver in 1994, Apache/mod_perl (1998 or 1999 by the time all the db connection pooling kinks were worked out?), etc.
Engineering excellence doesn't mean having a fancier system; it means having a system that solves the users' problem better faster and cheaper.
Am I bitter? No worse than Medea...
(I'm also confused by the person who claims that pgreesnpun isn't me. I am me, dammit!)
Your suggestion that we try to do more than a post-bacc is a good one. But keep in mind that we don't have much money (only $1 million/year). It is a lot easier to teach a Harvard grad than a raw high school kid. We're going to do the easy stuff first, try to do it well, and then expand as we get more resources.
If you look at Michael Saylor, who started his school with $100 million, you see the difference that more money makes. He is trying to do a whole liberal arts curriculum. He is trying to innovate in the method of instruction (online instead of face-to-face). I predict that he will have a tougher time than we will, even though he isn't constrained by money. When looking for teachers across a broad range of subjects, he will have a tough time just figuring out whom to call. Whereas I'm only one degree of separation from any qualified CS teacher in the world.
If we were to start giving bachelor's degrees we'd have to ask ourselves in what way we were better than Harvard or MIT. Those schools have, respectively, about 350 and 150 years of experience doing what they do. We would be tuition-free but so will they in the long run (I think). The guy below who said that I was an egomanaic is mostly right. I don't like to be involved in something unless it can be the world's best. I know how to make the world's best post-bacc CS program. But I don't know how to build a great college that will do all the things that need to be done for 18-22 year olds.
It certainly does not make sense to require folks to have a programming background. MIT does not require a programming background for admission to the EECS undergrad program.
As for "struggle with the problems" our students will have ample time for that. Only 2 or 3 hours per day (out of 12) are spent in lecture. The rest if problem sets.
When will our students have time to "hack on large projects"? The rest of their frigging lives! We want to do the best that we can with one year and then send our graduates on their way. We don't expect them to become Richard Stallman-grade programmers during one year with us or anyone else.
Finally, who ever said that we were teaching programming? We're teaching computer science! Some of our students might choose to go on to grad school at CMU and bury themselves in complexity theory or parallel algorithms or whatever. (We do have a couple of courses in software engineering but those are only two out of 11).
- a data modeling and declarative query language (SQL)
- abstractions implemented in PL/SQL or Java running inside the RDBMS
- helper code implemented in C running inside the RDBMS or the Web server
We do some presentation and merging RDBMS data with graphic design templates in Tcl or the AOLserver templating language (ADP).Why do we use Tcl for this last step? We don't anymore. ArsDigita will build you a 100% pure Java site and support it. Our toolkit is about getting the data models and workflow models right, not about language religion. Beyond that, we use whatever is most expedient. It turns out that AOLserver is a great efficient proven Web development tool. It happened to include a compiled-in Tcl interpreter. So we used it. If we were as smart as you, we'd have rewritten the whole thing in Perl instead of building a $20 million (revenue) profitable business.
If you don't know about any of the advancements in computer technology developed at MIT over the last 40 years nor any of the useful innovative software systems written in Lisp, maybe you should take a computer history course.
Some of the folks who have applied to ArsDigita University already have MDs, for example, and they fit your profile of the "costing these people $125K". But others have history degrees from Ivy League colleges. High SAT scores + a Yale degree in humanities big bucks job. Even ArsDigita.com pays graduating CS nerds a mere $100,000.
:-)
But you're kind of missing the point. This isn't career prep. We don't teach C programming or Oracle DBA. We teach the standard MIT/Stanford-style CS curriculum. We want to teach people who are going to change the world in some interesting way, not get all excited about $125K one way or the other (that's kind of like a rounding error for someone skilled in IT).
On the social life score, all I can say is that we expect our students to enjoy the same rich social life enjoyed by top computer science students around the world
Here's a fine example of how MIT turns out better engineers than Swarthmore. Elliot is whinging about Tcl and AOLserver while the engineers at AOL built a $120 billion business serving over 30,000 hits/second with AOLserver. Elliot hasn't bothered to check the arsdigita.com Web site (we've announced Apache and 100% Java versions of our toolkit, which really never used Tcl for much more than presentation; the Apache version is already up and running (it was authored by Robert Thau, the designer of the Apache module structure)).
If Elliot had looked at the curriculum, he'd have noticed that, just like MIT, we don't actually teach any computer languages. We expect the students to be bright enough to pick up the syntax as they learn the concepts (we might have to break the rules a tiny bit at http://arsdigita.org/university/ because we're introducing Java relatively early and Java has so much syntax and machinery).
As for teaching the "elite", Elliot, well we're sorry that we don't meet your standards. But with my piddling $1 million/year that I could afford to invest, we can't innovate too much. We're going to teach the Stanford/MIT stuff to people who had the qualifications necessary to get into Stanford and MIT in the same way (face-to-face education) used by Stanford and MIT. We're also going to let it all hang out on the Web for those who want to be monsters of self-motivation, but we don't judge ourselves by how well those folks learn.
Anyway, the bottom line Elliot is that if we had your intelligence and generosity, we could do more. But we don't so we're limited to just teaching 30 people/year in Cambridge for free.
Okay let me get this straight. They only accept people who already have bachelor degrees, and they only accept really intelligent and motivated people. Wouldn't these people already have really nice jobs that they probably won't be willing to leave for a year? That doesn't make this program cost-free, it costs these people the $125k they'd be making at work. Oh yes and their social life... how much of one can you really have, being in school 12 hrs a day? And what do the students get out of it? Some experience maybe (but we all know it's job experience that really counts) but a degree from a college that isn't even accredited.
If that isn't wacked, I don't know what is.
I mean, can you imagine what the people that have spent 6 years getting a MSCS have gone through? Let's see, in 1994 they were using Win3.11/Dos5. 1995, Win95A. '96-Win95B. 1998 - Win98. 1999 - Win98SE. Toss in the changes made to Windows NT/2000 (That would be from 3.51 to W2K) and all of the different *nixs and look what you have... People with a lot of knowledge about outdated, mundane, obsolete technology. I guess you could argue that they still have that knowledge and can use it towards modern stuff, but I would still rather have the education in things that can help me get a job today...
OK, so now I've pissed off every moderator with a degree in computer science...
kwsNI