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ArsDigita U. Cuts On-Campus Admissions
Cambridge writes: "ArsDigita University, which has been previously featured here, has lost its funding for the 2001-2002 year, and so won't be accepting applications. While it is all perfectly reasonable to expect that the good and great causes rising out of the Internet Boom will suffer the same fate as the many bad causes in the Internet Bust, I find it rather sad nonetheless." Note that the course materials will remain online, though -- so while it's still a sad turn that they can't accept applicants for the on-campus program for now, there is a silver lining.
One snag. Most of us are male, and Mills College is for women only (at least, it was when I lived in Oakland, nearby where Mills is located).
My impression was that the online material was largely posted as a courtesy. The cirriculum is intensive, and the designers of the program were highly skeptical that anyone not completely devoted to the program for a year would be able to complete it, but still shared the material online.
I think the truth is in-between. They wanted to try and give as many people as possible a decent backing in CS...
However, they also realized that many such people would be cubicle fodder. The end goal was to try and raise the general level of CS related skills across all companies so companies all over would be able to move one step beyond the primitive churn of haphazard design that we see today.
Wouldn't it be great if all your co-workers knew what a hashtable or linked list was, and in what cases you might want to use them? Even very small basic steps like that would really help everyone, both designers and coders. The benefit of that would extend outside of companies by providing more people who might be working on OSS stuff during spare time, but with an elevated level of skill. I guess what I'm trying to say here is that there are going to be cubicile fodder farms anyway, so why not try and make one that produces a halfway decent product.
A tangent could be people from other professions (like lawyers) who used knowledge gleaned from Ars Digita courses in other areas of our lives.
I could be wrong, but that's the impression I get after reading through a lot of Greenspun's material on Photo.net.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It was the job of every engineering school to churn out drones for cubicle farms... until open source and the Web came along. See http://www.arsdigita.com/asj/professionalism for how the options of a software engineer back in, say, 1985 were limited to working within a largeish product group. Only recently has it been possible for a couple of guys to do something huge like slashdot (for example).
What keeps me excited about teaching computer science is the fact that someone with a good CS background is in a great position to touch a lot of human lives. That wasn't true 20 years ago when computers were only in the back rooms of big companies. If someone with a first-rate CS education instead chooses to become a drone, that is sad but we don't live in Roman times (where a parent could kill his adult child if he didn't like the way he or she turned out; not sure if teachers were accorded the same privilege).
(Oh yes, and please don't sell Oracle employees short. They've got enough PhD computer scientists in their core RDBMS server programming team to equip a medium-size university. That said, I wouldn't want work in their huge bay-side office towers (no dogs allowed))
Unix is a good example of a transition/hybrid system. It only took two guys to develop the initial prototype. For distribution, it required cooperation and coordination from the staff of the world's largest and most valuable company (AT&T). It was about as close to open source as anything was in its day (late 1970s and early 1980s). It got distributed largely along the lines of the Internet as it then existed (ARPAnet among the universities). And it only got distributed so cheaply because it had been done in Bell Labs rather than an AT&T product division. Let me quote from http://www.arsdigita.com/asj/professionalism:
"What were a programmer's options, then, [in the 1980s] if in fact craftsmanship proved to be an unsatisfying career goal? The only escape from the strictures of closed-source and secrecy was the university. A programmer could join a computer science research lab at a university where, very likely, he or she would be permitted to teach others via publication, source code release, and face-to-face instruction of students. However, by going into a university, where the required team of 50 would never be assembled to deliver a software product to market, the programmer was giving up the opportunity to work at the state of the art as well as innovate and teach."]
Bell Labs, where Unix was developed, is in many ways analogous to a university research lab. Engineers there have to give up on the idea of getting applications into the hands of end-users, though of course occasionally it has happened.
If you read http://www.arsdigita.com/asj/professionalism carefully you'll see that the article does not posit large engineering groups either today or any time in the past. It says that the closed-source packaged software business strategy ends up requiring large groups of people for physical packaging, traditional marketing, and fulfillment to retailers.
I'll give you a personal example. I developed a computer-aided engineering system back in the 1980s with one other programmer. This automated the design of large steel structures. We built it on a Symbolics Lisp Machine and therefore our productivity as programmers was extremely high. It took us about a year to get the thing working properly on a test problem of doing one person-year of engineering for an air-cooled heat exchanger (like a car radiator but the size of a house with about 20,000 parts). It probably took another two years before the 100th end-user was looking at his or her design taking shape on the screen. And we needed several full-time business people to convince people to buy the software and a Lisp Machine to run it (more Symbolics machines were sold to run this app than for any other purpose; then it got converted to run on Suns).
Contrast that with adding a feature to photo.net. If I were to write a new service on photo.net, it would take less than one hour to reach the 100-user mark (photo.net attracts more than 30,000 visitors per day across all services on the site).
At least for me, the world has changed a lot since I started programming (1976).
I've written a small article on how we've refined our software engineering for Internet applications course over the years. It includes some discussion of what has been effective about ArsDigita University. See http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/teaching-soft ware-engineering
(still in draft form so please email if you have comments/corrections).
Oh yes, for those of you who are tools-obsessed, you'll be pleased to know that the new curriculum is tools-neutral. When we started out, none of our students came in with experience building Web apps and none had used RDBMSes. But now a student might have had a summer job using PostgreSQL/mod_perl/Apache. I don't want to look at his Perl code but I'm not going to tell him he can't use his familiar tools to complete 6.916. If another student is jazzed up about Microsoft .NET and she wants to use C#, VB, and ASP.NET, more power to her. We'll look at her data model, page flow, and what the application accomplishes.
This is sort of the same progression as has been followed by ACS. When we started packaging up our apps we said "Wouldn't it be nice to have three versions, one for Oracle/AOLserver, one with a Microsoft Active Server Pages presentation layer, and one with a JSP presentation layer". But we were only five part-time programmers. So we never got around to doing the other versions and figured someone else might. Early in the summer of 2000, when I was still at aD, I twisted Jin's arm into leading a small team to do a 100% Java version. And that opened up all kinds of possibilities for new and different execution environments (Tomcat, built-into-Oracle, etc., etc.).
But guess what? Nobody cares. You might think C sucks but you still run your spreadsheet. When I give talks to people in big organizations they often are most impressed by WimpyPoint (see http://www.arsdigita.com/wp/). They've never seen anything like it before and think it is amazing that you can view, at a glance, the most recent work of a whole bunch of people in one orgazation. Having seen it, they ask how to get it. But nobody has ever asked what computer languages were used to build it.
Get a little pool together where people use resources to study the invention they want to build and have a contest. 100 winners get 1/3 of the pot, 1/3 goes to running the school, and one 1/3 to resources for inventors.
Also put donations into the pool.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this university is mostly on-line in the first place.
Thus, how badly will it hurt them to not accept on-campus students, an action that would shut down most schools?
Hours of real video lectures by Phillip Greenspun and others (Richard Stallman for instance) here or http://aduni.org/about/colloquium_schedule.tcl if you're scared of links.
-- http://jamesthornton.com
I have been downloading the mpegs of the Ars Digita University lectures and soaking up a little of the knowledge. Seems like a very focused, intense program in CS - too bad it may not make it.
Many of the courses, according to the online syllabi, strongly resemble the MIT courses I took. Many of faculty had associations with MIT one way or the other. These courses were to be taught in intensive one month chunks, sort of the way the tech school University of Phoenix teaches. I guess the aim was to distill some of MIT without its overhead.
I missed the first posting about ArsDigita U., but I read over their web pages and it got me thinking.
In the promotional paragraph they mention that it is a one year (albeit intense) undergraduate program. In the News section they mention a thanks to Oracle for their donation. These coupled with the fact that they have lost funding during the hightech landslide brings up a question; Is ArsDigita really the scholastic wave of the furture, striving to produce competent and innovative CS mjors who will help us take the great leap into the technology era, or is it just a mill for the big companies to churn out drones for the cubilcle farms?
And just because Stallman gave a lecture there doesn't, in my opnion, prove that they are the former. I am all for educating toward technological tolerance and ease as we will need it in the years to come. I just hope that it will be the need for knowledge and not the need for revenue that wins out.
"Are these questions testing whether I'm a replicant or a lesbian, Mr. Deckard?" -Rachael Tyrell
That is not entirely accurate. There was a lay off at ArsDigita Foundation. We didn't want to completely exclude people from the Foudation if they wanted to stay involved, so we offerred a 1 hour/week status until we could raise more funds. This message did not go over as intended and I sincerely apologize that this seemed insulting. I'm also willing to apologize in person. Fortunately, we are able keep all the ArsDigita University Faculty and its administrator until the end of the school year. ArsDigita Corporation will continue to fund ArsDigita University through the end of the year as originally planned. After that, the Foundation is on its own to find funding (also as originally planned). But, unfortunately, and unlike the original plan, we were not able to raise the funding.
Philip Greenspun was asked to leave ArsDigita late last year, though he's still giving lectures etc. Yesterday, the company laid off roughly 20% of staff. In light of these developments the fact that ArsDigita University has lost its funding isn't terribly surprising, is it?
Mills is single-sex at the undergraduate level but coed at the graduate level.
Actually we posted the content online in hopes primarily of helping other universities (both established ones and start-up one-year post-bacc programs like ADU). Also we figured it would be nice for individual learners. Finally we posted the content online because we post everything online! That's what the Internet is for!
Mills College, located in the San Francisco Bay Area, has a longstanding program targetting the same demographic: bright people interested in computer science with a bachelor's degree in another field. After completing their studies, graduates go on to computer science graduate school, industry, or teaching. Like ADU, there is a strong MIT influence. (Half of the CS professors at Mills are MIT graduates.) Visit the web site or contact me for more information. While the official deadline has passed for Fall admission, I may be able to get strong applications considered.
Our aim was NOT to be "MIT without overhead". ADU is/was a post-baccalaureate program. Only college graduates could apply. Whereas for MIT undergrad CS, people who already have bachelor's degrees are excluded from even applying. The idea was to give people with bachelor's in other fields as much of the CS undergrad education as practical within 9 or 10 months.
t ware-engineering for some analysis of what worked well so far at ADU.
MIT remains great for what it is (undergrad education for people done with high school; grad education for people done with college) and we never claimed that we would be able to do better than MIT at MIT's chosen mission.
See http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/teaching-sof
- this
year ADU is exclusively on-campus. We are taught in person, have TAs
stationed in the same room as us, etc. Materials have been made available
online, to some extent, to benefit people capable of doing something
constructive with their time, but without the resources, flexibility, or
eligibility to attend a quality CS program.
- ADU is not focused on web
scripting and databases. There is one course explicitly on programming
for the web (yes this will involve using a scripting
language). Personally, I plan to use the
popular LAMP combo that month, whereas Philip has in the past used
AOL server and Oracle and TCL. To the extent that the program is more
focused on the Web than other programs, there is good reason, both for the
direction computing is going and because of the sorts of goals the
students here have. This is not to say that courses such as discrete
math, algorithms, OOP, theory of computation, and computer hardware aren't a part of the
curriculum.
- suggesting that ADU might be a mill for big companies desiring drones
for cubicle farms is really stupid. Hello, they're not even funding us.
Not to mention that a review of the student body would clear up any idea
that ADU students are the sort that would resign themselves to such a
pathetic fate.
- ADU was never intended to be a breeding grounds for
arsDigita employees. While this is less obvious, it is consistent with
the stated mission of this place, with Philip's comments in interviews,
and, hey, there is no evidence to the contrary, but don't let that stop
you.
- obviously a 1 year program cannot be everything that a 4+ year
program can be, but people should keep in mind that this is an intensive
program. The 12 hour a day, 6 day a week desciption is accurate. The
resources available, the interaction between students, these sorts of
things result in the time being used much more effectively than is typical
in the programs this is being held up against. The learning taking
place here, whatever the limit, is not at a dumbed down/non-interactive
level. This should be obvious to anyone who looks at the curriculum and
is familiar with what it covers.
- We did not lose funding because Microsoft pulled some strings. That is my favorite. Acutally Microsoft is sending us 40 Win2K machines next week.
- yes, we run Linux.
I suggest taking a look at the following links.- Tuition-free
MIT by Philip Greenspun
- the ADU
curriculum and faculty | more
- students | more | more
-
press
-
why
apply (google cache)
-
class
catalog (google cache)
-
do your own research
-ahb