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Former Students Say Steve Wozniak's $13,200 Coding Bootcamp Is 'Broken' and Sometimes Links To Wikipedia (9to5mac.com)
Last year, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak announced a coding program called Woz U that's designed with the goal of offering an affordable education. "Our goal is to educate and train people in employable digital skills without putting them into years of debt," Wozniak said last fall. "People often are afraid to choose a technology-based career because they think they can't do it. I know they can, and I want to show them how."
Now that a round of students have been through the 33-week program, a number of problems have appeared. Former student, Bill Duerr, called the program "broken," and that "lots of times there's just hyperlinks to Microsoft documents, to Wikipedia." 9to5Mac reports: "Duerr said typos in course content were one of many problems. So-called 'live lectures' were pre-recorded and out of date, student mentors were unqualified, and at one point, one of his courses didn't even have an instructor," reports CBS. CBS heard from over 24 current and former students and employees that reiterated Duerr's experiences. Instead of a quality program, Duerr said Woz U was comparable to an ultra expensive e-book: "'I feel like this is a $13,000 e-book,' Duerr said. While it was supposed to be a program written by one of the greatest tech minds of all time, 'it's broken, it's not working in places, lots of times there's just hyperlinks to Microsoft documents, to Wikipedia,' he said."
A former Woz U enrollment counselor said that at times he had to do things that didn't feel right: "Asked whether he regrets working for Woz U, Mionske said, 'I regret in the aspect to where they're spending this money for, it's like rolling the dice. [...] But on the reverse side, I have to support my family.'" According to Business Insider, Steve Wozniak said that he's "not involved" in the "operational aspects" of Woz U and doesn't know anything about the report this morning.
Now that a round of students have been through the 33-week program, a number of problems have appeared. Former student, Bill Duerr, called the program "broken," and that "lots of times there's just hyperlinks to Microsoft documents, to Wikipedia." 9to5Mac reports: "Duerr said typos in course content were one of many problems. So-called 'live lectures' were pre-recorded and out of date, student mentors were unqualified, and at one point, one of his courses didn't even have an instructor," reports CBS. CBS heard from over 24 current and former students and employees that reiterated Duerr's experiences. Instead of a quality program, Duerr said Woz U was comparable to an ultra expensive e-book: "'I feel like this is a $13,000 e-book,' Duerr said. While it was supposed to be a program written by one of the greatest tech minds of all time, 'it's broken, it's not working in places, lots of times there's just hyperlinks to Microsoft documents, to Wikipedia,' he said."
A former Woz U enrollment counselor said that at times he had to do things that didn't feel right: "Asked whether he regrets working for Woz U, Mionske said, 'I regret in the aspect to where they're spending this money for, it's like rolling the dice. [...] But on the reverse side, I have to support my family.'" According to Business Insider, Steve Wozniak said that he's "not involved" in the "operational aspects" of Woz U and doesn't know anything about the report this morning.
"I just cash the checks." - Woz
A classic problem with computer science educators. If you're good in your field your earning vastly less money teaching it than working it. Hopefully as the field matures more we get more semi-retirees teaching more but until then this will be a huge problem until we raise teacher's wages.
I remember my first CS-ish teachers in high school in the 90's. They meant well but didn't have a fucking clue.
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I just rented out my name...not my fault.... I am not even there....where is mommy?
Please.
Sad, so sad.
I don't understand why anyone would pay that sort of money when you can buy a $50 book and learn from that. Not only is it much cheaper, but the ability to learn on your own is an essential skill for a programmer since programming requires continuous learning in order to keep your skills up to date. If you're unable to study yourself, and need information spoon fed to you, it's probably not the career for you.
Besides, you don't learn to program in a boot camp. All you're going to learn is the basic language syntax and features, which you can learn easily yourself. To develop actual programming skills you need to write software. After writing an application you'll likely find there were many things that could have been done better and you'll be able to use those lessons in your next application, thus improving your skills.
Programming boot camps are a con aimed at people who aren't actually interested in programming but who have seen the high salaries you can get as a programmer. Real programmers more than likely learned to program around age 13, and they did it because it interested them, not for the money.
My CS teacher in 1985 was a math teacher who was into computers as a hobby, but into algorithms with a passion. One of my favourite classes ever, and it still influences me ...
students are just holding them wrong.
Did you read my post? We learned all about algorithms, which are pretty much platform or hardware agnostic. I still think that way. What a better education could one get?
he could end up being the next President of the United States!
(*rimshot*)
Thankyou for explaining the joke. It is much funnier now, with all that needless subtlety removed.
This is Slashdot. People are vilified for the oddest things. People with Trump Derangement are even worse than the ones in the past who had Obama Derangement. They're stupid and dangerous, so it's always best to play it safe.
13k for the piece of paper
I really have no idea what you are talking about. Maybe we are talking past one another.
If your point is trivial, i.e., one good teacher does not make all teachers good, well, then, I agree, and I did not offer my experience as a contradiction to the rule that you established above.
But I also think there are some people who do things for the love the material, and not for material gain. Which is to say, economics does not destroy the possibility that some people end up as good teachers in fields that would pay better elsewise.
I don't see it. There are a lot of teachers and the only ones I have seen are ones under employed struggling to get more hours. On all levels I see an overabundance of teachers competing for jobs. You might be surprised just how much many people value having half your life off work while getting paid a full time salary.
And I think you overvalue the hotshot wiz kids of silicon valley and their ability at teaching others. The last thing students need is someone who has never struggled with a programming concept in their life trying to teach them. And this is just the absolute opposite of my experience. I have gone to a university that attracted international talent to do research and shit. The only ones in the entire institution who had any idea how to teach anyone were TAs and this one teacher who was not a professor.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I've heard of paying out the Wazoo, and now people are paying out the Woz U?
'Nuff said.
That's true.
It's also true that computer science and computer engineering people know how to scale things, through automation and other means. A very simple example is that a lot of courses in other fields still have quizzes and such grades by hand. Anyone with even half a clue about computer anything wouldn't generally do that. Open source software like Moodle provides very flexible quizzes which can adapt to the student. I'd rather watch a recorded lecture by one of the best in the field than a live lecture by just another guy.
We CAN have high-quality education in this field, more efficiently, which means lower costs to students. The OMSCS at Georgia Tech looks promising, for example.
We also have to remember that graduating school doesn't mean you stop learning. I study daily and I've been in the field professionally for 20 years. College should give us the background we need in order to build our knowledge in different areas, and the skills and interest to learn. If we expect to do an entire career worth of learning in 2-4 years we're going to be dissapointed every time.
You are not being vilified. I'm just grumpy when people ruin a joke, thinking they made the joke. Nothing personal, we've all done it.
You know this "Derangement", be it left or right, is not a real thing, just a vague insult?
Wouldn't "partisan" be a better word?
I don't understand why anyone would pay that sort of money when you can buy a $50 book and learn from that.
Head First by O'Reilly:
https://www.humblebundle.com/books/head-first-books
Learn you some code:
https://www.humblebundle.com/books/learn-you-some-code-books
And I saved you $20.
Steve Jobs said Woz was a lack-luster coder. He'd procrastinate and get distracted by some gee-whiz side project. For example, he never finished the floating point version of Apple BASIC he promised Jobs.
Table-ized A.I.
Id rather get exceptional rare teaching.
everything else is just cat book | brain.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
how to rip people off,
how to get credit from others work.
how to get the weak to do the night shifts.
how to scam more VC money for crap products.
how to pump then dump stocks, change jobs every 6 months.
how to get excess huge stocks for free, and sell 2 days before
product releases.
how to sell shitty mobile apps to spammers for 7 digits+.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
I would hope so. Because I got news for you: Even real programmers do not know everything and tend to forget stuff, but they know where to look things up. And maybe that was the purpose of linking to Wikipedia, to teach you how to use the Internet.
Here is an example of my work yesterday.
- For a webapp I had to find the greatest common divider for the width and height of an image. Had no idea how to do that, so I searched stackoverflow for "greatest common divider javascript" and found this helpful answer.
- One of the comments links to the Euclidean algorithm on Wikipedia, so I followed the link to understand the algorithm behind the solution.
- Finally I came up with this wondeful one-liner for my specific case:
var whGcd = function gcd(a,b){ return b ? gcd(b, a%b) : a; }(width, height);
That's how I work. Lot's of Wikipedia links involved.
Signature deleted by lameness filter.
To be fair, you say 'Anyone asserting Woz has not "done" anything since the ][ and its disk operating system has not read enough about what the ][ was', which directly talks about the Apple II. You don't mention anything he's done since, but let's be quick - all of them were as an investor except one (Wheels of Zeus - tags to track your kids) and to my knowledge at least all of them have been commercial failures. Woz was a great 8 bit circuit board engineer, but so were many others. Remember Woz couldn't actually get the board to boot and needed Chuck Peddle to intervene - even then you had to boot it twice to clear the memory. Being a great circuit layout guy doesn't qualify you (or disqualify you) from being able to run a university. I'm sticking with it - I've seen nothing he's done since that has been a great advance.
Apologies - paragraphs:
To be fair, you say 'Anyone asserting Woz has not "done" anything since the ][ and its disk operating system has not read enough about what the ][ was', which directly talks about the Apple II. You don't mention anything he's done since, but let's be quick - all of them were as an investor except one (Wheels of Zeus - tags to track your kids) and to my knowledge at least all of them have been commercial failures.
Woz was a great 8 bit circuit board engineer, but so were many others. Remember Woz couldn't actually get the board to boot and needed Chuck Peddle to intervene - even then you had to boot it twice to clear the memory. Being a great circuit layout guy doesn't qualify you (or disqualify you) from being able to run a university. I'm sticking with it - I've seen nothing he's done since that has been a great advance.
Woz not knowing about what is going on in an institution under his own name reminds me of the Simpsons episode when Krusty turns up at Kamp Krusty after the kids revolt. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"Steve Wozniak said that he's "not involved" in the "operational aspects" of Woz U and doesn't know anything about the report this morning."
What i don't understand is why these people let others use their name and then produce a lousy product/service? Do this enough times and your good name will be gone and hard to restore to it's former glory.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
I think the AC is saying that experts often, but not always, make lousy teachers. BTW, someone with an M.Ed or D.Ed isn't necessarily a good teacher either. It just means they spent some years studying teaching, not actually doing it and learning how to do it themselves, i.e. M.Eds & D.Eds are theoretical and not practice based. A description of 3 (out of 16) of the characteristics of good teachers follows:
However, this is only part of the story; there’s another one! John Hattie (2003) analysed the difference between expert and ‘ordinary’ teachers. He determined that they differ in 16 ways and there are three that really distinguish them if it comes to learning effectiveness. He found that experts:
Quoted from: https://3starlearningexperienc...
So yes, deep subject matter knowledge is necessary but not sufficient. Having tutors who are experts in their subject matter but not good teachers, as is common in higher education where the only recognised qualifications are Masters and Doctorates, means that only a small minority of students can learn well in that environment. Prestigious universities compensate for this through selective admission. In other words, only accepting students who are likely to succeed without expert tutoring. MOOCs deal with this by accepting a 95% failure rate (and those students who succeed on MOOCs are almost always already highly qualified).
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
"lots of times there's just hyperlinks to Microsoft documents, to Wikipedia"
So it's just like working a real job, then? ;)
Why? Sure the Apple 1 and Apple ][ (and disk OS and disk drive) were great in their time, but 40 years later name another he worked on.
Because there isn't one. There is really nothing. So I am not surprised how this turned out at all.
Now, please list YOUR accomplishments that will be remembered 40 years on.
I'll wait...
> Apple ][ .. disk OS were great in their time,
Uh, Apple 2 fan here.
DOS 3.2 and DOS 3.3 *sucked* due to its dumb File System design. Who the fuck stores Meta-Data IN the file itself??? (Binary files had the first 4 bytes in the file reserved for DOS: load address, file length). Most of DOS 3.x wasn't even written by Apple -- it was contracted out -- sans the disk nibble writing/reading code. Notice how ProDOS stores the load address and file length in the directory entry itself. The ProDOS name itself shows what Apple though of DOS 3.x: Amateur DOS.
Even with the dumb design of mixing meta-data with file data Pronto-DOS and other "Fast DOSes", such as Diverse-DOS, RolandDOS, etc. showed how much "Buffer Bloat" there was in DOS.
> name another he worked on.
And _you_ have accomplished what again?
Why does he need a "modern" accomplishment? Any ONE of Woz's accomplishments -- Apple I, Apple ][, the disk drive -- outshine pretty anyone will ever accomplish. Woz helped usher in the computer age for everyone.
This constant "need to prove oneself" accomplished what again???
That said, Woz should take some responsibility for a school using his fame / name.
> and the Apple 2
What does the Apple ][ have to do with Woz U ???
I know of many projects the Woz worked on, his ability to rework circuits to use 20% less chips is legendary.
There is a reason the Apple 1 looked like an Atari video game board.
One of the most interesting things the Woz did that stunned everybody is the way his floppy disk drive worked.
When I first got mine I could not believe what I was looking at, the controller card only had a few msi ttl chips on it and the disk drive electronic only had a couple small chips that were mainly analog?!? how could this possibly work?
The Woz did it all in software
Yep.
And he used to tell the story about how, one late night before a big computer show where the Disk ][ was introduced, he and Randy Wigginton were able to change ONE BYTE in the Controller's State Machine PROM and reduce their raw error-rate from 1 X 10^9 to 1X 10^12.
For those who don't remember, this is how the typical Shugart SA400 controller looked in 1978:
http://www.s100computers.com/G...
Now, compare that with the Disk ][ controller:
http://i2.wp.com/www.appleresc...
Amazing that they do EXACTLY the same thing, isn't it?
Let me it put it more plainly. You are using anecdotal evidence to try to establish a norm. Your experience with your teacher is magnificent but it does nothing to dispute my point that there is no economic incentive for people skilled with computers to teach. Sure, there will always be those passionate about teaching enough to forgo money in the name of educating others but you can't base an entire educational system on good fucking will.
Why I have to explain this to a grown ass adult is beyond me.
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The Georgia Tech online masters in computer science costs $7,000. Typical cost to sit in a lecture hall is about $50,000. That traditional method is going to have to be a whole lot better to make it worth costing seven times as much.
I've been around computer science, in software engineering, for 20 years. One thing I've learned is that to earn well over your career, you need to keep learning, keep your skills up to date. What you learned ten years ago in school isn't enough, in fact it's mostly just background education to make it easier to learn the tools and techniques you'll actually use in your job.
If you have a spare $50,000 or $60,000 you want to spend on sitting in a classroom rather than watching the lecture from home or from the library, you're more than welcome to spend your money that way. I won't be doing that.
I'm not sure I'm understanding your question. Can you rephrase it?
I'm curious about your situation - are you employed by a university, or do you have $60,000 in student loans that you hope are worth it? For some reason you seem VERY resistant to the idea that people, including myself, can and did learn this stuff without spending $60,000 on the basics, before starting work. I'm wondering why that could be.
Some of those expensive university comp sci courses used a book my mom wrote. She didn't have $60,000 in student loans when she *wrote* the book, so ...
Btw, Bruce Perens is also a regular on Slashdot. He's had a pretty decent career, I'd say. Achieved quite a lot. One thing I don't think he's done is blow $60,000 putting the name of a fancy school on a piece of paper. He teaches university courses, he doesn't buy overpriced ones.
I'm sorry if you're struggling to pay your student loan debt or whatever, but your kids do NOT have to do the same thing. It's not required. I hope you don't tell them that it is. That would be really mean.
And who the fuck is "Robert"? Your naming of names in a first name context makes you sound much more like a lame hipster than an intellectual. It literally diminishes whatever you're trying to accomplish by naming names. If you have to tell some one about your accomplishments they probably aren't as important as you want them to be.
And they certainly aren't so when you're make such absurd and uneducated claims.
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