Education is hard. After working as a TA for freshmen for some semesters, I categorized college classes after this fashion:
10% of students succeed, no matter what you do to them. Those seemed to be the hacker types.
10% of students fail, no matter what you do for them(reasons range from cheating to family deaths).
80% of students mark their boxes and do okay; better teaching helps them, worse teaching harms them. They would correspond to the 8-5 workers, IMO.
At the heart of educational discussions sit some deep philosophical questions, such as:
Nature or Nurture?
What handholding level is appropriate?
How much moral leadership is appropriate?
Education systems: simple knowledge or more?
Is education for the individual or for the society?
What expectations do you have for someone who graduates high school? College?
What does equality mean when people are different?
These are not simply answered questions. There is considerable nuance needed to begin discussing them in any real-world situation.
A(The?) core issue relates to the human beings involved - to give a glossy example: some people like being factory workers. Others hate it. What education system handles this problem?
Another major issue is that the cycle time on a k-12 educational system is at least 16 or so years (likely something more like 30 years). Failing fast is problematic, and leaves human detritus...
I consider the US public educational system deeply flawed. I think that Woz's ideas are worth investigating. There are a multiplicity of educational reform ideas out there, and some work better than others. Woz's has the advantage that he's actually taught, so it may have a better chance than others of being reality based instead of pure ideology. Also, he's a genius. :-)
These are complex questions. Which means they probably should NOT be left to a political process to decide. Parents and the students themselves (eventually) should decide.
Will some make mistakes and fail? Yep. But that's better than the entire system being hobbled, which is our current situation.
We have a tendency of trying to take over everyone's decision just because some suck at making decisions. We seem to want people to think they are like everyone else rather than experiencing consequences and learning from feedback.
I watched Waiting For Superman the other night and apparently this is the exact same problem that is preventing the public schools from getting and developing the great teachers that great teaching requires. The unions want us to think all teachers are the same and do whatever they can to stop bad teachers from being fired.
Anyone concerned about the quality of education should check out this movie.
I went to a college that seemed to follow this belief. Sarah Lawrence College, in NY, lets you take 3 classes a semester, where half of your credit for each class comes from a semester long project that relates at least tangentially to the course subject. I ended up dropping out after 2.5 years to move to SF, but I don't think I would have lasted that long if not for the awesome projects I got to work on.
As examples of the type of I did for my CS-related courses: for Computer Science: An Accelerated Introduction (Python), I made an app that parses an iTunes XML dump, hits Last.fm's API for additional info on each track and artist, and uses that data to generate playlists. For Data Structures, I built a 3d printer for the college that uses Java firmware. For Robotics, I implemented a Neural Network-based bot that predicted opponents moves in low-limit Texas Hold Em poker. For another class, I wrote a bot for Eve Online that would perform margin trading.
These projects I found to be more valuable to me once I had started my career than much of the time spent in the classroom.
I went to a cheap state school and mostly regret it, I wonder if there's any correlation?
> According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, Sarah Lawrence College has been the most expensive college in the country for the previous two academic years (2008–2009;2009–2010).
> The total cost of tuition, fees, room, and board for a student entering in the fall of 2009 was $55,788.
That sounds like my dream hacker college. As a drop-out myself, I am thinking of going back to school sometime in the future, and wondering if SLC might be right place for me.
If you don't mind me asking, why did you drop out? Were there anything wrong with the school/system that made you move to SF without finishing your degree, or was it only for personal reasons?
Would really appreciate if you could share your overall experience at SLC.
There were a number of factors involved in my decision to drop out. At the root were family/financial issues, although these were not dire enough that I was forced, per se, to drop out. At the end of the day it came down to the school's limitations on how much CS I could learn. The school is very small (1300 undergrads), with very few of the students interested in pursuing CS in any real depth. I have only great things to say about the two professors in the department, but due to lack of student interest in the programs, there are few advanced classes available. Looking at the 2010-2011 Course Catalog (http://www.slc.edu/undergraduate/study/science-mathematics/c...), there are only two CS courses available (one for each semester) which require the student to have some prerequisite experience/knowledge (Databases and Robotics).
The other limitation you're faced with are the credit caps. SLC is a liberal arts school where, regardless of what you study, you can only receive a Bachelor of Arts degree. They cap you at 80 credits in Science/Mathematics, with a maximum of 50 of those coming from Computer Science courses. At the time I dropped out, I had 40 CS credits and 50 Science/Math Credits. Presuming I had stayed on for the additional year and a half to get a degree, I would have been limited to taking only 10 of my remaining 45 credits in what I genuinely wanted to be learning. Given the cost of the school (the most expensive school in the US), I felt that I would be better off 1.5 years down the line by getting paid to learn what I wanted to be learning, rather than paying to learn things that I didn't, simply for the sake of a degree.
It's actually been 1.5 years since I made this decision, I would have graduated next month, and I have absolutely no regrets about having made the decision I did. I'd like to make a blog post sometime about everything that's happened in the past year and a half. I've been considering finishing my degree at some point because there are a few fundamentals courses that I missed (Algorithms, Compilers, to name a few). I'm sort of torn at this point between making the decision to do it continuing to work 9-5 for the next 2+ years while taking courses online to get a degree, or whether I'm better off making the plunge back into an 70 hour a week startup lifestyle which leaves no room for online edu. I'm unsure of which leaves me in a better position 2 years from now. Have any of you finished an education online while working? Were you happy you did so?
You mean “unlike so many of his tech peers with opinions on the education system”, right? Because otherwise that fact is as irrelevant as the fact that Woz has never been a policeman. Or is teaching especially related to tech in some way I’m not seeing?
Edit: why the downvotes? I seriously don’t understand why the parent comment is mentioning that apparently irrelevant fact; I’m not just being nitpicky.
Unlike many of us who pee on the education system, Woz knows experientially what he's talking about in regards to education, having been on both sides of the podium.
Thanks for explaining. You’re saying it’s relevant because there are “many of us who pee on the education system”. In other words, my clarification of “tech peers” in michaelpinto’s comment as those “with opinions on the education system” is exactly what he means.
Woz’s being a teacher only is relevant if you know that many tech people disparage the education system. It seems my guess at a correction in my previous comment was indeed what michaelpinto meant, which means that it explains his comment to those who do not know this trait of tech people. Why, since my comment contained useful information, was it downvoted? (I have no idea if you, pnathan, downvoted me, but I am curious to hear from anyone who can explain.)
No. The idea is that many people who propose changes to the education system don't have much experience with it, but Woz is not one of those people. Who would you take legal advice from: a lawyer or your neighbor? Who would you trust slicing into your brain: a surgeon or some random Joe?
I understood that from the beginning. I was never confused about why having experience with teaching would allow one to better propose changes to the education system. I agree that knowing that Woz has experience tells you something useful about whether you can trust his ideas.
The only point I was ever confused about was why michaelpinto’s comment not only praised Woz for having teaching experience but also disparaged his “tech peers” for not having it, when I didn’t see a link between Woz’s tech peers and education. (Now I see that the link is that apparently, his tech peers are fond of attacking the education system.)
I see now that I hadn't made it clear enough which point I was confused about.
a 'project-centric' education might be great for hackers (i.e., everyone who reads this website), but remember that not everybody wants to build stuff for a living, and even for people who do want to 'build stuff', the kinds of things they might want to build likely aren't as easy to get started with as software.
what kinds of projects would you propose for kids who want to be lawyers? doctors? hairstylists? law enforcement? military? basically anything except for engineering?
You work on all types of projects so you can test out the world and see where you fit. Add in liberal arts to the project-centric professional, vocational and technical approaches and that could be a very balanced and exploratory approach.
let me attempt to clarify with a thought experiment. suppose instead the article was something like "All-star politician X claims that fund-raising, public speaking, polling your audience, and framing your ideas to persuade others should be the marks of success in school, not grades."
How would the HN crowd react to that? probably not nearly as favorably as to Woz saying that hacker-like projects should be the marks of success in school. But one could argue that those skills (persuasion, fund-raising, crowd psychology) are important for success in life as well.
The point I'm trying to make is that this project-centric view of success is very biased towards hackers, and it's an oversimplification to believe that most of the population would also find this appealing.
I think you're not seeing the distinction between which skills are important, and how to teach and measure those skills.
I certainly think that trying to teach, practice, and test fund-raising, public speaking, etc. each as separate skills would not be a good way to train effective leaders or politicians. But if you teach a bit about each of the skills and then have someone apply all of them to a specific project/campaign/endeavor, they'll learn more and actually accomplish something along the way. (BTW, Evidence of this is very easy to find, because effective leadership always requires you to be exercising multiple skills simultaneously.)
You wouldn't teach someone to play violin by spending a month on reading music, a month on bowing, and a month on fingering, and then expect them to be able to easily transition on their own to actual performing.
Similarly, it isn't a good idea to structure a curriculum to have separate classes on data structures, assembly language, object oriented programming, networking, GUIs, etc., and then expect somebody having taken all those classes to be able to build a useful application. (Nor can you simply wait until a "senior project" to start tying things together.)
There's really very little about that insight that's hacker-specific.
The important thing is that you've created something unique that you can keep.
I think the point I was (not so eloquently) trying to convey in my parent post was that hackers value 'creating something unique that they can keep' more than most people in the population, and since woz is the ultimate hacker, it makes sense that he's pushing for this sort of project-based education. I don't have any good examples off the top of my head, but you could imagine other cultures or even personality types within your own culture where people place value on something other than projects that they can hack on and show off to the world on github.
In my opinion, it would be very difficult for a national educational system to accurately grade creative projects like these, and even more difficult for these to be standardized across school systems so that the grades could be meaningful to colleges, employers, etc.
Why would the grades need to be meaningful to colleges or employers? You now have a portfolio of the project(s)... and then possibly some subjective paragraph or two of the teachers thoughts on the issue... and then the employer or college can judge the project themselves.
This reminds me of the college in Yellow Springs, Ohio (Antioch College) where there are no letter grades.. just pass / fail with a teachers write up of your performance to go into your 'portfolio'.. Though I think they closed shop recently because of a lack of funding.
The grades need to havebsome basic normalization because college admittance personell probably do not have the time to review several thousand projects during college application season to determine whether or not they actually demonstrate competence in the skills involved or if they were actually demonstrating the skills of the student and not the "projects that will get you into harvard" crib sheet the student was using. Grades and test scores have various drawbacks, but they are a relatively inexpensive normalization and filting mechanism compared to something like this; at the upper end of the spectrum you are doing projects in addition to grades/tests but the latter filters the project work that has to be considered to a manageable amount.
So maybe they should make the time, I don't see how an education system that pushes students in undesirable directions to make things easier on administration is a good one.
That's exactly why shouldn't have a "national education system" or standardization of schooling. We need education that fits the student not one size fits all factory schooling. As for meaningful ways for colleges and employers to measure candidates... how about meaningful innovative projects. The last developer I hired completed a innovative project (on contract) for us before we hired him. I would never hire off a resume and interview alone. I'd ask the candidate to show me what he/she has created.
I don't know anything about the education system in USA but looking at the numbers the university I am currently attending has to deal with every year and the amount you have to deal with when hiring I can bet the difference in size is quite big.
If we look at the university I attend, it currently has above 16000 students, with I would assume an average time as student of 3 years. The program I attend had more than 3000 applicants out of which 200 were selected. Not all programs have that ratio but I would not find it strange if the average was a ratio of 10:1.
Using these numbers we thus have (16000/3)*10=~53000 students applying each year. (I did a quick search and my numbers are surprisingly correct.) The university has 3 weeks to make its selections.
Standardization per se is not the problem. Standardization creates a base pool of knowledge and skills which are necessary to formulate, innovate, collaborate, and build projects.
Instead, standardization should be limited to a well defined subset of academics and education.
If you have to choose between a creative workforce that knows how to get things done and a standard workforce that fits inside of boxes and stereotypes, then damn the boxes and take the minds. Even if it costs some glorified HR person some trouble down the road.
That's the problem with standardized education. Critical thinking and creative thinking are stifled, because it's much, much easier to assign grades when every test and project is based on a simple set of criteria. The students either fulfill the criteria, or they don't. Standardized education is good at teaching students how to memorize information and follow instructions, but that's almost all it's good at. That was fine when schools were preparing students to work in factories, but for our current economic system, it's a complete disaster.
If the education system was based on creative projects, employers and colleges would have recognize that the grades are subjective, and not the best signal to judge a candidate by. In fact, grades already a pretty weak signal, since they indicate skills (memorization, ability to follow specific instructions) that aren't nearly as important as they used to be. The most important thing wouldn't be the student's GPA, it would be their portfolio. That's already the case for creative fields, but it's easy to imagine how it could apply to other fields. A portfolio of critical papers for academics, a portfolio of business plans (or, better yet, real businesses) for business students, an investment portfolio (real or virtual) for finance students, etc.
Wouldn't having a chronological portfolio of your personal works be valuable information for colleges, and employers?
It'd show development, areas of interest, 'how' you think, and much more. Certainly it's not going to be as simple as looking at a grade, or for a degree, but I think this would be as valuable (if not more) than current assessment.
Of course ranking these projects based on a grade is definitely difficult. Creative works have a certain flavor to them, and not everyone can appreciate it.
Grades from some schools are completely disregarded (that is, not taking seriously as indications of learning). Lower grades can often be more highly regarded, if accompanied by other evidence of actual learning and achievement. There is substantial controversy about how much consideration of grades adds to standardized test scores as an estimate of which students are best prepared for university studies,
but it is worth noticing that all of the most selective and sought-after universities in the United States continue to use criteria other than grades to select students, even after they look at where the grades come from before deciding what the grades mean.
Grades are fundamentally supposed to measure what/how much a student has learned. (though their success in this regard is debatable) I don't know that success on innovative projects measures learning. It'd also be a real b*tch for folks who are not innovative thinkers.
This is not to say it's an impossible idea, but we'd have to verify that generally speaking, performing well on projects correlates to learning- either that, or give up on the idea of grades representing learning.
I would like to go just a little OT here and say Steve Wozniak is truly a genius and it was not until reading Founders At Work that I completely understood how much so. His talents unquestionably span far beyond some mere mortals like myself.
The weirdest thing happened to me with regards to this story.
Yesterday I said to myself, that if I were to ever be a lecturer, I would want a course structured more like real-life. I even sent an email to myself, to remember to come back to it at the appropriate time.
This was the text of my email:
Sat, Apr 9, 2011 at 6:27 AM
subject: Ideas for designing a university course
mailed-by gmail.com
hide details 6:27 AM (19 hours ago)
This is for whenever I want to start lecturing.
Don't use tests or exams.
Use projects.
Both individual and team.
Encourage students to come and present their progress every week - ensuring that I will rip them apart if they are wasting time.
-- end of email ---
Definitely not comprehensive, but I have been wondering why the 20th century educational system has failed as badly as it has. Not just in the US, but even in Jamaica too. I think structuring it so that each student is accountable for what they have done (project-wise) would produce much better results than having them learn how to take a test.
Then I come here and see a top story from Woz basically saying the same thing.
This is just one of those moments, that might seem silly - but it's weird.
I read a course on Python for a semester, and I tried to use a similar approach: relatively few tests, a minor project for warmup and a major project (with emphasis on attendance & communication). I think it went fine, but it's not as easy as it looks. In particular, students would "show up", but it's not easy to motivate them to do more serious work.
I totally want something like this in education. I have a learning disability. I can't remember stuff so easily but I do love making things and that is how I learn best.
College, as much as I loved it, was always this sisyphean treadmill of quizzes, homeworks, and exams -- almost always covered in red. The cycle was, do homeworks, think I did it right, get back bad marks. Re-do homework, hoping I did it right. Take exams, fail exams because I couldn't tell if I did them right with HWs. It's like Waterfall and Education put together.
One class I took, Systems Programming, was the most helpful because there were no real tests or homeworks -- it was projects. It got my only A in college from this course, mostly because of the MUD I wrote for the final project. Other classes where this worked was English Lit, science labs but not the accompanying courses (sort of), others I can't remember.
Instead of learning students "to remember what art looked like just in case anyone asked", they should learn skills that requires them to acquire knowledge.
Sure a lot of education 'fakes' this by focusing on projects, but what useful skills can you honestly acquire in 10 weeks when your attention has to be divided over just as many courses?
This is why you should take part on StudentCompetitions.com to show-n-prove what you got instead of getting that grade everyone else got. Soon new platforms will be rolled out. Without getting into details; imagine GitHub but for everything - in competition-format. If it sounds like a bad idea I just wasn't detailed enough. ;)
I think the idea is good but such a system could probably be gamed easily. I am sure students would start to pad their resumes with great sounding projects without any substance.
That's why I mentined the competition site above - winning a competition against hundredsthousands of other students is quite a substance - in the same way no one can claim they built something that u had shared on your GitHub-account with a timestamp and blogposts long before they claimed that. CVs got ~no substance for the record.
Hackers are by definition counter-culture and seeks wisdom in going against crowd thinking. If there were no schools, hackers would go to school. If schools taught projects, hackers would do rote learning.
All hackers urge the same thing: "Think Different"
10% of students succeed, no matter what you do to them. Those seemed to be the hacker types.
10% of students fail, no matter what you do for them(reasons range from cheating to family deaths).
80% of students mark their boxes and do okay; better teaching helps them, worse teaching harms them. They would correspond to the 8-5 workers, IMO.
At the heart of educational discussions sit some deep philosophical questions, such as:
Nature or Nurture?
What handholding level is appropriate?
How much moral leadership is appropriate?
Education systems: simple knowledge or more?
Is education for the individual or for the society?
What expectations do you have for someone who graduates high school? College?
What does equality mean when people are different?
These are not simply answered questions. There is considerable nuance needed to begin discussing them in any real-world situation.
A(The?) core issue relates to the human beings involved - to give a glossy example: some people like being factory workers. Others hate it. What education system handles this problem?
Another major issue is that the cycle time on a k-12 educational system is at least 16 or so years (likely something more like 30 years). Failing fast is problematic, and leaves human detritus...
I consider the US public educational system deeply flawed. I think that Woz's ideas are worth investigating. There are a multiplicity of educational reform ideas out there, and some work better than others. Woz's has the advantage that he's actually taught, so it may have a better chance than others of being reality based instead of pure ideology. Also, he's a genius. :-)