Bill Gates: In Five Years The Best Education Will Come From The Web
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
For most of my college career, I was taught in a non-interactive lecture (from 15 to 300 students at a time). Sometimes the lectures were even being recorded or simulcast to remote locations. The lecturer often had no idea who I was. In graduate school, I got a good look at the "sausage factory" of how many core computer science class lectures are really developed. Unless it's an area of research and publication for the professor, they do a minimal amount of work on their lecture notes and exams. In some cases, the same professor taught the same subject year after year. Sometimes this resulted in progressively better notes, but sometimes not. In other cases, the class rotated among professors. They often took each other's lecture notes and used them with varying degrees of revision. Only when a course was a true passion of the professor was the lecture anything much more than what could be gleaned from a couple of textbooks on the topic.
Beyond the lectures, most of the labs and assignments were handled by grad student teaching assistants. I also got to see many of my friends go through the TA machine in grad school. The rare lucky ones got to TA a course related to their research, but most TAs were assigned to courses where they only knew as much as they'd learned in their own undergrad experience in that course. A few TAs would scramble to get up to speed. The smart ones would do the bare minimum for the course and focus on their research.
Then there are the textbooks. I look at the dead tree debris that on my bookshelves from my nearly dozen years of higher education and very few books contain anything beyond what's on Wikipedia today.
I can look back at a topic like "operating systems" and cringe. This was a undergraduate course that rotated amongst professors. At the time I took it, I'd already been on a dozen operating systems including VMS, NeXTStep and Dynix, played with Minix code, read Bach and Tanenbaum, etc. The PhD student assigned to teach my class had an undergrad in linguistics. I believe he'd never even logged into any unix system, much less had an operating systems course himself. He even dropped out late in the semester and disappeared. I damn near asked for a refund, but I took my grade and moved on.
There's no reason that a few passionate people on the web couldn't top that.
The classes are also smaller, which helps tremendously. At one point, I actually took a differential equations class at a junior college. We had 5 students. It was a great setting in an unexpected place.
When it comes to computers, the internet has been better than most undergraduate programs for a while now. And it's only getting better.
We did piles on networking, dcom, everything in the OSI stack actually. (I went to a canadian university, UNB).
While I agree undergrad uni isn't going to be on the cutting edge, I think that learning the basics, and the ideas behind why decisions are/were made is extremely valuable.
In short, you can't move forward without learning where you've been.
Also realistically understand cache organization is pretty handy for optimizing software execution.
If they want to make blinky lights, start with low level hardware. Once they know how to do something and are still interested they will move on to other areas. Thats the crux of why the web will deliver better education because they will follow their own path.
Education is only meaningful and relevant if it enables a person to do what they want to do and could not before. Arguably, the issue is that the educational system is trending towards becoming more standardized where as society is trending towards becoming more individual and specialized.
Or a mathematician, director, physicist, screen writer, journalist, accountant, statistician, historian, designer, botanist, cook, mechanic, etc.
Now that I think of it, most professions already have online communities for discussion and group learning of skills which one self-motivated enough to study. What's most blatantly missing is the accreditation: it's not easy to cheat the accreditation system at a University (mostly because the experience of academic culture is what gives the accreditation validity), but it's a lot easier to "cheat" online.
I'm sorry, but believe it or not, not all professional skills can be remotely acquired without a kind of human transference of intangible, personable skills. Education in higher academia is about much more than the acquisition of particular facts--it's a culture, practice, and way of life. Critical ideas are meant to be discussed in person, ruminated on, and debated in real, highly dynamic discussions. Real life work environments, especially in software companies, are ones in which critical, GROUP brainstorming dynamics are particularly important, because oftentimes the answer doesn't lie in the answer key in the back of the book, but rather as a result of a group process of rumination, guess, check, and revision.
In terms of formal skills sites like Vectips, Smashing Magazine, et al. Do a good job conveying how to work with tools.
I do agree that the sense of fraternity that grows up in a creative environment is important, but the web is flattening that out. Look at a site like Threadless.com where there is a dedicated critique community. I think film makers coming up sharing videos via YouTube, collaborating remotely, and will replace a lot of the community that is typically found on campus.
More broadly, we may be looking at the end of a historical blip. For hundreds of years, skills were transferred via apprenticeship, on the job training, etc. A number of demographic and political trends changed this from the 1950's til now, but maybe we are seeing a reversion to the mean?
My point isn't that a good set of lecture videos will be world-changing (we've had broadcast video for awhile now). My point is that that the learning all of these subjects can have a strong web component to augment the process (and "web" doesn't necessarily mean video). Maybe when I put it that way, it sounds almost obvious. A stronger statement: whatever form web-augmented learning takes in the next century will improve learning so drastically we'll barely recognize it.
Agree with the first part. Hoping you're wrong about the second. Time will tell :)
And creating small group face to face dynamics could be achievable using group video chat/telepresence.
and : """ A recent 93-page report on online education, conducted by SRI International for the Department of Education, has a starchy academic title, but a most intriguing conclusion: “On average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.” """ http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/19/study-finds-that-on...
It's a completely different way of thinking, no doubt about that. I love the university atmosphere.
The reason why you feel comfortable with a self taught software developer is because you can write and run software on your own.
Let's say you got shot. Who would you want to operate on you, someone who went to medical school but probably didn't see too many gunshot wounds, or someone from a field hospital in Iraq who operated on hundreds of cases but does not have a medical degree?
$x = "software developer" $y = "we made him head of this huge project without even evaluating his skills"
I don't think it's so unreasonable for a surgeon to learn the traditional body of knowledge online, learn his way around an operating table IRL, take a test, and then go do his residency like every other doctor.
On the other hand learning iPhone programming, which may be all you need to get a job as a developer, is significant easier than any learning any other profession online, just given by how much information is available on the topic and how well it's presented.
It is a bit like a pharmacist or a chemist who has never mixed two compounds together but knows all about them, yet does not know for example what colour they are, or what do they actually look like, or what the actual reaction from mixing them looks like.
I think another comment here made a good point. It is not just about the learning. It is also about teaching you how to think, and experience of course, practical experience. For example, I might be comfortable talking to a lawyer who got all his knowledge from the internet but only for reference, to ask him lets say what the law is, but I wouldn't hire him to argue a case for me. You can read all the books, or lectures, but without the practical experience of how to apply the law to facts which is then graded to give you an idea of whether you are applying it correctly and how to find things you do not know in the area of law where there often are conflicting points and maybe the law is not settled, and perhaps most importantly how to think like a lawyer, which argument would do, which evidence would do.
Even if all of these things can be replaced through virtual stimulation, why would you want to sit in front of a computer for say three years on your own rather than share the experience with others and make friends and have the opportunity to be part of interesting student groups, and expand yourself in many more areas than just the core subject.
I suppose it might be good for someone who might be thinking of a career change, if all those things can be replaced, but for an 18 year old, it would be very disadvantageous.
In any event, as things currently are Gates is very much dreaming. People have access to textbooks yet they hardly have replaced universities though pretty much they teach what is in the text book in the lectures which are only a small part of undergrad courses.
And obviously , using simulators can offer great results: """ The residents had displayed similar psychomotor skills, but the two groups performed very differently in the O.R. Those who had trained on the simulator completed the operation, on average, twenty-nine per cent faster than those who had not. Moreover, the residents who had received standard surgical training were nine times more likely to hesitate during the operation, five times more likely to injure the gallbladder or burn surrounding tissues, and six times more likely to make other errors. Additional research has shown that simulator training significantly enhances performance of hernia repairs, nasal sinus procedures, and bronchoscopic examinations of the lungs. """ http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/05/02/050502fa_fact?cu...
- It's the only socially acceptable way to spend years simply learning as a full time job.
- The argument that "lectures will soon be online" only makes sense if you believe that physically being present in lectures is the way that people gain knowledge in school.
- University admissions maintain a level of intelligence in incoming classes that I don't think an online community ever could - so that the students who interact at a university are interacting in a productive way.
- Physical colocation is just a better way of interacting with people than communicating online is.
- "Communicating online" is in its infancy. The way people communicate online now (facebook, twitter) is wholly different than 10 years ago, and will be wholly different 10 years from now.
- I agree that University admissions provide a useful filter, but one may emerge online, as well. Already, the people you meet on HN are not the people you'll meet on 4chan. I wonder what an HN clone would be like if membership were applied for and kept only as long as you maintained a certain comment point average.
- Agreed. A great deal of what Universities provide is a cultural submersion into a social class. This is hard, if not impossible, to replicate online. That said, it has nothing to do with learning. People can still learn online and go about indoctrinating in one social class or another in other ways.
- Social norms follow progress, not vice versa. Whatever Universities will be like in 1000 years won't be socially acceptable when it first appears.
Different, yes. Better? Ten years ago, the conversations I had on mailing lists had a lot more potential than you can fit in 140 characters. The trend isn't very promising.
The group-think would become worse than Reddit.
The link speaks louder than my words: http://www.woodmann.com/fravia/student.htm
Here you had a community that - spent years simply learning - shared their knowledge (for free!) in essays, email, and forum discussions - maintained a level of intelligence in incoming classes by use of strainers (reversing assignments such as http://www.woodmann.com/fravia/strain99.htm) - never needed to meet in person to contribute these great works
It can be done, but perhaps the question is, "why haven't we seen more of these in the wild?"
http://twitter.com/BillGates/status/19764971764 "I’ve been spending time watching some of the courses on www.khanacademy.org – many of which are quite good. More coming on GatesNotes..."
For what it's worth, I think he is right. You can learn a tremendous amount by reading and watching talks on the Web.
The thing lecturers tend to do is assume everyone in the class has been through the same set of classes before the current one and assume many things should be completely obvious and not need explanation, when often they do.
Especially in the areas of humanities and so forth, but also in Engineering (I hold a BSCEng, and am currently a Masters student) labs, conversation, community learning are all essential.
I also can't help but think of the Socratic method, and how at least I personally tend to learn in that manner. Simply being presented with information as fact doesn't really do it for me. Being guided, and assisted at coming to the truth on my own always leaves me with a much deeper connection to the knowledge I've acquired. And I feel that requires as certain measure of realtime interaction with someone who is an expert in the field. Simply watching their lectures while informative, does not seem to be enough.
While this may change in the future, given that online learning is in its infancy, I think 5 years is a bit short term. Especially considering the pace at which the established institution of education moves.
Best lecture EVER.
Why would professors need to make same lectures every year? It make more sense to make new lectures only when they have something new or better to say.
I think that its a collosal waste of time and ressources to make great lecturers repeat the same lecture over and over and over again to a small, limited number of students, instead of letting them record a larger number of one-time lectures. My favourite example is Salman Khan. If he had to repeat a few chosen topics over and over, he would never had the chance of creating a body of work as large and comprehensive as his academy.
He said about that: "With so little effort on my own part, I can empower an unlimited amount of people for all time. I can't imagine a better use of my time."
By the way, in the recorded SICP lectures, there arent actually _that_ many interesting questions asked. If Abelson and Sussman thought your way and prefered live interaction just in order to be able to answer more questions, thousands of people during the last 25 years would have not been able to experience them _at all_. It is not fair to reduce great lecturers to mere question answerers, IMO the accompanying Q&A sessions always account for a very small part of the value of a lecture, i.e. just to fill a occasional gap.
He said that you'll be able to find the best *lectures in the world which will be better than any single University. With initiatives like MIT OpenCourseWare and iTunes U, this isn't that hard to imagine.
I think most HN readers wouldn't doubt the power of a motivated, passionate individual when it comes to learning.
To me, the takeaway point that is most interesting is Gates' desire to break down the barriers to higher education and the transfer of knowledge. He also recognizes the declining value of a Bachelor's Degree.
Educational Institutions will always be vital to the education of "tomorrow's leaders," but the current paradigm is flawed and I like where Gates seems to be going with this.
Whereas in Asia people are scrambling to emulate the Western education system. They see the American education system as better at fostering originality and creativity. And there's a bias towards rote in Eastern education systems (at the moment).
Could it be that this is a grass-is-greener on the other side phenomenon?
I was thinking on the point he made though that maybe textbooks in America are thicker because America has more scientific knowledge than Asia and maybe the books get updated more often and maybe they are more in depth. Basically, I do not think you can just take one variable and compare it to another and proclaim that's the reason.
Just a matter of style really, I wouldn't read too much into it. Perhaps the fact that in the US you have to pay for your own text books is a driver too.
So, is he planning to try to develop an organization to provide that certification (because that's one of the major functions of colleges, though how important it is varies by field) or is he just saying that someone should? I'm pretty sure that he could manage it if he wanted to, even though it could be a pretty huge challenge [I can think of a few ways to get the core of the process (knowledge verification) to work, but none of them are quite perfect, so I'm sure that the main problem would be pretty easy to solve].
There is no reason why the current Universities can't provide this for online courses. Online courses do not mean that there won't be any Profs and TAs. But you just won't be going to their office on preset hours and sit in a classroom on specific hours.
Undergrad education in certain subject really doesn't change from year to year. You could build a course and do small adjustments year to year. What you would provide as a service in my view is the human help.
What I hope won't happen is that Universities will turn into for profit course giving institutions. We need the R&D work done at Universities. I'd be suprised if the government would want to continue funding Universities as they do now if for profit website could do it cheaper. Do the current for profit school like the University of Phoenix do any research?
(not that children in kindergarten have textbooks)
Physical enrollment in college now is way overpriced, and the market will soon correct that overpricing leaving colleges competing directly to enroll many more students with less cost overhead per student, which will lead to a vast proliferation of accredited online degree offerings.
Similarly, I spent a lot of time very sick. I made a lot of dietary and lifestyle changes and I am healthier now than I have ever been in my life. I am not a doctor but I am also not impressed with the current healthcare model followed in the US. I think I have a cheaper and more effective alternative to offer. Study after study after study shows that diet and lifestyle are huge factors in all the major (deadly) illnesses, like heart disease, diabetes, cancer. But doctors mostly don't push for dietary and lifestyle changes. They are mostly in the business of selling pills and surgeries. A big part of why they don't is that people aren't very receptive. Many people just want an easy answer. And it's quite hard to make money off of promoting lifestyle changes.
So to me, the big challenges are how to more effectively convey information and how to monetize it. I am still trying to decide if I should largely abandon my current websites and start over in a new space. I don't yet know the answer to that. But I do know that I have narrowed it down to "education is the answer" and I do know that I am very good at some things that other people seem to not be good at. I know this from years spent on homeschooling forums where for some particularly difficult things, I often was the only person who had much to say.
So I find this article very relevant at the moment and encouraging. I don't know if I have much to really contribute to the conversation that will be of interest to others or that they will value. Perhaps I just need to talk about it. For my own goals, accreditation is unimportant. The piece that matters is whether or not the information is conveyed adequately, which my current websites are not doing. I think I will be doing something educational on the web in the future. So I am kind of excited to see this piece.
In both cases, if you are primarily a technical person, yea, lacking social skills is a problem that will hold you back, but it's not the end of the world, or your career. It's certainly not as bad as, say, being of average intelligence, or lacking curiosity, or being lazy.
Running your own company gives you a lot more flexibility; if you know yourself well, you can use that flexibility to build a situation where your strengths help and your weaknesses don't matter so much...
But really, the computer industry was designed for mildly-autistic nerds who don't play well with others. by the standards of such things, I'm almost a friendly extrovert.
When you are a consultant you have only one boss: they guy that is able to sign the check. When you are employed, there can be multiple official and non-official bosses that you have to satisfy, plus all of the personal/social drama.
I think either way, there is a tradeoff. If you get shit done, people will put up with a lot of social problems, in both situations. Like the guy who wrote a hn story about how I didn't answer his support email. He refused a refund and wanted to remain a customer... the thing was, he wanted better support, but when the rubber hit the road and it was time to cut a cheque, he chose cheap over good support.
You can set up your company so that social skills don't matter as much, but that limits what markets you can go after. You can also choose your career while working for others, and get similar tolerance for social oddity.
(of course, the OP's problem was not so much social skills as flexibility, and being self-employed almost always is more flexible than working for other people.)
That isn't my primary concern. I have a form of cystic fibrosis, which has a life expectancy in the mid-thirties. My 23 year old son has the same diagnosis. He has not been on antibiotics in over 12 years and has taken no medication for about 3 1/2 years. This was achieved by carefully arranging our lives, something you cannot do in a job. He also has other issues, like eyesight issues. I currently work for a large company and have been stuck in the same entry level job for nearly four years. Conditions at work are a problem for me due to my health and this means my performance at work is not that great and it shows. If my son has adequate control over his working conditions, he can be very productive. If he doesn't, he can't be. Most employers are not going to accommodate his needs. And I went through the intake process with a program for helping handicapped individuals get a job. Fortunately, I got a job on my own before they provided any of their so-called "assistance" or I likely would be in worse straits.
I am very good at explaining social things to my sons and helping them cope in that regard. They can do that piece of it. But they still need a high degree of control over their lives, something a regular job will not offer.
really? my doctor pretty regularly admonishes me to eat better and work out more. I think the problem is me... lifestyle changes are /hard/
I mean, maybe they need better tools for making those admonishments more effective, but they certainly recommend diet and lifestyle changes before breaking out the pills and scalpels.
The current state of the art advice for CF patients regarding diet is "high calorie, high fat, high salt". The medical establishment routinely pushes unhealthy foods at people with this condition because such foods have a high fat count and, therefore, a high calorie count. Healing my body has shrunk my appetite. I no longer need the extremely high calorie diet that is the norm for my condition. I get treated by the CF community like I made up my diagnosis and was never actually sick. The idea that you can have CF and get well is wholly alien and utterly rejected by most members of the CF community, as well as the medical establishment. Most research for treatment is for drug therapies, not diet and lifestyle. The idea is that since it is so deadly, the treatments need to be equally scary (much like chemo for cancer patients). I have found that is completely wrong and is, in fact, part of the problem.
Short version: Good quality sea salt makes a huge difference. Good quality fats make a huge difference. Addressing PH balance does miraculous things (people with CF tend to be way too acid and this likely is part of what causes the "normal progression of CF" because high acidity within cells causes proteins to miss-fold and a miss-folded protein is the crux of the matter in CF).
One step at a time and the elite education will be everywhere, though it'll still cost an arm-and-a-leg.
I am huge on web-based education. I can't imagine what my skill-set would look like if I had access to today's web when I was growing up. I would love to build a website that brings educators together, from anywhere, to instruct groups of 10-15 people on specific topics-of-choice -- for free.
Edit: Looked it up, apparently it was UC in general -- http://bit.ly/aCmsNF
"The idea is that UC could become the first top-tier American university to offer a bachelor's degree over the Internet."
That's only 5 years. Schools have to be conservative in things like this because the things they teach kids will serve as the foundation of their lives. Give it another 5 or 10, and I think we'll see an online component as a standard part of public schooling.
- Focus - Sitting at the computer it is very easily to be distracted trying to pick up a challenging new concept. I find this even more true about things I don't derive any immediate benefit from, as in it is easier to concentrate on learning a library I'm going to use in a freelance project than say an obscure statistical model for a class. Sitting in the lecture give me that chance to clear my head from most distractions and focus on the content.
- Mindset - I head into uni, it usually gets me in the right mindset for learning and completing tasks. I don't get that sitting at home.
I would also add the guidance of some lecturers/ supervisors but this point really depends where you are. I can't say in my own experience this couldn't have been replaced online although their are moments when having such experienced teachers can help.
Edit- I would also add that these issues could be solved by getting together at a co-working space with some like minded others. I guess a hybrid model like that could have some merit, the educational institute acts as a network to connect like minded people for online study. Maybe they could also have a staff member that has a hands off role and just answers questions over email for a much reduced fee over the traditional system.
Now, seriously, Gates has a very weak track record on predicting the future of technology. That's why Microsoft was never known to be a first mover into any new market. It's really hard to predict the future - I was watching 2001 with my 14 year-old son last week and couldn't help but laugh that in an enormous space station an what seemed high orbit you would have AT&T phone booths.
"Mobile devices will be able to send and receive messages, but it will be expensive and unusual to use them to receive an individual video stream"
On ordering flowers online: "You'll be able to watch the florist arrange the bouquet, change your mind if you want, and replace wilting roses with fresh anemones."
"I believe that we’ll not only be using the keyboard and the mouse to interact, but during that time we will have perfected speech recognition and speech output well enough that those will become a standard part of the interface." (this is from mid 90's, IIRC)
"I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time," which is right in a sense that NT was once OS/2 3.0
"Spam will be a thing of the past in two years' time,"
"We will never make a 32-bit operating system," (that was when he introduced the MSX in Japan)
The low-end of the education will sure improve with the internet. Kids with mobile phones and computers can quickly google stuff up and browse the wikipedia to get some deeper information beyond their textbooks offer. It will augment, but it won't replace physical schools anytime soon.
Microsoft in particular actually have a track record of entering a market prematurely with an unpolished entry (often because the hardware resources/architecture/maturity of the underlying academic field aren't yet there to support a polished entry), failing, shelving the idea, and then being caught flatfooted N years later when someone else enters with something more polished.
Best example: http://www.academicearth.org
Yet a lot of people completely ignore this for education. Suddenly there is no value in spending time with classmates/teachers. It's all very strange to me.
The solution isn't new. The Open University has been around for a long time, and something like OU, augmented with all the media content that the internet can deliver, would seem to be the logical way to deliver higher education at lower cost.
I do not see anyone replacing an Oxford place with OU or any university place with OU. I think, though I might be very much wrong, it caters to niches, rather than the core of university market which is 18 to 21 year old.
The difficulty with OU is that it is not too easy to motivate yourself. In uni you know you are there to study - kind of - with OU or any other virtual replacement its a bit like a project which easily can drift because really nothing has changed with your life. You'll just get a bunch of stuff in the post and some online logging.
Also, there seems to be many generalisations on your comment and almost wishful thinking. Sort of saying, things are bad, so this replacement is the alternative so lets do it, rather than judging the replacement on its merits.
But we would need much more than an increase in percentage to make any judgement. What are they studying, how many get to graduate by age group, how many enrol by each age group...
This is already true--for just one example, see academicearth.org. I suppose Bill has to make it a prediction for the future for the press to be able to digest it.
I often tell people how absurd modern education is given the existence of video lectures (and the printing press, for that matter). They usually tell me that video lectures aren't a replacement for live lectures. When I ask if they've actually watched any video lectures, they usually haven't.
Best advantage of video lectures: I can download them with the netvideohunter firefox extension and watch them 1.5x speed in VLC, which actually improves my comprehension because I'm less bored.
Free textbooks are probably even better. I'm too busy with my side project to study, but here are two that look AWESOME:
http://www.math.wisc.edu/~keisler/calc.html
I'll be playing my fiddle when the educational establishment burns.
Some people spend a couple of years and thousands of dollars before discovering that their major isn't really what they thought it would be. And by then, they're just unhappy; they have invested too much to turn back, and don't really have passion anymore. I strongly suspect that a lot of people who do crappy work simply got into this kind of trap; if they'd had the chance to find out more about other jobs in detail, they may have made a different choice of major, and been much happier and more productive somewhere else.
But that misses the point. None of the knowledge or experiences I gained at university that have value to me today were obtained in a lecture theatre; nor could they be readily substituted for by a website.
So when your "robot doctor" is acceptable to you, then I should consider your consideration for education.
http://www.espacestemps.net/document8305.html
The context is clearly different, but the contrast seemed interesting.
An excerpt:
"The reasoning behind this decision was economic. The government reckoned that every million new graduates would raise China’s gdp by 2%. Not only did university graduates make skilled employees and attract higher incomes, but education itself was an engine of economic growth."
Five years from now on the web for free you’ll be able to find the best lectures in the world
Lectures might be the optimal way of learning given the technology of the last millenium, but I don't think they'll survive even a century in this one. Computers are interactive interfaces, and "The Web" is an interactive medium. I have a feeling that whatever replaces lectures is going to take advantage of that.
This could work for other subjects too.
As a concrete example, the Apple-provided WWDC 2010 sessions on iOS 4.0 and OS X are some of the best educational materials I've ever seen.
Well recorded, tested material, and, this is key, absolutely knowledgable presenters. The people that built those systems. I doubt any university, at any price, could provide lecture materials as broad as these. Add in the fact that I can watch these at my own pace on an iPad, literally anywhere, and scrub back and forwards, and there's no excuse for missing anything.
I think back to my sausage-factory university classes, and pretty-much it was mostly second-rate stuff, with a few notable exceptions (Guest lecture from SPJ on graph-reduction, in 87 was probably the high-point). It's sad to think I spent four years of my life doing a bachelors, when I could probably cover the material about 50% faster now, and retain it significantly better.
In short, Gates is late. It'll be way faster than 5 years. Hell, the new SICP lectures are already available I believe, and I'm sure geology, physics, maths, stats will all follow.
You are a very clever man. You see trends that most people ignore.
You're probably right in this assertion.
But you suck at time scales. It's like your fracking achilles heel. The world just doesn't change that fast. Dude, it just doesn't.
Peace out,
-Frank
Really, what he was best at as I gather is summed up by this:
After reading the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics that demonstrated the Altair 8800, Gates contacted Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), the creators of the new microcomputer, to inform them that he and others were working on a BASIC interpreter for the platform. In reality, Gates and Allen did not have an Altair and had not written code for it; they merely wanted to gauge MITS's interest. MITS president Ed Roberts agreed to meet them for a demo, and over the course of a few weeks they developed an Altair emulator that ran on a minicomputer, and then the BASIC interpreter. The demonstration, held at MITS's offices in Albuquerque, was a success and resulted in a deal with MITS to distribute the interpreter as Altair BASIC
Just because I might be intelligent I can't quite tell someone how to be intelligent. A scientist might be able to however if he does a lot of studies and is able to derive rules etc.
Besides, he is not serially successful, as in build one company and move on to the next, or successful in business, politics, history, medicine, physics. He just wrote one code. As I say sure it took some wits from him to make the deal and intelligence to write the code, but that in no way makes him qualified to know much about education, which is such an extensive topic.
And yes he was a drop out hence his genius idea of accrediting any knowledge however it was gained. If someone has some knowledge there are other ways to prove it to others than through accreditation. We have I think enough pieces of paper which misleads people as to our ability.
My point is just that school can't be the only qualifier for knowing about education- unless the point of education is to make people good at school.
>And yes he was a drop out hence his genius idea of accrediting any knowledge however it was gained. If someone has some knowledge there are other ways to prove it to others than through accreditation. We have I think enough pieces of paper which misleads people as to our ability.
I think most people agree that most certifications are garbage. However, most degrees aren't any better, when it comes to accrediting that a person has a particular skill. It's a hard problem that isn't being solved well by anyone right now.
the thing is, a college degree doesn't say anything about the ability of a person to do a particular job, and people in industry recognize this.
But the idea that you could have a certifying agency say that joe is a level 5 unix Engineer is very attractive to companies... a good certification system would make hiring people way easier.
The problem is that certification is one of those things that's easy to do badly and extremely difficult to do well.
I'd say he knows a hell of a lot more about it than most people.
He did drop out of Harvard, no? Every dropout has an excuse in the end, I'm not going into that. I just don't understand what makes people so upset about this point.
1.) those who dropped out of school due to lack of financial or social resources, or due to personal emotional problems
2.) those who dropped out of school because they had an incredible opportunity to capitalize on their natural talents and take advantage of their favorable surroundings
many successful 'drop-out entrepreneurs' fall in the latter category ... they came from middle-class or upper-middle-class homes, their parents had advanced degrees, they often attended private high schools and prestigious colleges, etc. etc. etc.
i'm afraid that if the meme of "dropping out is cool, just look at zuckerberg, gates, brin/page, etc." keeps propagating, that will give kids who aren't as advantaged (those in the former category) misguided expectations for what awaits them when they drop 'outside of the system'