jeffreymcmanus

They don't use the same CSS or the same content, although they do share design elements. So what. Lots of sites share design elements, because those design elements happen to work.

You need to revisit the definition of the word "cloning."

Demonstrably wrong. Developers (like anyone) are happy to pay for things if they can identify value. The problem is with the seller, not the buyer: people keep trying to sell things to developers that they can more easily build themselves. But today's platform as a service companies (like Twilio and others named in the piece) are providing a stack that can't easily be replicated by nerds working in isolation.

Do you cringe and blame your ISP every time you receive an email spam?

If you do the arithmetic, yes there will. At any rate, you don't need to be a millionaire to do venture investing.

Since it's possible to earn a degree online today, I'm not sure this is the case. Top-tier universities are faced with a significant innovator's dilemma problem here: they want to enforce their duopoly on the granting of degrees and they don't want online programs (which can deliver comparable content to students in a more scalable way at a fraction of the cost) to cut into their tuition revenue.

I'm not sure that beating the traditional university is the objective or that it's even necessary. Remember that the essence of a disruptive product is that it's a little bit worse and (at least) a little bit cheaper than the incumbent product. The question, then, for disruptive education plays (of which my company is one) is: which part of the traditional experience are you going to take away in order to achieve scale? Most .edu startups are taking away instructor interaction and emphasizing lectures, which is exactly the opposite of what most students actually need.

This kind of thing is one of the reasons why Georgia Tech is consistently among the top 10 computer science schools in the nation.

Uh, no. Did you even read the post?

Server has been migrated to WPEngine, which I am now deeply in love with.

This isn't about whatever language is the flavor of the month, although seeing universities teach a language that is less than 20 years old would be nice. It's more about CS programs that produce graduates who have no practical ability to code at all, in any language.

if the university purports to teach this stuff, they should hire people who actually know how to teach it. if their tenured PhDs aren't cutting it, they should look elsewhere. (this is how i got my university teaching job.)

Not instead of. In addition to.

No argument there. Like I say in the post, I'm all in favor of the goodness of the basics. I just think that giving undergrads all theory and very little practice is not optimal, and they should have the opportunity to go minimal on theory if it makes sense for them. Very few universities offer such a choice today.

> I don't think that catering to what undergrads want is a good thing, at all

that's not what i proposed at all. what i propose is to bring curriculum into the 21st century, and to call out the fact that cargo cult thinking and poor organization on the part of universities are standing in the way of that.

i agree that what i am proposing does not require a 4-year degree. i don't think that most undergraduates should spend four years in school.

"no one respects a vocational education" is cargo cult thinking. elite universities don't write world-changing software, educated, motivated people do.

i come not to butcher academia. as one of the least reformable institutions in our society, i'm pretty much indifferent to academia.

Wait -- no engineering is possible? None at all? Really? Then how do you explain the success of high school dropout Benjamin Franklin?

The point of my post is not that theory is worthless (which I call out several times in the post). It's really that there is more than one way to learn this stuff and that most undergraduates pick out a sub-optimal path for cargo-cult reasons (such as the "halo effect" of elite universities which I also called out in the post).

the issue has to do with apache and my cheap-ass underpowered personal server, not wordpress. but gracias for the link!

did you actually read the post? i actually pre-rebutted both of your arguments.

i understand quite well what a CS program is, since (as i pointed out in the post) i've been a student in three university CS programs and taught coding at a fourth.

i'm saying that most of what goes on in academic CS departments is not what we need as a society and it's not what most undergrads hope to get into when they enroll. most undergrads get into CS to write software, not to learn "theory" or "compiler design" (although, again, as i pointed out in the post, if this happens to be your bag, more power to you -- but this isn't really about you, it's about the mismatch between what university CS programs do and what people and society really want or need.)

software engineering is obviously teachable (i've been doing it for 20 years) and that's true even if you personally didn't have any good software engineering instructors or mentors. it looks like you and i are in agreement that rapid change in software engineering makes universities not the optimal place to teach software engineering (that was the point of my post). but it doesn't follow that because universities are bad at this, that software engineering is "not teachable".

Looks like ye olde blog is a bit slammed at the moment, apologies. (If only my university CS program taught me how to be a Wordpress sysadmin!)

This is like saying every plumber needs to know how to mine copper and smelt it so they can manufacture their own pipes. There are different kinds of software engineers, and the kind that you happen to be may not necessarily be the kind that's in demand by every employer.

The problem is that most people in academic computer science programs really want to learn software engineering. The related problem is that most employers want to hire software engineers rather than computer scientists.

that's kind of the point.

It's not "tacky," it's business. Products are not your friends. They don't have feelings.

You have the tail wagging the dog there.

That's not really true. It's not challenging to find CS courses online, and the year I spent in a CS graduate program (through Colorado State), the cost per course unit for CS was the same as any humanities course.

"the point is that on the whole it works"

How do you know that?

It's great that you're contrasting Khan to ALEKS. I'm not drinking the Khan kool-aid; my kid just started using ALEKS in the last month and I agree it's terrific. It's really puzzled me why Khan is getting all this attention when ALEKS has been around so much longer (and seems to be better in many respects -- just lacking instructional video). It would actually be terrific to have some kind of integration between ALEKS and Khan -- to be able to see a video lecture on a particular topic would be quite useful for the student.

Because in this case the burger king was located in the lower floor of a two-story residential building and caused air pollution and litter in the neighborhood.

UoP already does quite a bit of online instruction. It's unlikely there's much going on here that they aren't doing already.

UoP's bad rep comes not because they're a degree mill but because they have a high dropout rate (which is sort of the opposite problem -- if they were a degree mill their dropout rate would be low).

Their problem is really that they spent many years recruiting unqualified students who used financial aid to attend, telling them things like "it's no problem to take on $100,000 in debt, with a degree you'll easily be able to get a job that pays $100K." Then the student drops out after four semesters and defaults on their loans, leaving the taxpayer holding the bag.