What Use is a Master of Science in CS?
Don't botch a hiring situation because you don't understand what your candidate's credentials mean. An advanced degree in Computer Science has little to do with programming, but says a lot about the candidate's ability to solve difficult, open-ended problems.
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Student Profiles: A Proof of Concept
This post describes a proof of concept for a personal learning system called a student profile. The student profile gives students control over their personal information, including learning activities, and demonstrates how other parties can trust learning records kept in the student profile and shared by the student. This is a critical factor in creating personal learning environments that support life-long learning and give the university greater flexibility in system architecture.
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Sovrin Use Cases: Education
Sovrin's verifiable claims provide the means of creating a virtual university with little or no traditional integration between the various players.
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Students Loans: Debt Peonage
I advise my kids to stay far away from student loans. I'd rather they take a semester or two off and work, if necessary, student loans are tantamount to debt peonage and I'd just a soon my children weren't enslaved for a good portion of their life. I can't help thinking that we've yet to see the real cost of this. I think it might make the housing bubble look like a warm-up act.
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Quit Your Job and Get a PhD
Every once in a while I run across this question from people wanting to get a PhD: "I am interested in going on to the PhD level but I have run into a wall. Most of the traditional schools I have looked into want me to quit my job and attend full-time. I can't do this because of my family and house payment." There's a reason schools want you to be a full time student at the PhD level: it's the only way it will work. Getting a PhD isn't like getting a BS or MS;
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Open High School of Utah
I've mentioned a few times on Twitter that I'm on the board of directors for the Open High School of Utah and some people have asked to know more. The Open High School of Utah is an online public charter high school based on open source course content. Not "open source" in the software sense, but "open source" in the sense that all the course content is openly licensed. We're taking applications for 9th grade in Fall 2009 right now. Utah students attend for free. The open courseware model is one that's been working for some time at MIT,
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Alan Kay: The 100 Dollar Laptop and Powerful Ideas
Alan Kay preopares for his talk(click to enlarge) Alan Kay's evening talk is entitled Learners, Powerful ideas, and the $100 Laptop. He says that he's never found the right order for the ideas in the title. Computer companies in the 1960s thought Moore's law meant that they'd get higher margins. Web presses are amazing pieces of technology, but when you look at it, you don't see anything that tells you about how it changes things. Similarly, looking at the DynaBook in 1968 doesn't tell you the most important things. Thus, the idea of a $100 laptop isn't important because of
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Using Screencasts to Augment Instruction
Ever since I saw what Jon Udell was doing with screencasts, I've wanted to use them to augment some of my courses. If you're not familiar with the term, a screencast is a short video that, usually, shows th screen of a computer and has a narrative explaining what's going on. I think screencasts have a lot to offer instruction. In my CS330 class, we use Scheme. Learning Scheme is something the students have to do to complete the course, but it's not really what the course is about. Screencasts provide an excellent medium for introducing students to things
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