Given how much time I spent enrolled in MOOCs this year, I kind of knew this already. But for those now dipping their toes into this phenomenon, here are the top 5 things I learned this year.

1.  MOOCs are addictive. Like seriously addictive.  You think the internet is distracting now.  Wait until you’re juggling the demands of the five fascinating  Ivy League courses you signed up with through Coursera.  I’m kidding, but not entirely. Somewhere around July I found myself wrestling between my Code Year resolution with Codecademy and my determination to complete the Studio Track of Stanford’s Human Computer Interaction course. What began as a five week project soon stretched into something closer to eight weeks as Stanford realized how unprepared most people were for the work involved in field researching, building, testing and peer reviewing a web app.  I did it.  But by September I was burnt out.  Had I not dropped out of Machine Learning after half a video and made a firm decision to bear down, I never would have grocked Python (or learned the word “grock”).  So if MOOCs are something that might interest you in 2013, make a resolution now not to become a MOOC slut.

2. MOOCs are an awesome way to meet people in your home town. This is especially true if you live in a tech oriented city. If there isn’t already a meet up somewhere in your town in the subject you’ve become interested in you can probably start one. Or you can start meetups specifically around the course you happen to have enrolled in. Those meet ups will no doubt lead to other meetups. After organizing the first Code Year meet up in Montreal, I met and introduced people who went on to put on the first Montreal Maker Faire. The interests I cultivated through that venture led me to  WordCamp Montreal, Semantic Web meet ups,  MTL Girl Geeks, MTL Girl Hackers, to mention only a few groups I discovered over the year. Problem was I was so over enrolled in MOOCs, I often couldn’t go to all the things I wanted to.

3. MOOCS are like running.  They’re free. They require little expense or equipment. They’re outside the usual  parameters of civilized life. You make your own challenges. You feel your strength, endurance, and confidence build. You’ll want to quit right before you reach the finish line/personal goal/personal best.  But if you bear down, you’ll learn the effort is really worth it.

4. MOOCS are like a treadmill. They can be a great stepping stone to real life learning. If you’re shy of university life for whatever reason, or you want to try out a subject first to see if it’s for you, MOOCs are great.  But at a certain point you need to find an entry point into the complexities of real life learning.  That might be a meet up, a project independent of what you’re learning in the MOOC, or, in the end, a classroom course in that subject. If MOOCs are your only source of learning you’re going to get bored.

5. MOOCs are especially great for women. At one point this year, I came across a popular  tech ed blog, where it was speculated that the gender ratio of MOOCS were probably not much different from those in regular Computer Science courses. i.e dismally biased towards men.  I’m not convinced that’s true. Almost all the people who showed up to my Montreal Code Year meet ups were women. My experience of peer review in the Coursera HCI course is that there were many women in the course. And, while I don’t know the numbers, I feel safe speculating that MOOCs will be a significant factor  in restoring gender balance to computer science. (Yes I did use the word RESTORE.)

MOOCS in my experience are a great gateway to equity. This isn’t to say that societies should abandon a commitment to traditional learning.  We’re all going to have to be careful to make sure that MOOCs enable low cost high quality learning, not undermine it.

But I’m from Montreal.  Here we march in the streets and bang kitchenware to keep university tuition fees low.  As a result one out of two  Montreal university graduates are first generation (i.e. the first person in their family to go beyond highschool), by far the highest ratio in North America.

The MOOC can be an excellent learning path, and can do much to fill the equity gap, but it will never be a substitute for a deep social commitment to affordable higher learning.

Click on this portrait of the teenage Ada Byron to learn about her contribution to the history of computer programming.

Reblogged from TED Blog:

Python is killing me.

My enthusiasm of two months ago is drying up and all the things I thought I was going to love about Python, I now hate.  I miss JavaScript. The comforting closure of the semi-colons. Those curly brackets were always more fun than I gave them credit for. They told you where things went. They provided structure, style and whimsy.

Python is all empty space. And while the basic logic is still there, why do all computer languages have to do things differently?

Mostly, I guess I just resent that it’s hard. Which is probably a life problem, not a Python problem. Why do we always think that life is going to get easier?  I’ve been baby stepping my way through, but I’m falling behind.  I was on track to finish Code Year on time, and every week my percentage of completion is getting a tiny bit lower. I feel like a marathon runner who’s fading in the last mile.

Must. Get. The. Passion. Back.

Yesterday I was thinking about the programming satori experience that got this blog rolling. I remember how I felt after I got through the Snake Eyes  challenge. The world took on this complex, computational beauty that I never  would  have seen If I’d given up . For the week after that challenge I was thinking in code. I felt enlightened, stronger.

I’m sure Python has something to teach me too. I just have to be willing to re-commit and set a challenge to make up the ground I’ve lost.

One of the advantages of being the mother of a twelve year old is that I have many inspirational Hollywood movies to choose from in this mission. A scene from  the Karate Kid remake comes to mind. The one where they visit the Taoist monastery and Jaden Smith learns that the snake is not controlling the nun. By copying its movements the nun is controlling the snake!

There is some profound metaphor in there that I don’t quite understand yet. But I will find some way to make that allegory work.

Because if I’ve learned one thing from a year of learning to program, it’s that it’s usually right at the point when nothing makes any sense that the magic is about to happen.

Reblogged from TechCrunch:

Reblogged from TED Blog:

Reblogged from TED Blog:

Reblogged from TED Blog:

The open-source programming world has a lot to teach democracy, says Clay Shirky.

In this fascinating talk from TEDGlobal 2012, Shirky harkens back to the early days of the printing press. At the time, a group of “natural philosophers” (who would later adopt the term “scientists”) called the Invisible College realized that the press could offer a new way to share and debate their work.

Read more… 737 more words

“Doc Searls On Becoming Part of The Intention Economy,” Fast Company, May 3, 2012.

When my mom was starting her busy protoyuppy family, back in the 60s, one thing was easier. She had relationships with saleswomen at a few downtown department stores. “I could call one up and say, I need some back to school clothes, and she’d just put together a couple of outfits for you guys. And that was it, we’d just go down, take a look at them, buy the best option and I was finished.”

Think of all the time we spend now, comparison shopping, and all the energy and money that goes into convincing consumers that they have some kind of special relationship with a brand.

Imagine if the web could bring about a mass return to the kind of economy where customers had real sustained relationships with sellers. That’s a possibility put forth by Doc Searls in a book I started reading last week. The Intention Economy grew out of an article he wrote for Linux Journal back in 2006. Much has changed since then, but the kernel of his argument seems to be even more possible. What if the current trend of vendors, using technology to track and prompt buyers, shifted instead towards encouraging buyers to simply state their buying intentions up front. What if this brought about a more direct, open and respectful relationship between buyers and sellers. Wouldn’t almost everyone profit?

For instance, imagine you have an app that enables you to list the things you intend to buy in the near future. On this app you put the things you want to buy: a new car, a reconditioned Ipad for the kids, a coffee table that would match the living room you posted on pinterest, a grocery list that you don’t have the time to check with the latest flyers. Let’s say this app has enabled you to form a network of trusted vendors. Over the next days you receive bids, offers, helpful information from various vendors, a calculation of what your groceries would cost at three different stores. Some of these vendors have sold to you before, so they’re willing to cut you a better deal as a trusted, known customer. Let’s add some bonus features, like a terms of service contract  overseen by a good consumer protection group. A contract that the VENDOR clicks the agreement button on. And a seriously well insured way for the buyer to pay that doesn’t make her vulnerable to identity theft, or credit card hacking.

Imagine the money saved on advertising and marketing for the smart vendors who adopt this early. In a couple of years small to medium sized businesses could build a steady web of reliable clients in a stable, sustainable economy.

Everything is moving towards mobile technology, but I have yet to come across a market evaluation that doesn’t predict mobile technology is going to be even tougher to monetize than the web.

Unless it’s not. Unless vendors use it as a way to bypass the high cost of adverstising, marketting and branding altogether. Unless buyers (and yes I’m talking to you women, whose brains are fried from the responsibility of making most of the small purchasing decision in your household) start using mobile technology to find new ways to recover the authentic power they once had.

Imagine that.  Or better, why don’t we start forming a collective intention to make that happen.