[ExI] mit's answer to the stanford ai class

[Kelly Anderson]

On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 9:51 AM, Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com> wrote:
> It does do all these things - but there are two remaining pieces of value
> that currently require a physical place for people to come to:
>
> 1) Proving that a certain person has a given general skill category.  For
> example, in programming jobs, a Bachelor's in CS or a related field is
> almost a union card.  Whether or not this should be the case, that is the
> reality today.  With all-online learning, how do you prove that a given
> person really did take a certain course of education - and how do you
> gain mainstream acceptance of that proof?  The latter is the harder part
> of this challenge.  Currently, "the student showed up here to take the
> classes, or at least the critical exams" is the most commonly accepted
> solution.  (Notice the physical-presence-required offer in this class from
> a certain German university.)

The problem is that self taught computer scientists frequently develop
really bad habits in programming style that are terribly difficult to
break. I have hired several very smart people who were self taught
programmers, and have always at least partially regretted the
decision. In my experience, particularly bad are Electrical Engineers
turned programmers, because they have pretty darn big egos, and think
that their way of programming is better. Sigh.

BTW, loved Spike's contributions to this thread, but couldn't think of
a way to add much, other than maybe some comedic reference to Zen and
the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance... LOL

-Kelly