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Sunday, November 4, 2012

practical education for everyone; enough with MOOCs and enough with college










  1. New graduate to software professional
  2. Experienced developer to technical lead
  3. Senior developer to architect
  4. Senior developer to manager
  5. Various job roles to product manager





jake said...

Hi Roger,

Great ideas as usual. I am 100% on your side and I am following your work closely.

Currently, I am teaching in a First Nations school in BC, Canada. I face some extra challenges due to social factors, but I refuse to teach in anyway other than at the highest level possible.

On the positive, I have carte blanche to do whatever I want being the director of digital integration K - 12. I am focussed on basically everything that you believe in. Combined with Sugata Mitra's work, I feel that I am moving my students very fast into the future of education.

We are working on practicality. I am about to move some of my elementary students into using Scratch by MIT. I look forward to seeing what they can build.

I am not overly focussed on the programming side of it, but what I am mostly trying to give them is the ability to produce content. We will work with HTML and some CSS in the high school, but I am not trying to turn them into programmers per se, I am more about teaching them the cognitive abilities that you speak of through building their own content that they can display in portfolios that proves to organizations that they are capable of doing the practical work required for the 21st century (idea creation).

I am very interested in your computer programs that you are developing for high school. Could you let me know how much a program like this would cost and if there needs to be minimum numbers?

Thank you for your perspective. I absolutely hated school myself which is why I am there now. It has to change! I am working on it!

With respect.

Rodrigo said...

How "practical" are your courses? By doing some exercises? Do you mix other subjects into the courses? Will be projects to create, for example, an entire web site from scratch or something like that?

Roger Schank said...

the course are entirely projects; you build software (including web sites) from scratch