I’ve been ‘attending’ Harvard University’s free online Computer Science class, and I wholeheartedly recommend it. I hope to plug some holes in my CS understanding, left from sometimes inadequate self-teaching and an academic background too focused on the end-user understanding of computers. Having had almost no direct contact with a foreign academic systems (except for a couple of University of Texas workshops and seminars held here in Porto), let alone Ivy League, here are some remarks after ‘attending’ the first couple of weeks (meaning watching four videotaped lectures and doing a couple of ‘problem sets’):

• Organization: it’s mentioned 700 people are taking the CS class in-site, but I have no idea how many more are taking it online (for a [obviously high] fee you can actually get graded). Dozens of staff provide service to just that one class. Plus all the extra seminars people can attend (or freely download videos of), such as A Crash Course in Java or Using the Vim Text Editor. Comparison to my own experience as academic instructor — all alone with sixty students in a small room — is headspinning.
• Dress-code: the utter lack thereof. Students come on stage wearing shots and flip-flops, exactly the kind of clothing items a high-profile portuguese university attempted to ban while soliciting students to denounce colleagues. Only shows that what University should be all about is knowledge, ideas, and creativity; not suits. Rigorous dress-codes send the very wrong idea presentation is more important (I haven’t seen any portuguese college soliciting students to rat out plagiarists — which would still be wrong). Presentation has a certain amount of importance, of course, (I often find myself wearing a polo shirt just to look a bit different from most students — ‘more teacherly’, if you will), but very tiny indeed — if it’s hot outside, by all means skip the socks.
• Colloquialisms and rhythm: the instructors’ speech is very free-flowing, sometimes even low-level curse words pass by. But that doesn’t mean the teaching is by any means dumbed-down, by the contrary, the rhythm at which new information is passed on to the students is much more unrelentless than anything in my own academic experience.
• Notes: the lectures’ notes are provided to the students so they don’t spend their time writing down stuff instead of paying attention. In my teaching, I’ve often interrputed students writing down stuff I say, an habit so embedded in some students they often don’t even look to something I’m showing. I always give out some links that I hope work as notes, but perhaps I should systematize this.
• Giving (Free / open-source) software in a virtual appliance, such as a VirtualBox VM: what a great idea! Not really practical in my video editing classes, but a good way to ensure students do their exercises in the ‘same’ computer in Multimedia Lab, for instance (of which usage of some open-source tools is part of the syllabus).

So yeah, I’m enjoying it.

A very interesing Scientific American article about Erez Lieberman Aiden, a twenty-first century Renaissance Man with work in lingustics, mathematics, engineering and genetics.

Although I strive to be interested in multiple things, this article made me feel like a very low-ranking amateur-division polymath, if ever. But even though there’s no contest there — some people are just geniuses the way some are natural leaders, others run 100 meters in 9.5 seconds and others fully recharge on just 4 hours sleep —, this is the kind of success-story article I find misleading: even if corporate and academic establishments are supposedly supportive of All-Round People, often these will only actually get there through a mix of far-out genius, luck and nepotism — and I feel there’s a very thin line between being perceived as ‘a genius’ and ‘a deadbeat who can’t focus’, very much like the thin line between being brilliant and being a self-obsessed douche (think of you favourite sport for thousands of examples of this). The truth is, establishments, being establishments, want drones. Caring about multiple kinds of stuff may get you plenty of pats in the back and the kind of weak praise that is disgusting the way weak handshakes are, but doesn’t correlate with big cash payments and career advancement (see most true Renaissance Men — for each sponsored millionaire like Michelangelo there were dozens of peers striving to make ends meet).

But still, being interested in things is interesting. Keep doing it.

Do you like the ‘lightbox’ I use to display big images on my website? Now you too can download and use it. It’s free! And it is marginally superior to other lightbox scripts, which is why I made the effort:

• You can add titles and descriptions to images;
• Images automatically resize to fit in the browser window (but you can set an attribute to disable this).

I’ve also started a new code scrapbook, in which I’ll post more useful scripts in the future.

The Web, always finding new ways to tempt me into spending money (I don’t have) in books (I don’t have the shelving space for). Kottke