roman_vorushin's comments

> However, there is one important piece of advice I wish I could give to my past self, when I started my PhD: _Actively_ collaborate with others.

This great advice is hard to underestimate.

Stanford's classes are specially designed for online education (i.e. not a byproduct of on-campus lectures from 2003). In last years 3 major innovation dramatically increased effectiveness of online education:

1. Special format (found by Salman Khan): short videos, blackboard

2. A lot of quizzes inside lectures (inquiry based learning). See http://t.co/eN9g9MAU and http://t.co/YiXUMs9x

3. Group effects (http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_educa...). If your class has definite schedule and you have thousands of people doing this class with you and communicating while doing it, your results will be much higher.

It seems to be very misguiding when designers of some new programming language are heavily biased with some business needs or platform selection.

Programming language is not just a technology. It's a way of communicating my thoughts. I don't want to think and write (and read!) in just an _efficient_ language.

What a coincidence! We implemented this kind of timeline in our DjangoDash 2011 project (Jul 30-31) - http://familyfeed.vorushin.ru/vorushins/Marta/ (source code - https://github.com/vorushin/FamilyFeed)