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> What is it about formalized schooling specifically, that you believe makes it uniquely capable in teaching people what they don't know? The teacher. Teaching

by dozzie 10y ago

> What is it about formalized schooling specifically, that you believe makes it uniquely capable in teaching people what they don't know? The teacher. Teaching/learning was always about the teacher, who knows what and in what order to teach. You can have the same effects with the same effort as with formalized schooling if you have a private teacher, but how many self-taught developers had them? And then there's this small thing that in formalized schooling you're taught by several people, each for their own discipline. It's hard to come by a tutor that knows seven different fields and it's hard to come by seven tutors for each of the fields.

Nadya 10y ago
>who knows what and in what order to teach. Plenty of courses have their general outline publicly available. Some colleges even share older lectures [0]. There are more-than-enough resources available for self-directed learning. Have questions? StackOverflow exists. The #1 criticism against self-directed learning is how self-motivated the autodidact is. Most people suck at staying motivated to teach themselves. If they aren't 100% passionate about learning the subject and can keep their interest going, they will fail. [0] https://www.youtube.com/user/MIT/playlists https://www.youtube.com/user/MIT/playlists
- dozzie 10y ago
  > Plenty of courses have their general outline publicly available. Yeah, something like educational videos we have since the VHS era, and even before that, handbooks. It's still nothing like having a real teacher.
- arielcamus 10y ago
  I totally agree with you -- staying motivated, especially if you are learning alone from home, it's incredibly difficult. I have a thesis that I have recently started to validate which is that you can considerably improve motivation in self-directed learning environments by introducing online collaborative learning. I just wrote about it and launched a little course/workshop to test the idea: https://medium.com/@arielcamus/learn-to-build-a-backend-with-node-js-doing-pair-programming-b6d5a241b846#.utueveijh https://medium.com/@arielcamus/learn-to-build-a-backend-with...

by dozzie 10y ago

Nadya 10y ago

>who knows what and in what order to teach. Plenty of courses have their general outline publicly available. Some colleges even share older lectures [0]. There are more-than-enough resources available for self-directed learning. Have questions? StackOverflow exists. The #1 criticism against self-directed learning is how self-motivated the autodidact is. Most people suck at staying motivated to teach themselves. If they aren't 100% passionate about learning the subject and can keep their interest going, they will fail. [0] https://www.youtube.com/user/MIT/playlists https://www.youtube.com/user/MIT/playlists

dozzie 10y ago
> Plenty of courses have their general outline publicly available. Yeah, something like educational videos we have since the VHS era, and even before that, handbooks. It's still nothing like having a real teacher.
arielcamus 10y ago
I totally agree with you -- staying motivated, especially if you are learning alone from home, it's incredibly difficult. I have a thesis that I have recently started to validate which is that you can considerably improve motivation in self-directed learning environments by introducing online collaborative learning. I just wrote about it and launched a little course/workshop to test the idea: https://medium.com/@arielcamus/learn-to-build-a-backend-with-node-js-doing-pair-programming-b6d5a241b846#.utueveijh https://medium.com/@arielcamus/learn-to-build-a-backend-with...