9 ms·

A School With No Teachers, Where Students Teach Themselves

101 points by mattm 13y ago

yeukhon 13y ago
I like the idea, but I hope the article would address my question whether or not there are mentors available for office hours. You can certainly learn by trials and errors, but to be honest you'd learn a lot more if there are professionals to help you. Second issue is programming 15 hours a day seems a lot. I can't even stare at my screen for more than 7-8 hours a day. That's a lot of work... I do like the idea, and I think traditional curriculum should adopt part of this. I advocate my department to do "student seminar" as elective, but the department always refuses by saying "your employers don't see the value and have no way to justify your ability by taking this elective." I like professors to give students more freedom to build things and show to class their progress.
- craighooghiem 13y ago
  I feel like there are so many other places to find mentors now that it's not necessary to have them at the school itself. As for the second issue, I stare at a computer screen for at least 12 hours a day - you have to be careful about it (backlighting, fl.ux, etc) but it's possible to do and can result in some incredibly productive days. That said, 15 hours is a long time.
  - HarryRotha 13y ago
    Used to do 15 hour days.. then cubital tunnel :( Now I'm trying to recover and limiting myself to 4hrs.
  - yeukhon 13y ago
    Maybe. For general programming questions like how to loop two things at the same time or combining two lists into a dict, yeah. For particular open source project if you are lucky yeah you can get help from IRC (or fall back down to reading source code). But infrastructure, scaling, security, these are very specialized areas. You can get a general idea from stackoverflow or security exchange but implementation wise SO is not a good place to find inspiration. In the past when I had to deal with puppet/chef I constantly had problems that the mailing list just couldn't help and the only way I could get help was to bring someone in and had them debug in real time with me.
- nathanappere 13y ago
  Epitech student here (42 is kind of a fork, the whole managing team is Epitech Alumni). So far they copied everything from Epitech and it seems to work in the same way so: 1) Mentors should be available at 2 in the morning. Not that they have to (most of the time) it's just that you mostly interact with teaching assistants that still are in school working on their projects too, so they usually pull the same kind of hours than you. 2) You have really tight deadlines and a huge amount of project so it's not unusual to have to work 15 hours. But the whole thing is just about learning to manage crazy constraints, you deal with it the way you want. If you choose to work 15hours a day an manage to be efficient then great, but it's more about learning to be organize / be efficient.
Artemis2 13y ago
It is a shitty school, launched by one of the biggest IT groups in France (Illiad, which owns mainly Online - hosting provider and Free - ISP/mobile carrier). Students are under stress during their whole scholarship. I think one attending this could work for Illiad at most (and maybe elsewhere, by using their experience). Although it is free, which is interesting for people with low resources.
- conradk 13y ago
  Since this is the first year, I don't see how you could know if we are gonna be under stress. But I'd like to understand, if you have more information on that. I've spent a month in the school 42 in July. The stress we had was a good stress IMO. The one that pushes you to work instead of spending 3 hours a day on YouTube. We just had to be able to say "I won't have the time to finish, so I'll try making the least worse". Once we understood that, it was intensive, but fun.
LAMike 13y ago
15 hours a day? On fake problems? Why not teach them basic skills on the frontend and backend and let them work on projects for 15 hours a day?
- DanBC 13y ago
  I'm guessing French unions don't want unpaid students doing real work because they want the real work to be done by employed people.
  - juliendorra 13y ago
    This has nothing to do with unions and all to do with the archaic views on education and developers of the founders. Note that I teach in a French web school where students do work on real projects from real clients, for free, in year 2 and 3. In another web school where I teach at 'master level', year 5, the project are real paid projects for real clients. It's totally possible, and I must say, it's even the rising ideology that you have to make students work on "real projects" (with wildly varying definition of what that means); so yes, it's a little bit crazy to see young students working 3 years 15 hours a day on arbitrary exercises, and calling it a school that will produce wildly creative professionals.
  - nathanappere 13y ago
    Well I guess that when you have a good story it is a shame to let facts get in the way. French unions have no say in the curriculum of a private school (and it would make absolutely no sense, lot of fantams about french unions there I think!). Private school can teach pretty much what they want. If they want they diploma recognised by the government then they must comply to some policies of the ministry of education, but it is up to them.
- juliendorra 13y ago
  From what I gather the 42 team has a really poor view of anything web-dev related. They have this idea of creating "hardcore devs", because supposedly they are better and if you can code hardcore you can code anything. (An idea that obviously lead to entire categories of failures, because not two systems are alike, and developing necessitate many skills, including communicating, writing, leading) Note that this is what I gather in part by talking to a pre-selected student that didn't make the final line (nor she wanted too); and in part by reading the 3 year program of the school, the interviews.
j2d3 13y ago
This is probably bound to catch on fast in the us where teachers and their unions are thought (by an unnerving possible majority) to be one of the primary factors in our ongoing economic problems.
- bcoates 13y ago
  I like the idea that it's targeted at people for whom the existing system is failing, rather than a panacea for education. Alternative education programs like this don't have to be capable of replacing traditional education to be a success.
- cowsandmilk 13y ago
  a program that only admits 18-30 year olds will replace education of minors in the US? This article had a catchy headline, but what is described is not much different from how most of my classes were in college. They've just removed the couple hours of lecture and instead just give out the problem sets. There is no democracy in choosing the problems you are solving, or any encouragement to explore things that interest you.
- zarify 13y ago
  Except this isn't really 'school', it's more of a technical college. Students are going to learn a specific skill. (I could be getting confused by how you folks in the US still call what we call university 'school' in which case disregard my comment :/)
  - platz 13y ago
    Agree, the scope here is extremely limited
DanBC 13y ago
I thought (from the headlines) that this was going to be like Summerhill School. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summerhill_School https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summerhill_School) > It is run as a democratic community; the running of the school is conducted in the school meetings, which anyone, staff or pupil, may attend, and at which everyone has an equal vote. These meetings serve as both a legislative and judicial body. Members of the community are free to do as they please, so long as their actions do not cause any harm to others, according to Neill's principle "Freedom, not Licence." This extends to the freedom for pupils to choose which lessons, if any, they attend.
- gbog 13y ago
  The great essayist Simon Leys said one day that education task was to prepare pupils to be the best citizen in a democracy, but that democracy is not part of the tools used to achieve education. I think these differing views coke from different understanding of democracy. On one side democracy is reduced to "decide together", and is applied to school management, experimentally. The real democracy is on the other side.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
juliendorra 13y ago
There is more to it than this idealistic view: 42 is very excluding for women, succeeding in bringing in les than 7% women. Less than a classic computer engineering school in France apparently. So much for inclusiveness. (They managed that by only showing bearded old men on their website, bringing a frat-house culture from their experience in older schools, with "fun" bonding games like taping a student to the trees, and all in all not thinking twice about it) Also, there is no entrepreneurial skills in the program (it's supposedly optional in year 3), no vision of a developer as part of a community (nothing in the program about going to external events, like FOSDEM for example). Every student student is supposed to work on the same exact problem (exercise really) than the others, as far as I can tell in the same order. All in all, the discourse on creativity and inclusiveness is really not in sync with how the school is designed. No teachers doesn't equate peer to peer learning, nor a path to being a great, creative coder anchored in her/his community.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- nawitus 13y ago
  >42 is very excluding for women, succeeding in bringing in les than 7% women. Having a small percentage of women doesn't indicate that they're excluding women.
  - alanctgardner2 13y ago
    Not necessarily, but they do have less women than the average French school, and the OP gave a bunch of serious reasons why this might be the case. They could try to eliminate those policies, and see if it increases female enrollment.
    - gbog 13y ago
      What serious reasons? Some pictures with beards? You're kidding. From the article and the kind of philosophy behind, it seems clear to me that they just do not distinguish people race, background, gender even. When putting pics on the site they don't think "oh let's get some women and some black people for the balance" because they forbid themselves to think in these terms. That's the founding of French laicity and equality and public education. I think it's still the right way to do it. That's why all the IT is sexist meme is so flawed.
sieva 13y ago
This is really the type of innovation that education needs. Providing solutions for a broken system is very much like putting lipstick on a pig...without the proper infrastructure that can provide the support and challenges that students need, no amounts of interaction, collaboration or analytics will make significant changes (with emphasis on significant). Although there is a good chance this isn't a "perfect" solution, it's a huge step in the right direction, and I'd like to see more government funding going towards trying new approaches vs funding something that hasn't worked well in a 100 years. Upvote and a high five to all entrepreneurs working in this field :)
mekoka 13y ago
I see some comments already heavily criticizing this school. A few things to note before taking those comments at face value. - This is the school's website http://www.42.fr http://www.42.fr. If you can't read in french, but want to know more, I'd suggest to use some translation tool, or lookup other articles that talk about it. - I also encourage you to lookup who is behind the project http://www.42.fr/lequipe-et-les-moyens/ http://www.42.fr/lequipe-et-les-moyens/ - The very first class will be in November 2013. So the program hasn't even started yet. I don't know how some people can foresee failure this early. - on this page, http://www.42.fr/notre-pedagogie-programme/ http://www.42.fr/notre-pedagogie-programme/ there's a testimony (I think) by Bruno Lévêque that roughly translates to A "project based" methodology that favors realism, learning by creating real applications useful in everyday life. That answers the question will they be doing only programming exercises for 15h a day? It is unfortunate that this website would only be in french. If there was an english translation, I sense that some people would be a bit less cavalier about spewing unsubstantiated information.
- vellum 13y ago
  An English version of the actual course curriculum is here: http://pastebin.com/YjX1dgSD http://pastebin.com/YjX1dgSD They actually cover a lot: C, Java, Functional Programming, Kernel Programming, Iphone/Android Development, etc. French version: http://www.42.fr/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/programme-42.pdf http://www.42.fr/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/programme-42.pdf
- namenotrequired 13y ago
  Thank you. I also think that, even if some of the criticism is right, for a lot of those students (and their future employers) this project will still be a lot better than the alternative of them staying unemployed or working bad jobs while full of this untapped potential.
  - yodsanklai 13y ago
    No, the alternative is to study (for free) in any French university.
yodsanklai 13y ago
I'm very skeptical about this. The idea is that computer science isn't properly taught in French old fashioned universities and "grandes ecoles". As a result, some students fail while they would succeed with a more pragmatic, project-based education. It sounds like a good idea. After all, we all know stories of bright people or great hackers that felt academic education wasn't for them and followed a different, successful path. And after all, Xavier Niel should know, being a such a successful entrepreneur. Well, I think he's wrong for several reasons. 1 - even though he says otherwise, conventionally CS is already taught largely with programming projects. 2 - this field has became so complex that IMHO it's increasingly difficult to escape some theoretical knowledge. And actually, 42 curriculum has plenty of it. It's not clear how it's gonna be taught, and I can't see how a student that failed to learn let say Automata theory, linear algebra and Fourier transforms at university would succeed just because he's now supposed to learn by himself. 3 - I think teaching with projects still requires a lot of preparation and supervision from the teachers, and last time I checked, 42 didn't have that kind of resources. For instance, you can't just ask 800 students to write a shell (and learn UNIX and C in the process) by leaving them on their own for a month. Of course, some will do it, but most won't. I doubt they manage to find 800 john carmack.
- nathanappere 13y ago
  Epitech Alumni here (42 is basically the same thing but free). 1. Studied in CSULB / UCB, you really don't do enough of them. More theory than practise when you should probably seek theory when you're confronted to a problem that needs it. 2. You really don't need to know about automata theory, linear algebra or whatever to be a good developer. Brings me back to what I said in 1. 3. Actually the paper doesn't depicts the reality clearly: you have a lot of teacher assistant always available to help you, it's just that they are not allowed to gives you the answer, only to help you search in the right direction. When you encounter something tricky where finding documentation on the internet becomes an issue then you can talk about it with them. The system works quite well in Epitech. I have been a C & C++ assistant there and the level amongst the assistants is really good, and you could never hire the same number of qualified teachers (if you could find them). Having people that worked on the same project themselves quite recently (like 1 or 2 years ago) makes it that you will always find someone who knows what he is talking about. To teach CS this is really the best system I have seen so far, and it teach you to never get stuck, never trust blindly what someone says, and always go find the answers by yourself.
kevgnulldev 13y ago
While I have reservations about this particular instantiation, discussion does seem to notions, at least vaguely (superficially?), to ideas that do have merit and are being successfully implemented in some US medical schools... (Emphasis on vague/superficial)... At the risk of enlarging the conversation beyond its intended scope, I'm thinking along lines of pedagogy that address some of these ideas: http://learning.media.mit.edu/content/publications/EA.Piaget%20_%20Papert.pdf http://learning.media.mit.edu/content/publications/EA.Piaget... A move that I'd like to see but that this particular project only tips its hat to.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

101 points by mattm 13y ago

I like the idea, but I hope the article would address my question whether or not there are mentors available for office hours. You can certainly learn by trials and errors, but to be honest you'd learn a lot more if there are professionals to help you. Second issue is programming 15 hours a day seems a lot. I can't even stare at my screen for more than 7-8 hours a day. That's a lot of work... I do like the idea, and I think traditional curriculum should adopt part of this. I advocate my department to do "student seminar" as elective, but the department always refuses by saying "your employers don't see the value and have no way to justify your ability by taking this elective." I like professors to give students more freedom to build things and show to class their progress.

craighooghiem 13y ago
I feel like there are so many other places to find mentors now that it's not necessary to have them at the school itself. As for the second issue, I stare at a computer screen for at least 12 hours a day - you have to be careful about it (backlighting, fl.ux, etc) but it's possible to do and can result in some incredibly productive days. That said, 15 hours is a long time.
- HarryRotha 13y ago
  Used to do 15 hour days.. then cubital tunnel :( Now I'm trying to recover and limiting myself to 4hrs.
- yeukhon 13y ago
  Maybe. For general programming questions like how to loop two things at the same time or combining two lists into a dict, yeah. For particular open source project if you are lucky yeah you can get help from IRC (or fall back down to reading source code). But infrastructure, scaling, security, these are very specialized areas. You can get a general idea from stackoverflow or security exchange but implementation wise SO is not a good place to find inspiration. In the past when I had to deal with puppet/chef I constantly had problems that the mailing list just couldn't help and the only way I could get help was to bring someone in and had them debug in real time with me.
nathanappere 13y ago
Epitech student here (42 is kind of a fork, the whole managing team is Epitech Alumni). So far they copied everything from Epitech and it seems to work in the same way so: 1) Mentors should be available at 2 in the morning. Not that they have to (most of the time) it's just that you mostly interact with teaching assistants that still are in school working on their projects too, so they usually pull the same kind of hours than you. 2) You have really tight deadlines and a huge amount of project so it's not unusual to have to work 15 hours. But the whole thing is just about learning to manage crazy constraints, you deal with it the way you want. If you choose to work 15hours a day an manage to be efficient then great, but it's more about learning to be organize / be efficient.

Artemis2 13y ago

It is a shitty school, launched by one of the biggest IT groups in France (Illiad, which owns mainly Online - hosting provider and Free - ISP/mobile carrier). Students are under stress during their whole scholarship. I think one attending this could work for Illiad at most (and maybe elsewhere, by using their experience). Although it is free, which is interesting for people with low resources.

conradk 13y ago
Since this is the first year, I don't see how you could know if we are gonna be under stress. But I'd like to understand, if you have more information on that. I've spent a month in the school 42 in July. The stress we had was a good stress IMO. The one that pushes you to work instead of spending 3 hours a day on YouTube. We just had to be able to say "I won't have the time to finish, so I'll try making the least worse". Once we understood that, it was intensive, but fun.

LAMike 13y ago

15 hours a day? On fake problems? Why not teach them basic skills on the frontend and backend and let them work on projects for 15 hours a day?

DanBC 13y ago
I'm guessing French unions don't want unpaid students doing real work because they want the real work to be done by employed people.
- juliendorra 13y ago
  This has nothing to do with unions and all to do with the archaic views on education and developers of the founders. Note that I teach in a French web school where students do work on real projects from real clients, for free, in year 2 and 3. In another web school where I teach at 'master level', year 5, the project are real paid projects for real clients. It's totally possible, and I must say, it's even the rising ideology that you have to make students work on "real projects" (with wildly varying definition of what that means); so yes, it's a little bit crazy to see young students working 3 years 15 hours a day on arbitrary exercises, and calling it a school that will produce wildly creative professionals.
- nathanappere 13y ago
  Well I guess that when you have a good story it is a shame to let facts get in the way. French unions have no say in the curriculum of a private school (and it would make absolutely no sense, lot of fantams about french unions there I think!). Private school can teach pretty much what they want. If they want they diploma recognised by the government then they must comply to some policies of the ministry of education, but it is up to them.
juliendorra 13y ago
From what I gather the 42 team has a really poor view of anything web-dev related. They have this idea of creating "hardcore devs", because supposedly they are better and if you can code hardcore you can code anything. (An idea that obviously lead to entire categories of failures, because not two systems are alike, and developing necessitate many skills, including communicating, writing, leading) Note that this is what I gather in part by talking to a pre-selected student that didn't make the final line (nor she wanted too); and in part by reading the 3 year program of the school, the interviews.

j2d3 13y ago

This is probably bound to catch on fast in the us where teachers and their unions are thought (by an unnerving possible majority) to be one of the primary factors in our ongoing economic problems.

bcoates 13y ago
I like the idea that it's targeted at people for whom the existing system is failing, rather than a panacea for education. Alternative education programs like this don't have to be capable of replacing traditional education to be a success.
cowsandmilk 13y ago
a program that only admits 18-30 year olds will replace education of minors in the US? This article had a catchy headline, but what is described is not much different from how most of my classes were in college. They've just removed the couple hours of lecture and instead just give out the problem sets. There is no democracy in choosing the problems you are solving, or any encouragement to explore things that interest you.
zarify 13y ago
Except this isn't really 'school', it's more of a technical college. Students are going to learn a specific skill. (I could be getting confused by how you folks in the US still call what we call university 'school' in which case disregard my comment :/)
- platz 13y ago
  Agree, the scope here is extremely limited

DanBC 13y ago

I thought (from the headlines) that this was going to be like Summerhill School. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summerhill_School https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summerhill_School) > It is run as a democratic community; the running of the school is conducted in the school meetings, which anyone, staff or pupil, may attend, and at which everyone has an equal vote. These meetings serve as both a legislative and judicial body. Members of the community are free to do as they please, so long as their actions do not cause any harm to others, according to Neill's principle "Freedom, not Licence." This extends to the freedom for pupils to choose which lessons, if any, they attend.

gbog 13y ago
The great essayist Simon Leys said one day that education task was to prepare pupils to be the best citizen in a democracy, but that democracy is not part of the tools used to achieve education. I think these differing views coke from different understanding of democracy. On one side democracy is reduced to "decide together", and is applied to school management, experimentally. The real democracy is on the other side.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

juliendorra 13y ago

There is more to it than this idealistic view: 42 is very excluding for women, succeeding in bringing in les than 7% women. Less than a classic computer engineering school in France apparently. So much for inclusiveness. (They managed that by only showing bearded old men on their website, bringing a frat-house culture from their experience in older schools, with "fun" bonding games like taping a student to the trees, and all in all not thinking twice about it) Also, there is no entrepreneurial skills in the program (it's supposedly optional in year 3), no vision of a developer as part of a community (nothing in the program about going to external events, like FOSDEM for example). Every student student is supposed to work on the same exact problem (exercise really) than the others, as far as I can tell in the same order. All in all, the discourse on creativity and inclusiveness is really not in sync with how the school is designed. No teachers doesn't equate peer to peer learning, nor a path to being a great, creative coder anchored in her/his community.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
nawitus 13y ago
>42 is very excluding for women, succeeding in bringing in les than 7% women. Having a small percentage of women doesn't indicate that they're excluding women.
- alanctgardner2 13y ago
  Not necessarily, but they do have less women than the average French school, and the OP gave a bunch of serious reasons why this might be the case. They could try to eliminate those policies, and see if it increases female enrollment.
  - gbog 13y ago
    What serious reasons? Some pictures with beards? You're kidding. From the article and the kind of philosophy behind, it seems clear to me that they just do not distinguish people race, background, gender even. When putting pics on the site they don't think "oh let's get some women and some black people for the balance" because they forbid themselves to think in these terms. That's the founding of French laicity and equality and public education. I think it's still the right way to do it. That's why all the IT is sexist meme is so flawed.

sieva 13y ago

This is really the type of innovation that education needs. Providing solutions for a broken system is very much like putting lipstick on a pig...without the proper infrastructure that can provide the support and challenges that students need, no amounts of interaction, collaboration or analytics will make significant changes (with emphasis on significant). Although there is a good chance this isn't a "perfect" solution, it's a huge step in the right direction, and I'd like to see more government funding going towards trying new approaches vs funding something that hasn't worked well in a 100 years. Upvote and a high five to all entrepreneurs working in this field :)

mekoka 13y ago

I see some comments already heavily criticizing this school. A few things to note before taking those comments at face value. - This is the school's website http://www.42.fr http://www.42.fr. If you can't read in french, but want to know more, I'd suggest to use some translation tool, or lookup other articles that talk about it. - I also encourage you to lookup who is behind the project http://www.42.fr/lequipe-et-les-moyens/ http://www.42.fr/lequipe-et-les-moyens/ - The very first class will be in November 2013. So the program hasn't even started yet. I don't know how some people can foresee failure this early. - on this page, http://www.42.fr/notre-pedagogie-programme/ http://www.42.fr/notre-pedagogie-programme/ there's a testimony (I think) by Bruno Lévêque that roughly translates to A "project based" methodology that favors realism, learning by creating real applications useful in everyday life. That answers the question will they be doing only programming exercises for 15h a day? It is unfortunate that this website would only be in french. If there was an english translation, I sense that some people would be a bit less cavalier about spewing unsubstantiated information.

vellum 13y ago
An English version of the actual course curriculum is here: http://pastebin.com/YjX1dgSD http://pastebin.com/YjX1dgSD They actually cover a lot: C, Java, Functional Programming, Kernel Programming, Iphone/Android Development, etc. French version: http://www.42.fr/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/programme-42.pdf http://www.42.fr/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/programme-42.pdf
namenotrequired 13y ago
Thank you. I also think that, even if some of the criticism is right, for a lot of those students (and their future employers) this project will still be a lot better than the alternative of them staying unemployed or working bad jobs while full of this untapped potential.
- yodsanklai 13y ago
  No, the alternative is to study (for free) in any French university.

yodsanklai 13y ago

I'm very skeptical about this. The idea is that computer science isn't properly taught in French old fashioned universities and "grandes ecoles". As a result, some students fail while they would succeed with a more pragmatic, project-based education. It sounds like a good idea. After all, we all know stories of bright people or great hackers that felt academic education wasn't for them and followed a different, successful path. And after all, Xavier Niel should know, being a such a successful entrepreneur. Well, I think he's wrong for several reasons. 1 - even though he says otherwise, conventionally CS is already taught largely with programming projects. 2 - this field has became so complex that IMHO it's increasingly difficult to escape some theoretical knowledge. And actually, 42 curriculum has plenty of it. It's not clear how it's gonna be taught, and I can't see how a student that failed to learn let say Automata theory, linear algebra and Fourier transforms at university would succeed just because he's now supposed to learn by himself. 3 - I think teaching with projects still requires a lot of preparation and supervision from the teachers, and last time I checked, 42 didn't have that kind of resources. For instance, you can't just ask 800 students to write a shell (and learn UNIX and C in the process) by leaving them on their own for a month. Of course, some will do it, but most won't. I doubt they manage to find 800 john carmack.

nathanappere 13y ago
Epitech Alumni here (42 is basically the same thing but free). 1. Studied in CSULB / UCB, you really don't do enough of them. More theory than practise when you should probably seek theory when you're confronted to a problem that needs it. 2. You really don't need to know about automata theory, linear algebra or whatever to be a good developer. Brings me back to what I said in 1. 3. Actually the paper doesn't depicts the reality clearly: you have a lot of teacher assistant always available to help you, it's just that they are not allowed to gives you the answer, only to help you search in the right direction. When you encounter something tricky where finding documentation on the internet becomes an issue then you can talk about it with them. The system works quite well in Epitech. I have been a C & C++ assistant there and the level amongst the assistants is really good, and you could never hire the same number of qualified teachers (if you could find them). Having people that worked on the same project themselves quite recently (like 1 or 2 years ago) makes it that you will always find someone who knows what he is talking about. To teach CS this is really the best system I have seen so far, and it teach you to never get stuck, never trust blindly what someone says, and always go find the answers by yourself.

kevgnulldev 13y ago

While I have reservations about this particular instantiation, discussion does seem to notions, at least vaguely (superficially?), to ideas that do have merit and are being successfully implemented in some US medical schools... (Emphasis on vague/superficial)... At the risk of enlarging the conversation beyond its intended scope, I'm thinking along lines of pedagogy that address some of these ideas: http://learning.media.mit.edu/content/publications/EA.Piaget%20_%20Papert.pdf http://learning.media.mit.edu/content/publications/EA.Piaget... A move that I'd like to see but that this particular project only tips its hat to.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]