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Wed, 23 May 2012

Lifelong learning

Below are four of my (150!) browser tabs opened, that I oddly had in sequence.

Various tabs open to online learning websites.

There has been much made of the pheonmen of lifelong learning and although I thought I had finished my exams when I finished University, I'm still doing them.

From left to right:

Duolingo, where I am learning Spanish.

Quite a reasonable site, currently invite-only. My worry is my pronounciation will be crap though. I do wish that it did not have to use Flash to accomplish things though.

Udacity, where I am doing CS212 - Design of Computer Programs

Nice interface, annoying that it uses YouTube to host videos as that meant I had to whitelist YouTube in Flashblock.

I picked this course as one of the other ones I wanted to do had already closed. I suspect I'll eventually do each of the courses they have on offer. One nice thing is that courses run every 8 weeks or so.

Codeacademy, I am currently doing their Codeyear course.

Well presented, but I find that their Javascript interface is extremely slow to startup. It consistently lags behind my typing speed by about 3 seconds.

I'm using Firefox beta, so I'm always running something fairly fast and modern too.

I'm primarily doing this course to see how/what they are trying to teach non-programmers. My feedback is that it is not geared towards someone with no programming knowledge. The initial 10 weeks of Javascript presentation proceeded at a very fast pace. If I weren't a programmer already, I'd have stuggled to keep up.

Coursera, here I am doing the Machine Learning class.

I'm not a fan of this interface at all, which is why I find it hard to come back to the site each week. I'm not sure exactly why though, since it uses WebM and no Flash. Hurray!!

Either way, I'm doing the Machine Learning class. I tried this last time it was offered and got to week 5 — same week I'm on now — and then I got suddenly busy IRL, so was not able to complete the course.

Unlike Udacity, courses run at set times and you have to do the work on the required dates in order to get the statement of attainment, which can be hard when you are juggling multiple things

Keep in mind, these are just the extra things I have decided to learn. I'm also learning more about Django, Puppet and Python in my work everyday. Plus I'm actually doing a Spanish course in real life too. Oh, and I have a job and I go out. I'm generally actually pushed for time.

Which probably explains why I have not been keeping up with the blog. It isn't because I hate you, although it might be too ;-) , I'm just busy.

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ॐ (aum) - what was, what is and what will be, wildfire's musings

Anand Kumria
wildfire@progsoc.org

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