I am reading a book titled “Data Journalism”. And I read a very Interesting insight that was primarily meant for “Journalism” industry – But I realized it’s true in general and I thought I’ll share that with you. The insight is that the world has changed from “what’s new” to “what does it all mean”. By that it means that few years ago – we had to subscribe to newspaper/journals/other-paper-based-stuff to know about “what’s NEW”. And notice that the pace at which the NEWS reached us was very slow. But now Thanks to Internet – we know “what’s new” and in fact it is TMI (too much information) and so now what we ask ourselves and others (including online services): “What does it all mean?”.
That’s about it for this post.
How do you deal with “information overload” – Tips/Techniques? do comment!
Recently I completed a cloud computing course taught at University of Washington and so now I am a certified Cloud guy but more importantly It was great learning experience!
More about the certificate:
The course had three courses which covered following topics:
cloud computing fundamentals
cloud computing models
cloud computing case studies
cloud computing application building
operations in cloud
scalable computing
MapReduce
NoSQL
Big Data
programming Big Data
Database as a Service
Thanks University of Washington and Instructors for a great learning experience!
Pinal Dave sir wrote a five part series on the topic of “Developer Training” and I believe it’s a nice professional development resource. So here are the Five parts along with my notes that I made when I was following the series:
[Update 20th August 2012: seems db-class, ml-class, saas-class etc have been “merged” under a single umbrella which is now called Coursera]
I have been a fan of khan academy for more than 2+ years now. And huge fan of TED for 3+ years now. Did you knew that Khan academy helped me when I took a graduate level class about statistics (To gain mathematical foundation for data analysis) six months back? Yes true story: Apart from Textbooks, course classes and my note-taking (scribbling), the resource that was most helpful to me (for practice) were video courses on statistics at Khan Academy:
I watched videos on topic that I was not comfortable with. I got ‘A’ for this course and of course, Khan academy was big help!
Fast forward today, I just completed watching few videos at saas-class.org and the quality of the material is Mind-blowingly awesome. And I know mind-blowlingly is not the right word, but you get my point, don’t you?! I am sure, you do!
You may ask – what basis do you have to compare saas-class.org with other courses? Well, I am pursuing an awesome certification on cloud computing at university of Washington (UW). It’s great! Now compare that with free saas-class.org whose content is equally great. I am not comparing the “Exhaustiveness” of the course here. The course at UW is one year-long and saas-class.org is just five weeks – so of course, the content at UW covers more topics. But if I compare the quality – I am just blown by both courses. I get to learn things that I do not know and to me that’s what matters. So Thank you UW and saas-class. Also. it does not end here – I am taking a graduate level course at school of management which focuses on business side of cloud computing. It’s great too and so is saas-class.
Enough of “judging” – but my point being that more than 50k students are accessing saas-class and they get a chance to get learn about software as a service, Agile Development, etc and isn’t that amazing!
Quick Facts: TOTAL students at UCB (Covers every major) = ~ 37,000 TOTAL students enrolled for saas-class (just one course taught by UCB professor’s): 60k
Notice the IMPACT of offering an online course (with OUT admission *requirements*)
Also, Think of students that get access to it, students from communities in the remote(st) part of our world can NOW learn about latest technology. Think of impact that they could make in their community.
I am not saying that these models should necessarily replace existing models, I know Importance of classes and world-class education – That’s why after my undergrad studies in India, I moved to USA to pursue Graduate degree in Information Technology and Management. So I know, Importance of contemporary education system. But these courses/videos help educate masses and not just selected few. And that’s what makes them the NEW ivy’s in my opinion.
It’s Not just for the chosen “ONE’s”
In the new model, every gets a level-playing field to become the “ONE” < No disadvantages, It then boils down to persistence, motivation, etc to become successful and then no one and I mean no one can say that “Ivy’s are the ONLY path of success”.
Replace: ivy’s with “Ivy’s + All good Universities”. I just wanted to craft an eye-catching title. To me, Meet the NEW uni’s didn’t seem that appealing!
And yes check these resources out, if you haven’t already:
What am I missing? Are there other NEW ivy’s out there that I may not know about?
btw, I consider people sharing their knowledge via blogs, technical forums, etc are important too. They add value in someone’s life. And that’s one of the reasons I blog too!
I remember, Once a professor in an US university pointed his students to watch a video lecture (to delve deeper) from NPTEL. Isn’t that awesome!? I came to know about this because one of my friend was part of that class.
I have researched on cloud for a while now and to me, it seems like a right time to study cloud in more detail. And what’s more – it’s University of Washington and so the faculty teaching courses are top-notch. And so I hope to learn from the veterans and awesome academicians via this certificate program.
YUVA is a NGO based in India and one of their campaign is to spread computer literacy among slum children’s. For this campaign they partnered with Microsoft and the name of the initiative was Yuva + Microsot student partners Digital literacy campaign. I was a part of this wonderful initiative and the few snapshots that you see were taken when we volunteers used to go and teach this wonderful bunch of intelligent students basic computer stuff.
Here are the photos from some of our sessions in Ahmedabad, India:
