RE: "Bill Gates: In Five Years The Best Education Will Come From The Web"

11. August 2010 19:07

I wanted to give an opinion to an article I read regarding what Bill Gates said about education and the impact technology will have on it.

You can find the article here http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/06/bill-gates-education/

It is a short article, but brings about what could be in the future for our kids. Here is a snippet of the article

“Five years from now on the web for free you’ll be able to find the best lectures in the world,” Gates said at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, CA today. “It will be better than any single university,” he continued. (Siegler)

I have two lovely children that are 2 1/2 and 4 months old. Last night my wife and I got on the topic of education in our nation.  Our public school system is pretty much a joke.  And before any of you involved in the public education system start criticizing me about it, mind you I have 3 members in my family and other friends involved in it. Our teachers get paid crap for the hours and BS they need to put up with.  I told my wife by the time our 2 1/2 year old gets to high school, I wonder if there will even be high school?  My guess is, there probably will be.  Reason for it, is that it provides a great way to be social and interact with people that are not like you.  It also provides social skills that a kid will need in the future, regardless of what career path they choose. Now for me personally, the education you get in high school is weak and doesn't really mean much.  If I had to do it again I think I would have taken more college classes my junior and senior year in high school, because high school education is nothing. Could I have just chosen to get a GED and take a college placement test? Probably, but then I would have missed out on the social aspect.

Now, you could say that Bill Gates is mentioning that in 5 years Univerisities will be less important.  If you see it like this, I can see this happening.  He mentions that people will be able to find lectures online from professors.  I have witnessed this first hand via a PlayOn Script for the software PlayOn.  I'm not sure if the script has been updated but I was able to watch lectures online from professers through out the U.S. These were anything from electricity to biology to mathematics. Even though I finished my college career 4 years ago I still found them interesting and beneficial.

Now imagine a kid who is self-motivated.  He/she will be able to learn anything they would want on the web through lectures, research and studies.  The web is a very powerful tool for someone who is self-motivated.  I myself have learned a lot from the web. Hence, why I try to provide whatever knowledge I have on this blog. 

Because of the web, I was able to build a 12ft x 12ft shed from scratch. I read about foundations, dimensions, material, types, tools needed, etc... In the end, my shed was built and it's standing strong. Keep in mind I had no previous knowledge of framing or any type of construction. The most I did before that was yard work.  In addition, I was able to build a built-in-bbq.  Again, I found images, schematics, ideas, other peers who had done it and blogged about it, etc... Again, In the end, I constructed a frame, applied stucco, laid tile and grouted it.  Now my built-in-bbq works and is good to go!

I bring up those tasks I accomplished because I believe Bill Gates is right. Somehow we need to acknowledge those people out there educating themselves online. Unfortunately, as of today, the only way to measure someones education is through a piece of paper and transcript provided by the college and high schools. 

Personally, what I would love to see is more technology in the K-12 area of schooling. I know this is a far fecthed idea. Imagine the teachers (who for the most part are excellent individuals and care about our children) being able to use technology to get ideas across to the kids. Imagine being able to have your classroom watch a lecture from some other teacher in a different high school. This would give the kids a different perspective on what their teacher is giving them.  Imagine an 8th grader watching a high school class for 2 days. This would give them the ability to prepare for what may be coming.  What about 7th or 8th graders participating in high school classes from their own Junior High/Middle school. The possibilites could be endless if thought about correctly.  With the end result being a better education for the child, but yet still learning those social skills that are needed. Maybe some of this is already going to today, but it would be great if it became a standard.

On the other hand, will the public education system just completely fail and the choice will be to send the majority of the children to charter schools or provide home school?

Then you can bring up the point about cost for charter schools and college. To Bill Gates point, you can educate yourself with a computer and about $50 a month (price today for a decent bandwidth connection). For those that can't afford a computer and $50 a month, they can go to the public library and use their internet and computer systems for free or a very low cost. 

It goes back to self-motivation. Why would a kid spend hundreds of dollars on a text book when he/she can find the same, if not better, information on the Internet. Why spend thousands and thousands of dollars on education when lectures are free online?

"He believes that no matter how you came about your knowledge, you should get credit for it. Whether it’s an MIT degree or if you got everything you know from lectures on the web, there needs to be a way to highlight that." (Siegler)

Lets think about the work place now. We would like to have our college degrees on our resume because it shows we went through the work. Will this matter though in 10-20 years? I don't think it will. Think about who is hiring employees today. Most likely people in their 40-60's.  Think about the technology they had back then when they were growing up. It was nothing compared to what we have today. I think it would be difficult for them to grasp the power of education from the Internet.  Maybe that's why they think having a college degree is so important.  Maybe they think that is the only true way somebody can get an education. 

I would also like to make a point that those people hiring individuals 10-20 years from now are most likely not going to be stupid enough to hire an individual who is not fit for the position (although it does happend from time to time) regardless of their education background. I believe those individuals hiring 10-20 years from now will understand a traditional college degree does not weigh as much as it does today.

What about those people getting a Masters? Maybe in the future, lectures will be pieced together from professors around the world providing their knowledge to those who either paid a subscription fee or maybe some professors provided them for free. The possibilities are endless with technology.

In the end I agree with Bill Gates about college needing to be less "placed-based" (Siegler). With technology, education is all around us and we need to figure out how to acknowledge those who have obtained an education not through a traditional college environment.

It will be interesting to see what the future holds regarding education. Since I love technology I hope to see it play a bigger part with education.

Thanks for getting through my disorganized thoughts! :) And yes, I'm sure this is not a perfectly written blog post, but I wanted to get my thoughts out there

Resources:

Siegler: MG Siegler, http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/06/bill-gates-education, Aug 6, 2010

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XDev Biz and Business Websites

14. July 2010 16:19

I just got done launching the product website for XDev Biz (demo and blog are to come shortly). As you can tell in the name, it was created by myself with the help of another colleague of mine for some other ideas. 

This is designed for small businesses and start-ups that need a professional solution to get an internet presence out there within a quick time frame.  XDev Biz allows a small business to not worry about having to pay an independent consultant, or worry about hiring an "IT" guy to get a site up and running at a low cost. 

Our pilot website is Painting Face to Face.  This only went up a few days ago (at the time of this writing), so the owner still needs to enter in some data.


XDev Biz differs, because we design the site for you and add on custom solutions only if you want/need them. Otherwise the base website should be able to provide a small business what they need.

There will be many more modules added to this product in the future so it should be exciting.

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My Laptop Configuration for .Net Development

22. May 2010 16:33

Well it's an early saturday morning and not much is going on in the house right now, except that I am monitoring the sprinkler system in the backyard right now.  Have to get it ready for the summer grass.

I had multiple questions this week about what I have installed on my laptop for developing. I thought I would post what I have installed so all of you can see what tools I use to develop, or try to use to develop :)  So here is the list:

UPDATED 10-11-2010


Windows 7 Ultimate - 64 bit
IIS (installed most features)
IIS Media Service 3.0
IIS URL Rewrite Module 2
IIS SEO Toolkit 1.0
SQL Server 2008 Standard
SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 1
Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate (full install except SQL Express)
Silverlight 3
Silverlight 4
Deep Zoom Composer
ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions 1.0
PHP 5
Expression Studio 3
Expression Blend 4 RC
Expression Studio 4
Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools
XNA Game Framework (via Windows Phone 7 Tools install)
Windows Media Center SDK 6
Firefox
Safari
FileZilla
Paint.NET
Beyond Compare
Foxit Reader
Virtual Clone Drive
WinRAR


As far as javascript libraries I use the CDN's so no need to keep them on my laptop.

Also, my choice of WYSIWYG editors is TinyMCE.

Another mention. I'm not a big fan of putting beta software on my laptop because I can't afford to keep uninstalling/installing the releases.  Also I don't want it to interfere with the work I do. I will put RC on as I feel necessary.

That's about it. This is what gets me through all my projects. Since I do 95% web development in one way or the other, I don't need much more than this installed.

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April Update

29. April 2010 18:59

Well there definitely has been a lack of posting on here by me.  I apologize for not putting any content on here recently.  I have been quite busy since the beginning of march.

Anyway, I thought I would let you know what I've been up too over the last, almost, couple months.


I was busy working with Run N Gun Sports on implementing Club Dynamix.  The reason this implementation took a bit longer was because Run N Gun Sports is more of a "League" website instead of a "Team" website.  So there were a few things we needed to figure out how to handle and if they were ok with how the Club Dynamix product worked. They provided excellent feedback on the product and improvements were made to it over the month.

Good news out of the Run N Gun Sports project was that Club Dynamix does pretty well at handling data for leagues!

Next, I decided to take on another project of something I knew nothing about.  This website is for Sports4Charities.Com.  Reason I didn't know anything about this is because it uses X-Cart for the website.  The owner of the website purchased it and needed help changing the look of it.  Problem for me is that this is designed using the Smarty Template system in PHP...yikes! I'm not a PHP developer!  In the end after taking the time to figure out how the template system worked and some basic PHP code all went well and we are in the final stages of getting the site live for him!

Note: Turned out the the template system in PHP is not much different that master pages and user controls in ASP.NET.

Third, I have been working on my idea and design for version 3 of Xtra Knowledge. This is an ASP.NET Knowledge Base software.  The first version I designed about 6-7 years ago and has been a personal project over the years, but now I am making it open source and this will be designed in the following:

ASP.NET 4
Entity Framework 4
SQL Server 2008 (nothing special though)
Silverlight 4
WCF 4

So far I have the DB designed, WCF service designed and the Entity Framework Model.  This will be a great learning experience and a good project in the end...well at least I hope so!

Fourth, I've been making additional improvements to Club Dynamix. I changed the architect design a bit for better maintenance and deployment. I also added a few more modules to it.  I added the ability to have a simple content management system and also the ability to change the images in the image rotator on your own and order them as well. 

Fifth, I have implemented TFS 2010 and upgraded to VS 2010. This took a bit of work to get my code organized how I wanted it.  I must say TFS 2010 was pretty easy to get setup. Then again, I didn't do it for an enterprise either.


Last, my wife and I had our 2nd child!. A little baby boy.  Needless to say, that takes up all of someone's extra time!!!

Oh and you can't forget Spring Training, start of the MLB season and also the NFL Draft. In my opinion the AZ Cardinals has just an OK draft...could have done better. Best pick was Daryl Washington out of TCU for LB.

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Comments On Here

23. April 2010 20:02

Ok so I finally implemented DISQUS Comments on here.  Unfortunately, I haven't gotten all of the comments imported into their system yet.  So I apologize to those who have commented on here and they are now not showing up.  I'll work this when I get some time. In meantime I think this comment system will be better that the one BlogEngine.Net provides.  Thanks to @jguadagno for the recommendation a while back!! I just now got to it!

I still need to clean up the theme as well as some of the comment links/info are inaccurate.  But hey...it's a start right. Plus the post information is what's most important on here :)

 

 

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My Random Thought

I think the OCW is a great thing to have available to those who are in school, just finished school or just want to educate themself

http://ocwconsortium.org/

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