Two posts caught my eye this week. The first was Anil Dash’s The Blue Collar Coder, and the second was Greg Wilson’s Dark Matter, Public Health, and Scientific Computing. Anil wrote about high school students and Greg spoke about scientists, but ultimately they’re both about teaching computer skills to people without a formal background in computing. In other words, training.
In the hierarchy of academia, training is pretty firmly at the bottom. Education at least gets some lip service, being the primary mission of the university and all. But training is a base, vulgar activity. And it’s a real shame, because the problems that Anil and Greg are trying to address are important ones that need solving. Help will need to come from somewhere else.
Surfing Complexity 