CS101 at udacity.com

Just signed up for Building a Search Engine. It's a 7-week course offered by one of the two Stanford professors who taught last year's AI course. That was a free course and a wildly successful experiment in Open Source Education.

One of them, Sebastian Thrun has since left Stanford to start Udacity. An online, open source university. I mean folks, this is gold on a platter. There are two instructors: Thrun, a Google Fellow, and David Evans, CS prof at University of Virginia and an MIT grad.

I've never used this term before, but two things are happening now to urge me to do it. The NEXT BIG THING. This idea and Raspberry-Pi. Two major efforts to educate those who want to be educated about computers. Doing the job our schools and universities are not. Sure, you can get a CS degree just about anywhere, but how about the youngsters coming down the pike? They show up in my community college classes knowing absolutely nothing about how computers work. Where will they get the spark that might set them on fire to learn, to experiment, to chase, to fiddle, to solve--to create, invent?

I'm not talking about students who pick CS as a major because it's where the jobs might be most available. I'm talking about the students who will dive into the field with passion, wonder, curiosity, and creativity. Those folks don't go after jobs; they go after knowledge and skill simply because they want to.

New Web Site

Starting the New Year with a New web site. I've moved all the contents of what was my personal directory hanging off clairdunn.com to borderlinegeek.com. I cannot believe that I got this domain at this late date! My jaw is still dropping.

Anyway, it's got all the old stuff, plus new stuff as it comes along. Today I added a page for the Raspberry-Pi -- can't wait to get my hands on one. That is one page you need to check out!

From Another World

I have moved. Sold house and land and moved.

Slowly settling in and curiosity, which I thought dead these last 8 months or so is starting to stir. A stumbled-upon word that seemed to be not in context; the word was "processing". I tracked the awkwardness, out-of-context-seeming use and found a new (to me) language call Processing. Two books from amazon.com and five days later, some fruit from the tree I thought dead.

VT2000 Adventures in Processing

I now have four books and my toe(s) is/are in the digital waters. We'll see. But I was excited enough to make the page.