education

200 universities just launched 560 free online courses

200 universities just launched 560 free online courses – this is a somewhat dated blog post – from a few months back, but I’m pretty sure the number of universities and courses is only increases with time.

If you haven’t heard, universities around the world offering their courses online for free (or at-least partially free). These courses are collectively called as MOOCS or Massive Open Online Courses.

In the past six years or so, close to 800 universities have created more than 8,000 of these MOOCs. And I’ve been keeping track of these MOOCs the entire time over at Class Central, ever since they rose to prominence.

Periodic Table of Software Engineering

I came across this Periodic Table of Software Engineering, and I think it’s an excellent visualization. For those working their way to become software engineers, it provides a nice map of skills, topics, and knowledge areas to cover. For the rest, it clearly explains why software is so much more complex than anybody thinks.

What is the hardest part about learning to program?

Quora runs an interesting question – “What is the hardest part about learning to program?“. As always, there are plenty of insightful answers with suggestions, tips, shared stories, research and statistical data, and more.

For me personally, this answer in particular was useful, as I’m very well familiar with the phenomena, but never knew there was a name for it – Dunning–Kruger effect.

Science for fun – fun science topics and experiments

Science4fun is a website that helps make science more fun for kids.

Welcome to Science4Fun. It is the place for kids to learn science in a fun way. It has a wide variety of interesting science topics that are full of articles, and easy to do science experiments. All the content of the website is written in simple English with a lot of pictures to help you understand the concept easily.

With kids being a lot more video-oriented these days, I think this site is more helpful for parents, rather than the kids themselves. But it’s a good effort, with a good selection of topics and experiments. If you are looking for a way to have fun with kids while making it useful too, give it a try.

Why So Many Top Hackers Hail from Russia

Brian Krebs has an interesting post on “Why so many top hackers hail from Russia“:

Conventional wisdom says one reason so many hackers seem to hail from Russia and parts of the former Soviet Union is that these countries have traditionally placed a much greater emphasis than educational institutions in the West on teaching information technology in middle and high schools, and yet they lack a Silicon Valley-like pipeline to help talented IT experts channel their skills into high-paying jobs. This post explores the first part of that assumption by examining a breadth of open-source data.

Overall, not very surprising, but the details and references are interesting. It seems a lot has changed since I graduated (back in 1995).

Via Slashdot, which also has some insightful comments.