Archive for the ‘learning’ Category

Class Content Resources

Thursday, July 1st, 2010

Here’s a list of websites that you can use to create content for classes here on Curious Reef.

Although there is a lot of content available for free and that can be redistributed non-commercially, make sure to review and respect the creator’s rights before creating a class on the material.  I have not reviewed all of the licenses for these sites.

  1. MIT OpenCourseWare
  2. Stanford Engineering Everywhere
  3. Open Yale Courses
  4. UCSD Podcasts
  5. List of freely available programming books
  6. Academic Earth
  7. VideoLectures.net
  8. Khan Academy
  9. YouTube EDU

Let me know if I’ve missed any sites that you think are link-worthy.

Of course, don’t think that classes have to be strictly based on content that is “academic worthy.”  Less formal classes are encouraged as well, such as Bash Scripting and Learning Vim from the Inside.

Khan Academy Presentation

Sunday, May 16th, 2010

I just stumbled on this post with a video from the Khan Academy founder.  It’s a great inside look on what drives him to put together his video lectures on over 1,000 academic subjects.

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2329-sal-khan-and-the-khan-acadamy-to-the-rescue

There are already several classes here on Curious Reef related to OpenCourseWare content.  Some classes focused on Khan’s lectures would be great too (they’re Creative Commons licensed).  If any of his subjects is interesting to you, feel free to create your own class on Curious Reef around the content.  It would be a great way to track progress and work with others.

How many people are learning Django right now?

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

It’s fun to see what other people are learning.  Google Trends is typically used to measure popularity of a topic, but I wanted to try something different.

Twitter is a good place for tracking what people are doing, so let’s see if we can get an idea of how many people are learning Django. I picked Django because that’s what Crunch Course is built with, so it happens to be on my mind a lot now. While we’re at it, we can compare it to Ruby on Rails to see how they stack up.

Below is a graph of how frequently people tweet about learning Ruby on Rails versus learning Django:

Web Framework Learning Tweets

The results show that Django and Rails are about equally popular among Twitterers, with about 5 tweets per day on each subject. It could be that the search was too restrictive by including the word “learning” in the search, but I also didn’t want to capture every tweet tangentially related to each framework. I just wanted to see who is actively learning it right now.

The searches are general matches for learning rails and learning django. If anyone put the words “learning” and “django” anywhere in their tweet it would count as a match.

I captured the data by storing those Twitter queries in my Clicky analytics account.  They did the hard part by polling Twitter every day and emailing me the results.  I just graphed the data.

Although there are quite a few relevant tweets in the results…

Learning Django Tweet

…there are also some tweets unrelated to web frameworks that are included in the tally:

Learning Django Tweet

I  didn’t make any attempt to clean up the data and remove the non-relevant tweets.  It’s just for fun and a way to get a rough data point about what frameworks are hot in Twitterland.

What learning topics would you like to see monitored on Twitter?