I've been watching the SICP videos this weekend with the goal of making it all the way through this time (I tried watching them about a year and a half ago after taking my first programming MOOC).
What struck me this time was how much the emphasis is on practical software engineering rather than Lisp. That's what Ableson is so intensely passionate about in the video, not the theory. And so picking up the book and looking at the parallel text, I reread it in a whole new light. It was like rereading Eco's Name of the Rose after 25 years and not as the piece of pop fiction I thought it was the first time.
Which brings me to my point that video is just another communication channel. It conveys particular information efficiently and other information less efficiently. Text is no different. Without the video I would never have picked up that SICP and Code Complete have many similarities in subject matter and one just starts with a clean slate and the other in the messy middle.
Video does not need to be fancy to be effective. See Jeffery Ullman's Finite Automata on Coursera. It's PowerPoint and a small talking head and a red pen: And it's better than reading the book he wrote with Who because though dense, it's an order of magnitude less dense than the text.
On the other hand, University of Phoenix operated its online courses with NNTP and was reasonably interactive though asynchronous. It's a matter of curriculum development I suppose. Dan Grossman at University of Washington compares developing a MOOC to writing a textbook and that probably captures the domain of possibilities.
What struck me this time was how much the emphasis is on practical software engineering rather than Lisp. That's what Ableson is so intensely passionate about in the video, not the theory. And so picking up the book and looking at the parallel text, I reread it in a whole new light. It was like rereading Eco's Name of the Rose after 25 years and not as the piece of pop fiction I thought it was the first time.
Which brings me to my point that video is just another communication channel. It conveys particular information efficiently and other information less efficiently. Text is no different. Without the video I would never have picked up that SICP and Code Complete have many similarities in subject matter and one just starts with a clean slate and the other in the messy middle.
Video does not need to be fancy to be effective. See Jeffery Ullman's Finite Automata on Coursera. It's PowerPoint and a small talking head and a red pen: And it's better than reading the book he wrote with Who because though dense, it's an order of magnitude less dense than the text.
On the other hand, University of Phoenix operated its online courses with NNTP and was reasonably interactive though asynchronous. It's a matter of curriculum development I suppose. Dan Grossman at University of Washington compares developing a MOOC to writing a textbook and that probably captures the domain of possibilities.