Tag Archives: school

College was my biggest mis­take:

$44,000 might as well have been a mil­lion dol­lars, because in my mind they were equally unfath­omable– with only $300 in my check­ing account, I had to make a deci­sion whether or not to bor­row $176,000. Makes sense.

I remem­ber fac­ing a sim­i­lar deci­sion at 18. I with­drew the $6,000 from my sav­ings account and wrote a $5,000 check to Whitman.

The other grand bought me a MacBook. On that MacBook I taught myself basic HTML, CSS, PHP, and even­tu­ally dis­cov­ered WordPress.

I wouldn’t say my time at col­lege was a mis­take. Too much good came out of it to say that. But, I do know what the more pro­duc­tive use of my time and money was.

Professors with­out bor­ders. Interesting overview of mass, dis­trib­uted, web-based teach­ing tools. Things like Coursera and Udacity are neat but they’re really just an alpha. They take the same model of edu­ca­tion as tra­di­tional col­leges and shift it online. The rev­o­lu­tion will come when some­one sets the goal of build­ing a web-native tool for learn­ing. Then it will get interesting.