Quote of the day...

Quote of the day...  This one is from a New York Times article (I read them so that you don't have to :) about the things the must be done to make online education attractive as an alternative to traditional (and very expensive) universities.  The article focuses on credentialing, specifically on alternatives to the traditional college degree that's embodied in a diploma.  As my long-time readers (all four of you) will know, I'm not happy with the existing diploma system, as the possession of a diploma from an American university really tells you very little about what that person actually knows, or can do.  So this quote really caught my eye:

The standard diploma has roughly the same amount of information that prisoners of war are required to divulge under the Geneva Conventions. 

Ha!  Yes, that's absolutely true.  The fact that a candidate programmer has a degree from (say) Carnegie-Mellon University tells a prospective employer almost nothing at all about that candidate's suitability for the job.  Some of the alternative credentialing ideas mentioned in the article (Mozilla's Open Badges, in particular) are attempting to address that problem.  Traditional universities have a conflict with these alternative credentialing ideas, though – to the extent that they succeed, they will (a) provide less expensive alternatives to the university, and (b) expose the mediocrity of the education those expensive universities are delivering. 

Meanwhile, the best credentials I know of currently are open source project contributions...