Skip to main content

Thoughts on Education

I feel a bit down when getting informed that one of my mid-term test is below average. Honestly, I didn't master that course solidly. I know roughly how it works, but the lack of practice make the foundation very vulnerable.

I recall one of the courses I am currently taking online, a machine learning course taught by Stanford. Surprisely, I master that material much better than the school courses though the difficulty levels between these two courses are similar.Two very important aspects worth highlighting is the weekly online tutorial sets&programming exercises+ the active peer forum learning. I feel uncomfortable if I didn't finish the tutorials&programming exercises with 100% accuracy. This feeling never occurs in the university tutorial classes as I didn't get timely feedback on how well I am doing in the tutorials. But this feeling came very often when I was still in high school in China. Teachers will announce tutorials after each class and we'll have to finish them before the deadline and then get feedback in the next class. This feedback system works efficiently.  However, one problem with this feedback system is that it is highly dependent on the responsibility &efficiency of teachers and this system is not customized for every student.

Doing the supplemental exercises and getting timely feedback seem to be essential for mastering the course materials. I remember one of the seniors in the CS3216 pitch session told us about his experiment of gamifying the learning experience for his secondary students. It works extremely good. The news about Prof.Ben's JFDI Academy also makes me think further on how the web can positively change our ways of learning.  Feedback can come from peers, oneself, teachers, anyone else. The more efficient the feedback system is, the better the learning outcome it would get. For the traditional approach, the role of teachers will have a higher weight than self-feedback+peers feedback. However, I think a better model would be self>reliable resources>peers>teachers>others. The question here is how can we gather all the reliable resources for customization. It reminds me of Google/Quora/Wikipedia. However, these systems are still too generic. A secondary school student will hardly trust these systems if they can find direct help from peers/teachers. A more customized learning community is need to be created for customized groups of people

Education is important and it is a long-term project. I'll probably pick a education-related start-up company in Israel to work with. 路漫漫其修远兮

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

InnovFest 2015

I attended the innovFest 2015 event. It was quite eye opening. Besides the booth, some topics in the forums also interested me. The first topic I joined was the Kopi Chat with Yossi Vardi, a famous Israeli entrepreneur and investor. He is straightforward and humorous. When talking about the most important reason why people wake up with a great idea but ended up sleeping without executing anything, he collected answers from the audiences. One answer pretty much fitted his appetite-- "People fear about losing faces". He shared his opinion with the quotes from Theodore Roosevelt, “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually st

Consistency Matters

I didn't post anything last week, which means consistency has been broken. There's a need to reflect the task management skills, otherwise I'm very likely to driving the wrong road Priority changes. A good exercise would be to list the priorities down everyday and assign reasonable time to the tasks. Then never second-doubt. 100% focusing on the task when doing it. Priority changes from time to time.  Human minds are single-threaded, thus, we'll need to keep focused when doing one particular task. Be Grateful. I received the confirmation from NOC Israel that I got admitted by the programme and I'm heading to Israel next Jan:-) Thanks a lot for Prof.Ben and Karl's help. Ultimately, it might be a plan from God. Thanks every one. The additional interview from Google went well, however, I didn't get the winter intern opportunity this time. Though it's a bit too greedy to ask for too much, I still feel a bit sad after informed that I didn't get th

Super Fruitful Weeks

These two weeks are extremely fruitful. Almost all my expectations for coming to Beijing have been met in such a short time-- to form long term relationship with entrepreneurs here, to work with talented designers, to improve my coding skills, to experience the tech entrepreneur life, etc. I'm loving the city. Though not as clean and nice as Singapore, this is a place for young dreamers to pursue their careers. As a famous song writer wrote about Beijing, " 我在这里欢笑(I'm laughing here) 我在这里哭泣(crying here) 我在这里活着(living here) 也在这里死去(dying here) 我在这里祈祷 (praying here) 我在这里迷惘(confusing here) 我在这里寻找(seeking here)  在这里失去(losing here) ". The extreme inequality creates a lot of diversities and opportunities here in Beijing. The youth have a strong desire to be successful and they form active entrepreneurial communities in cafes, meetup groups, incubators,etc(mostly in and around Zhong Guan Cun). Here is a photo taken in Cheku Cafe which is a tech hub for young entrepreneurs