This site is in transition while I migrate my PHP and Ruby courses over from CCSF and CSM. Though the California Community Colleges are sinking (ever so slowly and painfully), I do have time to move my courses and ensure that they will be available to anyone who’s interested in getting into Web programming.
Courses
My introductory PHP and Ruby courses will be available June 1, 2012. Eventually my Python and HTML5 courses will make it over. My college courses run for 18-weeks, but I will be rewriting my WiseBison courses to be self-paced, modular, month-long classes.
Besides putting my the courses here, I’ll have my blog, code tips, PDFs, free stuff, and reviews. If you’re interested in updates while I’m getting set up, sign on to the RSS feed.
Keep hacking…
After 12 years at CCSF, my courses are in danger of being cut as the on-going budget crisis eats away at the curriculum. To keep my courses in play, I’m migrating them to WiseBison.
I really like teaching at CCSF. I’ve met a lot of great people along the way. I’ll miss the camaraderie I feel with my students as we work our way through learning cool new things. I think I always learn as much each semester as my students do.
I started teaching my teaching career with a Saturday Perl course. The regular teacher was on sabbatical and none of the full-time instructors wanted to work weekends, so they gave the class to me. I was a former student at CCSF, and I’d done a little Perl programming for a DotCom start up. I was really nervous about standing in front a class full of smart people, but, after a few weeks, I got the hang of it. Teaching felt natural to me and I settled into the course.
When the regular came back from sabbatical, she didn’t want the course and talked the chair of the department into turning the course over to me. Over the next couple of semesters enrollment grew and I was turning away students. What I didn’t realize was that a course with a large enrollment can be a curse. When it gets too big, it gets split into several sections and goes up for bid. Two full-timers took the new sections, and I was out of a job. I felt burned. I had never been laid off a job before.
My mentor (the Perl teacher), tipped me off that I should develop another course, one that none of the full-timers would want to teach. I had just finished working on a PHP contract, so I proposed the PHP course and the department accepted it. It was 2002 and no one in the department had ever heard of PHP. The course went on to be a big hit. After running the course a few semesters, the enrollment numbers went through the roof. We were turning students away.
You might guess what happened. One of the senior instructors was looking for another course to teach, and he proposed that we create an online section for the PHP course. I would teach the face-to-face course. I began to feel like I was going to get bumped again. I was a frog on a lily pad, and I needed another lily pad for the day when I had to jump again.
I started creating more new courses. The first was a five-day Rails course. It was a surprising flop. The course was too early — no one had ever heard of Rails, or Ruby, for that matter. So, I created a Ruby course, and it was a flop. Only a handful of students showed up for the first session of the course. So, I created an advanced PHP course. Another flop. I was learning the facts of academic life: there’s a big audience for beginning courses, but not for advanced courses.
Looking for more lily pads to land on, I moved the Ruby course online — and enrollment tripled. I started teaching the online Ruby course at the College of San Mateo, where it thrived. On a roll, I created Python and HTML5/CSS3 online courses, both of them successes.
But the time has come, once again, to jump. CSM cancelled the Ruby course, and at CCSF we’re told that deeper cuts, on top of last years cuts, are coming in 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015. There’s even talk of CCSF going into receivership. The handwriting is on the wall. This time I’m going to jump out of the community college system, to this site, WiseBison.
Keep hacking…
Welcome to WiseBison.com. This web site will be the home of my CCSF and CSM Ruby, Python, and HTML5 courses. The courses will cover the content of in my college classes, with the same reading, coding assignments, and quizzes. The courses will all be self-administered and self-paced. I will eventually create some short-term instructor-led (by me) courses around these topics. The first courses will become available June 1, 2012.
This will also be my blog, replacing my HackingtheValley.com blog. Check back now and then to see what’s going on, or sign up for the RSS feed to stay up to date.
Keep hacking…
When I’m not hacking on Javascript and PHP at Yourversion.com, I teach PHP and Ruby courses at CCSF and CSM. And next summer I’ll have a Python course at CSM (edited: jan 15, 2012 — and it was a great course). Up to now, these courses have been F2F—face to face. But now there’s trouble in River City.
Enrollment for F2F courses has been on the decline since the DotCom Bubble ruptured. Now consider this fact: enrollment jumps 50 to 100% when we put a course online. This means that we’re gonna put lots of courses on line—as many as courses as we can, as fast as we can.
Not everyone is happy with this. There are some teachers who despise online courses. The Luddites are yelling, The sky is falling! Online courses can’t be monitored. Online courese are an invitation to cheating! Robots will take our jobs!
The Luddites are probably right: the sky is falling. And the robots are coming. It’s inevitable that many teachers will be replaced by software that will be indistinguishable from a human teacher, online, at least. A friend who works at Adultfriendfinder.com tells me they already have bots that can convince eager young fellows that they’re talking to a really hot and willing girl. It wouldn’t take much more to create a bot that does a pretty good impression of an online Computer Science teacher.
Then again, it won’t matter, really. After all, the glaciers are going to be passing over this neighborhood in 50,000 years or so. As far as I know, there are no schools—or people—under 2,000 feet of ice. I know this to be true, because I read it online, on the Discovery Channel web site.
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