"The answer from CodeSchool was that they just assume students have the knowledge going into a course to tie up any loose ends and that it was intended that they'd have to do some research on their own. Yeah, no thanks."
I actually find that doing some research on your own encourages an active learning model, which really pays off in the form of better retention/understanding of the material.
It seems that the younger generation's culture of passively consuming large amounts of content has really hampered the ability for meaningful learning.
Well, to be fair – debugging is really, really frustrating when you don't know any programming and therefore have no idea how to even describe your problem in searchable terms, let alone solve it using stackoverflow anecdotes (if you know that stackoverflow exists). IMHO debugging techniques is worthy of separate course in itself.
I had a reply written out yesterday about what's generational decay vs. the evolution of learning (complete with everyone's second-favorite Einstein quote) but at the end of the day, how someone wants to learn is going to resonate with them more than how someone else thinks they should learn. We have a public school system that is dealing with the repercussions of teaching students the same way they did 20, 30, 40 years ago. We can't blame the kids when the results are all the same.
I'm not looking for a one-size-fits-all solution. Web development motivates the hell out of me but that passion alone doesn't help me get over pre-existing barriers and how my brain comprehends things. I assume once I have my first ah-ha! moment the pieces will start falling into place, but I'm just looking for a peg on the wall to grasp onto at this point.
I'm surprised this post got as many upvotes as it did because admittedly I feel out of place here in a sea full of people who are naturally inclined, incredibly determined and/or had some great teachers, so I wasn't sure if my problems would translate.
Learning this stuff isn't as essential to my job as it would be just incredibly useful to me personally, otherwise I wouldn't be so flexible in using these services and would probably be hitting the books instead of making multiple monthly payments. I know if I find a site that I can learn from that any of my friends can learn from it too. There are hundreds and thousands of those people out there who want to learn this stuff in a way that is easy to swallow, which will in turn spur the rate at which we see new services and tools. It's a cash cow if someone does it right, and I want to see them succeed and help them in the process.
Additionally, it also doesn't help me feel better about the quality of the research I'm doing when the top result for any web development question is still W3Schools.
If a service does it right, it is work. No one's asking for a free pass, they're just asking that the content is manageable for the audience they're trying to cater to.
A) If your message is "You're learning it the wrong way. You need to actively work to understand and do research on your own." then that is mildly rude and also not really very germane to the discussion. The whole point of the service is to do the best possible job guiding you through learning programming; having to fire up Google to complete its exercises is a failure mode. The parent is offering specific, valuable feedback as to where and how it fails.
B) But you didn't just say that. Instead, you signed it off with a baseless, bullshit line insulting the poster and half of the userbase, and that's all it is, an insult; unless you have some very interesting studies in your back pocket, you have absolutely no idea whether "passively consuming large amounts of content has really hampered [our] ability for meaningful learning." That is pure flamebait. Leave it in your keyboard.
Not to mention the younger generation's culture of.. cheap shot that always gets under my skin (though I'm not that young).
It's so ridiculous how people can appear insightful with some useless and completely untrue complaint about "young people today," "today's materialist society" or whatever.
Young people today do far far more self learning, actively pursuing stuff that interests them than any previous generation, in my opinion. They have much better tools. My younger brother (in his teens) has for several years been in a mode where he gets into little obsessions about learning this or that. Video special effects. Lock picking. Fishing. Whatever. A lot (maybe most) kids his age are like that. The topic can be whatever: diet, exercise, skin care, sex. Not necessarily the stuff that HN gets escited about but it is the stuff that interest them. I wouldn't surprised to learn that the mean skill level for application of make up has skyrocketed among teenage girls in the last ten years. Their starting point acquiring knowledge knowledge (who is the president of X?) is Youtube but that doesn't make it "passively consuming large amounts of content".
Want to test this? Try giving a group of 35-45 year olds and a group of teenagers photoshop lessons at work or school. Then give them a project. See how many of them are reading online tutorials and watching youtube videos to get things done vs how many are just using the prescribed material with the notion that they can't be expected to know anything outside of it.
This whole thread by the way is amazing. It's all about new ways that people are acquiring knowledge & skills. Full of anecdotes and opinions about what approach or tool for learning stuff is good or bad. What the problems are. Underlying it all is a sense that the best possible learning tools are incredible and coming soon.
Lets give credit where credit is due. Lets look at this as what it is: a discussion about how to make the awesome awesomer.
Thanks for calling the OP up on pure curmudgeonry.
I actually find that doing some research on your own encourages an active learning model, which really pays off in the form of better retention/understanding of the material.
It seems that the younger generation's culture of passively consuming large amounts of content has really hampered the ability for meaningful learning.