Keep Learning

The woodcutter story

Once upon a time a very strong woodcutter asked for a job with a timber merchant, and he got it. The salary was really good and so were the work conditions. For that reason, the woodcutter was determined to do his best. His boss gave him an axe and showed him the area where he was supposed to work. The first day, the woodcutter brought 18 trees. “Congratulations,” the boss said. “Go on that way!” Very motivated by the boss’ words, the woodcutter tried harder the next day, but could bring 15 trees only. The third day he tried even harder, but could bring 10 trees only. Day after day he was bringing less and less trees.

“I must be losing my strength”, the woodcutter thought. He went to the boss and apologized, saying that he could not understand what was going on. “When was the last time you sharpened your axe?” the boss asked. “Sharpen? I had no time to sharpen my axe. I have been very busy trying to cut trees…”

Moral of the story : Working hard is not enough; one has to keep on sharpening one’s skills.

How I sharpen my axe

Nowadays one easy way to keep learning is thanks to the Internet resources gives to us. Two amazing initiatives are udacity and courserawhere you can enroll different university courses. Some of the courses I would like to enroll are :

HTML5 Game Development (cs255)

• Topic: This course will walk you through the major components of building GRITS, an HTML5 game. We'll talk about how to take standard game development techniques, and use them to create high performance HTML5 applications.

Model Thinking

• Workload: 4-8 hours/week
• Topic:We see political uprisings, market crashes, and a never ending array of social trends. How do we make sense of it? Models. Evidence shows that people who think with models consistently outperform those who don't. And, moreover people who think with lots of models outperform people who use only one. Why do models make us better thinkers

Organizational Analysis

• Topic:It is hard to imagine living in modern society without participating in or interacting with organizations. The ubiquity and variability of organizations means there is ample room for complexity and confusion in the organizational challenges we regularly face. Through this course, students will consider cases describing various organizational struggles: school systems and politicians attempting to implement education reforms; government administrators dealing with an international crisis; technology firms trying to create a company ethos that sustains worker commitment; and even two universities trying to gain international standing by performing a merger.

Writing in the Sciences

• Topic:This course teaches scientists to become more effective writers, using practical examples and exercises. Topics include: principles of good writing, tricks for writing faster and with less anxiety, the format of a scientific manuscript, and issues in publication and peer review.

Design: Creation of Artifacts in Society

• Workload: 5-10 hours/week
• Topic:This is a course aimed at making you a better designer. The course marries theory and practice, as both are valuable in improving design performance.

Computer Vision: From 3D Reconstruction to Visual Recognition

• Workload: 5-10 hours/week
• Topic:This course delivers a systematic overview of computer vision, emphasizing two key issues in modeling vision: space and meaning. We will study the fundamental theories and important algorithms of computer vision together, starting from the analysis of 2D images, and culminating in the holistic understanding of a 3D scene.

Artificial Intelligence Planning

• Workload: 3-4 hours/week
• Topic:The course aims to provide a basic grounding in artificial intelligence techniques for planning, with an overview of the wide spectrum of different problems and approaches, including their underlying theory and their applications.

Control of Mobile Robots

• Workload: 5-7 hours/week
• Topic:Learn about how to make mobile robots move in effective, safe, predictable, and collaborative ways using modern control theory.

Developing Innovative Ideas for New Companies

• Workload: 5-7 hours/week
• Topic:Explore how to identify and develop great ideas into great companies. Learn how to identify opportunities based on real customer needs. Develop solid business models. Create successful companies.

Health Informatics in the Cloud

• Workload: 5-7 hours/week
• Topic:A non-technical introduction to the contemporary application of computing to healthcare delivery, public health and community-based clinical research.

Natural Language Processing

• Workload:8-10 hours/week
• Topic:Have you ever wondered how to build a system that automatically translates between languages? Or a system that can understand natural language instructions from a human? This class will cover the fundamentals of mathematical and computational models of language, and the application of these models to key problems in natural language processing.

How to build an start up

• Topic:You'll learn the key steps of the Customer Development process: how to identify and engage the first customers for your product, and how to gather, evaluate and use their feedback to make your product, marketing and business model far stronger.

Software Debugging (cs259)

• Topic:At the end of this course you will have a solid understanding about systematic debugging, will know how to automate debugging and will have built several functional debugging tools in Python.

HTML - Web browser

• Topic:Take this class and learn how to build your own simple web browser complete with the ability to parse and understand HTML and JavaScript.

Machine learning

• Workload: 5-7 hours/week
• Topic:Take this class and learn how to build your own simple web browser complete with the ability to parse and understand HTML and JavaScript.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are plenty of courses you can join. There are courses made by university teachers and the only problem, for my, is that there are too much interesting courses and they are time consuming. Please, let me know if you find other interesting courses.