You are correct that CMU and Pitt are not on the same level, but you have your dirctionality flip. Pitt is in top 10 in research expenditures nationally[1], I don't think CMU is even in the top 50. Don't ignore the significance of a medical school. NSF has a 7 billion dollar budget, but NIH is 30 billion. Don't even get me started on endowments.
Pitt+CMU == complementary research institutions that have had a long tradition of collaborating (for example the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center) and BOTH provide strong intellectual anchors for the city. BOTH are significant.
+1 for digital humanities folks. Your emphasis on well written documentation is a strong argument for agate over more powerful, but more confusing, data processing libraries. I'm already thinking about using agate in my digital humanities workshops!
It should be noted that the IPython Notebook is being developed to support multiple backends. People are working on backends for Haskell[1], Scala [2], and Julia[3]. I'd love to see a Clojure backend.
All of this does not obviate the challenges of setting up IPython, but that could also be (somewhat)resolved via cloud services[4][5][6].
The IPython Notebook is part of the IPython interactive computing environment[1]. You must to install IPython locally(or in the cloud) and run the notebook web server to load and execute the notebook's code live in the browser. These are static HTML representations of the notebooks, think of them as previews, but you can download the JSON .ipynb file and load it up in your IPython Notebook environment and execute the code.
The benefit of the IPython Notebook is sharable JSON file and interactive REPL-like environment that blends code, results, and narrative prose.
I haven't started meaningfully playing with nbconvert yet, but I think one of the really promising features are the nbconvert templates[1]. From what I gather you can make custom templates with jinja and invoke them on the command line. It would be interesting to create a docbook, msword, specifically formatted pdf templates which would allow IPython Notebooks to flow into existing print publication workflows (if I recall O'Reilly uses docbook, yes?). I haven't been able to find documentation about the nbconvert templates so I'm dragging this out of memory from an email or a tweet I saw once upon a time.
One thing I'm hoping to figure out is a way to transform IPython Notebooks into PDFs that satisfy my university's dissertation formatting guidelines (one inch margins, 12pt times, etc).
Wow, you definitely have some great ideas here, and given the enthusiasm about ipynb, I would not be surprised to see these things happen in the next 6-12 months.
O'Reilly does use docbook internally as part of the toolchain, but asciidoc is coming into style as well. I've done most of my work in docbook with a docbook editor, but did some of my latest boook in asciidoc, which was much easier. Just use a standard text editor of choice (like Vim) and get right to it. Much easier for me, anyway.
One thing I'd really like to see is ipynb supporting asciidoc instead of or in addition to markdown. You can go to/from asciidoc and docbook in a lossless way, IIRC.
asciidoc support would require an ansciidoc renderer written in javascript, which does seem to exist[1](although I haven't used it). This also highlights some of the problems with markdown because it is an insufficiently rich language for generating semantically meaningful markup for use-cases beyond blogging. There has been some really interesting work on "scholarly markdown"[2][3], but given the social and technical complexities of markdown implementations and the community[4] seems like adding asciidoc is easier than fixing markdown.
What an awesome idea -- I can think of some sociologists/biologists who had to suffer through MS Word equation editor with excel charts who would love something like this. The internal hyperlinks would be awesome too.
For now, at least you can "decode" ipynb to LaTeX and use the %%latex magic.
I see this degree as a huge boon for folks in the technology sector who are already working, but want to pick up a masters degree (for professional development or promotion). This isn't a replacement for the face to face college experience, but individuals who are working full-time don't necessarily want/need that socialization.
This is cheap enough that I could easy see tech companies offering to subsidize this degree as a perk for their employees, assuming the employee gets accepted to the program.
There's quite a barrier to a student with an existing undergraduate degree wanting to expand into a masters in a different field, particularly technical fields like engineering or computer science.
mooc's like Georgia Tech's offer a middle-of-the-road option between a tradition masters w/ placement testing (or a whole second bachelor for some) and professionally 'doing without' any accredited education and relying solely on chops and applied experience. I think there is a clear hole in the educational market for these 'transitional' services, and online courses seem to fill it well.
The real questions (VikingCoder stated above) are:
to what degree does that $6600 certificate raise your earning potential?
AND
how effective, in contrast to traditional degrees or self-directed studies, are these online courses at educating people to professionally acceptable standards?
This one isn't much different from the perspective of someone wanting to expand to another field. You need a bachelor's in CS from an accredited 4-year program to enroll, or else you have to go through the usual placement-testing/remedial-course process if your degree is in a different field, as with the regular Georgia Tech CS Masters.
I don't see MOOCs as offering anything in particular that would make it easier to lift that kind of requiement. Large courses (whether in person or online) rely on incoming students coming from a standardized background, to allow the courses to assume a lot of things and minimize tailoring to individual students' varying needs. And MOOCs by their structure rely on instruction in (very) large courses.
The real change is price for degree, and price to attend. You will have to go through the same placement-testing or remedial coursework, yes, but will have only $6600 to pay for the masters on the other end, and are able to take the courses on your own schedule, in your own geography. Keep your day job and all that.
If you're already in a college town with an affordable & flexible CS program that you stand a chance of getting into, then this probably doesn't offer much. But then, how does it stack against the Georgia Tech name? MOOC or not, that's got to look nice at the top of the certificate.
I understand this isn't for everyone, but I think there is some new-to-market value in these programs.
"My experience has been that Community Colleges already do a lot of what he's suggesting"
That was my thought exactly. The CC system is quite good at educating people, yet, I feel like many folks pontificating about the "future of education" focus only on "Research 1," or more correctly, doctoral granting universities with very high research activity[1].
Pitt+CMU == complementary research institutions that have had a long tradition of collaborating (for example the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center) and BOTH provide strong intellectual anchors for the city. BOTH are significant.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Pittsburgh#Res...