…puts to use some the skills that provided by…
…becomes clear that is class is more fluffy offered…

what the hell kind of skills are those, surely not English or grammar. You learn that at CMC? You need a job, we have some sweeping up and so forth.
Get real, friggin youtube for a class? The money would be better spent smoking crack. In my day they were called Pitzoids for a good reason and it looks like it still holds true. Try a couple real classes that require you to actualy work and use your gray matter in the process. But hey, it’s your parents money, spend it any way you like. Next time I stop by McDonalds could you super-size my order for me!
Worked hard in school, worked hard at work, retired last year at age 41!
HMC ‘87

yes. exactly. i went to a middle school and high school in which the very idea of studying anything that happened post-1960 was ridiculous. that attitude of historical/academic elitism was ignorant, first of all, and ineffective at preparing me to confront the important issues of the contemporary world.

my first undergraduate class, in contrast, covered a variety of european films from the last forty years or so, and turned out to be both useful and interesting.

it’s absurd to think that academic study should not examine a prominent contemporary phenomenon like youtube. this class may need some fine-tuning, but is sorely needed in our increasingly technological world.

and so on.

I am not rich. I do not smoke weed. Drugs can be bought at POMONA. I am not taking the youtube class because I agree it is silly. BUT…I am getting an AMAZING education with great professors at Pitzer. (A school where last year 18 students received Fulbright’s and has been recently publicized on NPR for our new GOLD Leed certified environmental dorms). I am a double major in Neuroscience and Spanish. I do not take my education lightly, I am not an underachiever. Every school has a stereotype….but it saddens me that people take them so seriously. Pitzer, my school, is a liberal school where both students and professors can put new innovative ideas into action easily and where no opinion is not heard, what other college student can say that?

Oh and PS: a CMC student was stabbed a couple days ago….maybe you should write about why they carry knives to parties.

Must say I lost some respect for you on this one. Claremont McKenna isn’t the pinicle of the liberal arts world either, so I think it is kinda silly to put down an whole college over one silly class. I know this is not the first silly class to exist.

I think this quote pretty much sums it up
“If practical programming (a la the Stanford class) is so obviously more useful than commentary on the culture of technology (a la the class you’re smearing–and your own blog), I should be reading more CodeProject and less TechCrunch. Time to rearrange my RSS reader. Buh bye.”

I will probably take you much less seriously now as I know you are just looking to masterbate your ego at all costs, as you are tearing on a class that is only teaching something that you do every day of your life, e.g. “In addition to new companies, we will profile existing companies that are making an impact (commercial and/or cultural) on the new web space.” (That is from your about page). I hope you feel good about this one.

Mike is a petty man, who is having flash-backs of his college days doing keg stands at Wohlford, getting turned down by Scrippsies, and talking shit all day about Pitzer screaming Puck Fomona.

Yes, Pitzer is hardly an academically rigorous college, ok its closer to a high school than a college, but that doesn’t mean that a youtube class where you watch clips all day is that outrageous. Hell at the very least they’re generating page views and that means ad dollars . . ie. creating value.

The only thing I can get from such a comment is that modern culture and politics is seen by you as being not worth analysis, which from a site that focuses on tech culture seems pretty sad.

College was a waste of time for you? You should have picked a better school or saved yourself the tuition. I feel I learned almost nothing useful in high school (except how to take the SAT - talk about worthless), but college was a totally different story. Maybe it’s because I’m in engineering. I’ll grant that the humanities kids don’t do a whole lot

See ya! (though I doubt you’ll actually rearrange your RSS reader)

“Behind the populist rhetoric lies the mailed fist of vested interest.” - me

Here’s a summary of your post:

1. Point out that there’s a class about YouTube.
2. Quote a student saying YouTube is worth studying.
3. Provide an ad homenim attack on the intellectual standing of school providing the class (I suppose to discredit the student without actually addressing the substance of his comment?).
4. Point out that Stanford (a school you apparently respect) has a class about creating Facebook applications, true, but it’s useful because it’s focused on programming rather than cultural analysis.

Heh. The most amusingly bad thing about your post is that you’re actually re-creating the format of the class you’re supposedly critiquing. You post a link to a YouTube video, provide minimal commentary, and invite your readers to comment. You could, in fact, be a student at that very class, reading this blog post aloud and thus completing your assignment. At which time the other students in the class would probably roll their eyes at your poorly constructed arguments.

If practical programming (a la the Stanford class) is so obviously more useful than commentary on the culture of technology (a la the class you’re smearing–and your own blog), I should be reading more CodeProject and less TechCrunch. Time to rearrange my RSS reader. Buh bye.

Come on, Juhasz has dedicated her academic career to the role of video in social change. Take a minute to think about what her ambitions for the course are and about the role that consumer generated content has played in changing the dynamics of marketing and political participation in the past few years. Is that not worthy of academic analysis?

The decision to read the syllabus out loud accompanied by an illegible still shot of the document? Bad choice. But beyond that, done well, the course could be great.

By the way, I went to Hampshire College for my undergraduate degree, where the cracks are inevitably about taking ultimate frisbee for credit, so perhaps I’m a little more sensitive than others about snide comments about the education received at a small liberal (emphasis on liberal) arts college. No one ever seems to question the quality of the courses I took in pursuit of my Master degree from Harvard, but I probably got more out of those silly classes I took at Hampshire — hands down.

The real value of college almost always comes down to the *connections* with other like-minded people you make, and the networks you become part of. The education is incidental, and actually is easily provided in alternate contexts - like as part of work itself. Come to think of it, the power of silicon valley is the power of those human networks, and the power of on-the-job learning.

What of this YouTube class? If it were substituted with a Quantum Physics class, it is not like the kids are going to get a lot more out of it either! This is not to say that there don’t exist kids that would be interested in Quantum Physics or being exposed to it is not helpful. My point is that *most* - the vast majority in fact - wouldn’t get much out of even a well-taught Quantum Physics class in college. Might as well have some Feynman lectures on YouTube, and point the kids to it, and whoever is really interested, can come talk to the professor.

If you accept that college is mostly a waste of time (I am practicing my belief here in AdventNet - we actually have dropped college as a requirement for employment!) then the only thing I would find wrong with that YouTube class is that it is so damn expensive!

Sridhar

And, I’ve learned quite a lot by watching TouTube videos in the “Documentary” and “Educational” sections, thank you very much. At the very least, it provides interesting new perspectives on what we are all-too-ready to call “the truth”.