Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

1.9.12 | Welcome back. Despite my best efforts to unplug completely during the holiday break, a lot of technology-related items caught my eye (and I’m happily typing this post on my shiny new MacBook Air).

A story on coding was particularly noteworthy. In only 48 hours, a new startup called Codecademy signed up an incredible 97,000 people for its Code Year, a free class designed to teach those of us new to computer science how to code via programming lessons sent each week to our inboxes. As Sarah Kessler points out at Mashable, that’s “more than twice as many students as were enrolled in the 150 U.S. computer science undergraduate programs that the Computer Research Association surveyed last year.” And that number has since almost tripled with 273,129 signups as of today, according to the site.

Wow.

Educators and technologists have long been saying that coding is the new literacy of the digital age. Douglas Rushkoff, who has a new book on the subject, “Program or be Programmed,”  said in the book’s trailer, “When human beings acquired language, we didn’t just learn to listen. We learned how to speak. When human beings acquired text, we learned not just how to read but how to write. And now that we have acquired computer, we should learn not just how to use computers but how to program them.” (Read more about Rushkoff and digital literacy.)

Over the past couple of years, we’ve written about a number of incredible efforts to teach kids to code. Scratch, a tool launched in 2007, provides an early introduction for kids creating their own interactive stories, games, animations, or music, while Hackasaurus and classes like this one offered by FabLab San Diego engage kids in more complex programming lessons.

“Our message is that the web is Lego, something we can all shape around us,” says Mark Surman, executive director of the Mozilla Foundation, a partner on the Hackasaurus project that introduces kids to HTML tags—the most basic components of website programming —  hoping to spark interest in technology creation and turn kids from media consumers into creators and developers.

“With a very tiny amount of programming skills, you can change it.”

Kids are interested. But still, 97,000 in people in two days! There is obviously an incredible demand from mid-career adults, too. Maybe they also realize that Rushkoff and Surman are right.

Codecademy bills itself as “the easiest way to learn how to code.” Lessons start with JavaScript basics, and you can access them online for free here. Code Year lessons start today, but it’s not too late to add your name to the class list.

Users can also earn badges for completed lessons and can share these badges on social networks. (Learn more about badges at the Digital Media and Learning Competition, or read Heather Chaplin’s story.) Codecademy also keeps track of your total score and your lessons completed.

“If you want to invest two years in something that will help you, you would do better to learn how to hack than get an MBA,” Paul Graham, founder at Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley startup incubator where Codecademy was created, says on the Code Year website. While many MBA’s out there might argue with him, perhaps 2012 is the year we prove him right. 

My first lesson arrives in my inbox today, and I can’t wait to get started.