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WordPress University Was Always Online

Did anybody listen to Peter Thiel? In 2011, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal, dubbed “contrarian investor” by the New York Times, created the Thiel Fellowship. A collection of 24 youngsters under the age of 20 were awarded $100,000 in exchange for dropping out of college to start tech companies.

Thiel said:

I believe you have a bubble whenever you have something that’s overvalued and intensely believed. In education, you have this clear price escalation without incredible improvement in the product. At the same time you have this incredible intensity of belief that this is what people have to do…It seems very similar in some ways to the housing bubble and the tech bubble.

Thiel had struck a raw cultural nerve. For years, as the world reeled and slowly recovered from a financial crisis, the quality of higher education was rapidly degrading while tuition costs were steadily increasing.

As more colleges make the switch to online only in the response to the pandemic, and the “college experience” becomes a relic of a bygone era, one wonders what the future of the university might look like.

Picture of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk sitting around a computer, founders of PayPal.
Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, founders of PayPal. Typical underachievers.

Does a college education still improve economic outcomes in any significant way?

For people interested in tech careers, the answer is probably no. A college education produces minimal, if any, value. In effect, the university model, with American student loan debt amounting to $1.6 trillion, seems to do more harm than good.

COVID-19 has taught the world many harsh lessons and forced us all to reckon with difficult conclusions. But it has also shown us the promise and potential we might have otherwise passed without comment.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the 2019 median salary for a web developer comes to $73,760 per year, or $35.46 per hour, with no former work experience in related occupations required. The bureau lists an associate’s degree as the typical entry-level education, which, at most colleges, amounts to 5-6 semesters—considerably smaller investment than a four year degree.

But with readily available—and free—online courses in WordPress, HTML, CSS, PHP, and JavaScript, and the ubiquity of certification programs and “boot camps,” even an associate’s degree seems like overkill. When anyone, from any background, can launch a $70,000 per year career with no more experience than a few free courses available through any public library, we have either entered an era of unparalleled prosperity—or The Twilight Zone.

Should any web developer decide to pick up full stack development skills, or expand into general software engineering, the median salary jumps up to six figures. And this is before we get to the new frontiers of big data and “the cloud.”

Instead of thinking in monotone sentiments like “learn to code,” let’s imagine a generation raised under the banner of learn how to learn.

“The computer was a tool,” says John Dorner, IT coordinator for a USDA grant program, and WordPress developer. Starting his career as a 4-H program leader and agricultural extension agent for the University of Georgia in the 1980s, Dorner discovered computing as a shortcut to efficiency.

It wasn’t so easy to learn computers in those days. Tasks any high-schooler would consider common today required deep knowledge of how hardware and software worked together. There were no hard drives. Dorner had to employ two floppy disks, one with the operating system and application and one with his data, in order to create a spreadsheet.

“Writing code without the Internet was…interesting,” Dorner recalls. Learning PHP and MySQL from a recliner, balancing a laptop on his lap, and a book on the arm of the chair, Dorner demonstrates that the will to learn can exist outside of the classroom.

During our conversation over Google Meet, we talked about the alternatives available to people young and old, and from virtually any socio-economic background, who are interested in pursuing careers in IT or development.

Before opting for an associate’s degree, there are shorter duration programs available. Boot camps and certification programs provide rigorous course work and leave their students with some experience and a portfolio—and no student debt.

Dorner says:

Most web agencies would hire people if [they’ve] got a certificate, a portfolio, or some way to prove [they] have the skills…That’s more important than a full degree. Now, if you want to work at IBM, they might require a Bachelor’s or Master’s Degree. And there is a lot you can learn in those [full degree] programs. But somebody coming out of [community college or a boot camp] can get a good job and something starting.

In addition to free courses online, Dorner suggests that WordPress can be a powerful accelerant to tackling bigger concepts in web development. The WordPress path to web mastery works in “layers.”

“WordPress is a good starting point,” Dorner says. “[You] can do a lot in WordPress without knowing any code.” Once one has achieved a level of comfort with the WordPress interface, he can start adding custom CSS rules. From there, he can try his hand at child themes. And before long, full themes and plugins.

“The more you hack, the more you learn.”

In addition to learning the WordPress interface, the learner is being exposed to deeper concepts like web servers, open source philosophy, and version control.

What is left for the universities to cover?

Everybody needs to have some general education, Dorner replies. Basic math, science, and some of the humanities help to round out a liberal education. Beyond the general education, there are life skills and experience that must happen oustide of the classroom.

Dorner not only works in IT, but creates jobs as well. During the hiring process, I asked, what’s the most important criteria an applicant must meet?

It’s very important to be a self-directed, lifelong learner. I hired someone [recently]…[She] had the minimum requirements, but she had the initiative to learn something new. She was self-taught, went out and learned the stuff, and was able to solve the problem. That was more important to me than [the credentials].

The pathways into the tech field are now baked into society itself. Every kid who learns how to Google for information is building a working knowledge of SEO. Every kid who touches an iPhone learns the fundamentals of UX. And so forth.

The question for the coming years is whether or not the university model will meet these kids on the journey to careers in tech with something unique to offer them, or if the kids can get there well enough on their own.

WordPress university was always online.

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Bringing Back Blogs in the Age of Social Media Censorship

You’ve probably never heard of Robert B. Strassler. That’s OK, you’re not alone.

Early in his career, Strassler worked in oil fields, but he always had an interest in the classics (the formal designation for the studies of ancient Greek and Roman civilizations). Eventually, Strassler’s hobby became an obsession. He went so far as to author his own translation of Thucydides, the Athenian historian of the Peloponnesian War.

The problem was nobody wanted to read Strassler’s book. This was in the 1990s. It was more difficult to publish to the web and there was no social media. Strassler approached every Ivy League institution he could find. Nobody was interested in reading a manuscript about Thucydides penned by an oilman with no formal credentials. That was the situation until Strassler contacted Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist professor in Fresno, California. Hanson agreed to look at the manuscript and was astounded by Strassler’s work: a brilliant, highly readable translation of Thucydides including maps, diagrams, and charts. Hanson helped the disconnected oilman get in touch with a literary agent. Strassler’s landmark edition became the standard translation of Thucydides. Still read today, The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War is as successful as any book on the classics can be—in the age of Twitter.

Those of us who take the idea of democratic publishing seriously rejoice at how the field has opened to include anyone who has something to say and is willing to write it down. That’s why we should be more alarmed when we see social media companies crowd the spaces once occupied by blogs and do-it-yourself content creators. We see a decline in diverse opinions as the web quickly becomes less free and more autocratic.

How many Robert B. Strasslers are being stifled today by biased algorithms and arbitrary “community guidelines”?

In March, as COVID-19 exploded into a worldwide panic, the web gatekeepers we’ve come to rely on quickly massed around a singular interpretation of events and stifled dissenting voices—even mild ones.

YouTube, the second largest search engine in the world, demonetized all videos that mentioned “COVID-19,” “Coronavirus,” or any term related to the pandemic, and herded viewers away from content creators and toward the Center for Disease Control (CDC) — the same CDC that first advised against wearing masks. Even medical practitioners who deviated slightly from the prevailing vision were removed from the platform after gaining millions of views.

Experienced journalists who questioned official decrees (surely, the role journalists are expected to perform) were targeted with hit pieces and character assassination by their own peers.

As author/professor Cal Newport noted in an op-ed for Wired, much of the dissenting viewpoints and on-the-ground data have become part of the mainstream conversation even after being suppressed by a small group of decision-makers:

We don’t necessarily want to trust engineers at one company to make the decisions about what topics the public should and should not be able to read about.

How many times have you clicked on a link in a tweet and received a message as shown in the following screenshot?

Image of Twitter's unsafe link warning.
Twitter unsafe link warning.

Adults should be trusted to determine what kind of content is harmful (if such a thing exists) without the assistance of Twitter employees and their “partners.” And, are these warnings actually meant to protect people or simply to shield Twitter from corporate liability? I think we can guess what the answer is.

It’s not only those without official-sounding credentials who are being barred from sharing content. Creators who clearly have experience in their fields of study are also facing arbitrary censorship.

The Great Courses Plus, a streaming service that produces college-level video courses taught by actual professors, was threatened with a ban from Google if they did not remove COVID-19-related content from their app. In an email to subscribers, the team wrote:

Google informed us they would ban The Great Courses apps if we continued to make [Covid-19] in-app content available. We are working with Google to ensure that they understand our content is factual, expert-led, and thoroughly vetted, so that we can remedy this misunderstanding as soon as possible.

The videos in question included content from Dr. Roy Benaroch, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at the Emory University School of Medicine; Dr. David Kung, Professor of Mathematics at St. Mary’s College of Maryland; and Dr. Kevin Ahern, Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at Oregon State University. How or why these scholars were found unworthy of Google’s imprimatur is a mystery. As the public does not presume to give Google programming advice, perhaps Google could return the favor by not pretending to be experts on epidemiology, immunology, and virology.

The only way to see these offending videos is on the Great Courses website, where Google’s authority is not absolute. It happens to be a WordPress-powered site. For intellectuals and laymen who value free expression, having your own website is becoming the only way to make sure you can keep it.

The problem of pitting credentials against experience in a zero-sum conflict is fixable, and WordPress is a big part of the solution.

WordPress allows capable scientists, economists, and medical professionals in other fields to write at length about their ideas without fear of being blocked by arbitrary restrictions. Also, the five-minute install (which does take a little more than five minutes for many people) imposes enough of a barrier to entry to discourage cranks.

We like to think of the internet as a true egalitarian system, where every voice is given equal consideration, but deep down we know that’s not exactly how it works. Network effects tend to form hubs of concentrated influence around a handful of websites. This isn’t always a bad thing. A recipe blog with poor taste and no pictures deserves fewer readers than a blog with great-tasting recipes and high-resolution images.

There is still room enough in the network for certain nodes to grow in size and influence based on the quality of their content. A node with enough backlinks, good organic search rankings, and high-quality content will gain an audience, and be able to keep it, without fear of corporate reprisals or aggressive algorithm updates.

If we really care about democratizing publishing, we won’t always like what we read. There will be disagreements, but democracy requires a literate population eager for debate. We can challenge, discuss, and learn.

There are a lot of Robert B. Strasslers out there in the network, waiting patiently to be heard.

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State of the Meetup Under Lockdown

By now we’re all getting weary of the phrase “new normal.” Much ink has been spilled over the question of what that new normal will look like after the pandemic has passed over us. There’s a stubborn streak in the American national character that admits of little change but, like an assiduous puppy, finds what works.

I’ve been attending the local WordPress Meetup since moving to Asheville, North Carolina, three years ago. Finding myself in a new city, getting out into the community and meeting people in the same industry seemed like a good opportunity to get connected. And it worked. I’ve lived in a handful of cities, and nothing has worked faster and better in getting me acclimated to a new locale. As I write now from a sort of exile, present circumstances make clear why the meetup matters.

The WordPress community is a naturally diverse one. But diversity itself is neither inherently good nor bad. Developers all over the world may commit to the same codebase, but that doesn’t mean they’re all together. Working among GitHub avatars and social media accounts alone, it’s easy to allow in-group preference to collect and fester and eventually spill out; as it did recently with a brouhaha about a certain baseball cap.

The WordPress meetup is an in-group breaker. People of wildly different backgrounds manage to come together around a common theme (sometimes literally a theme). We meet in person, face to face, catch up on old things, and learn all new things. Depending on who you sit next to, you might even hear a dirty joke. We get the all-important sense of being in what the ancient Greeks called the polis, the city-state. We’re all different, but Asheville is our city-state, and WordPress is why, twice a month, we get out of our homes and assemble. When we talk about democratizing publishing that means for everyone. This is why the meetup is important, and why it must go on even during a pandemic.

Group of people listening to a WordPress Meetup talk.

At the meetup, we’re not just learning about WordPress. We’re learning about each other. Business cards change hands. Smiles and handshakes lighten the air. Asheville is a beer town, so there’s often a brew before, sometimes during, and always after. This kind of fellowship is a critical ingredient to building a tight-knit group, yet it’s what we sacrifice first when the order to keep “social distance” comes down.

Social distance? I thought. How is it possible to even have a meetup under such frosty circumstances? But have a meetup we did—at least virtually.

As the order to distance and stay at home came down, I canceled my “Basics of SEO” presentation and pondered whether the meetup will simply have to wait until the virus clears. John Dorner, a local developer and arch-organizer, decided we must give the virtual thing a try. Who knows how long we’ll be barred from gathering?

These days we’re all familiar with Google Meet, Skype, and a host of other video conference tools. I’ve been working remotely for three years now, and regular video meetings are part of my weekly routine. It’s not that the video conference software isn’t perfectly adequate, but there is a lack of warmth about it. It’s perfunctory, a means to an end. But maybe I was wrong.

As the virtual meeting launches, we have the usual throat-clearing and the customary hiccups. Ambient noise. Broken microphones and webcams require certain attendees to post chat comments. But we finally get down to business. Dorner encourages all the new people to join the Slack channel, where members can post questions, get help, and continue the conversation after the meetup. We spin a digital wheel of fortune to decide who gets the free JetBrains license—our regular giveaway, which I’ve won twice now.

Soon, John presents his screen and shows us how we can better manage large clusters of media files in our WordPress sites. It all goes off without a hitch. I volunteer to give my talk at the next meeting.

Our Asheville area group has a long list of subscribers. Yet, we only see a fraction of that RSVP regularly. Often, people will RSVP but not be able to attend. More universal topics tend to bring out larger crowds. For some, making it out to a 6 PM meeting on a weeknight is a big ask.

The benefit of the virtual meetup is that it gives those with busier schedules and longer travel times a chance to attend a topic they’re interested in but may have otherwise skipped. We miss out on the fellowship, but we get the knowledge.

John Dorner performs card magic at the Asheville Meetup.
John Dorner performs impressive card magic.

As time and space allow, we can consider what the long term outlook might be. Right now, it’s just a series of if/then statements. We’re all waiting.

As the virtual meetup came to a close, it occurred to me that we could probably expand our boundaries a little bit. I can invite coworkers in Virginia Beach to check out our local meetup. I could invite family from Florida if they were interested. But then, would the Asheville WordPress Meetup lose its local flavor? Is that a bad thing?

Eventually, the pandemic will pass, as all pandemics do. The meetup may land on the hybrid model, having virtual meetings from time to time while keeping the live thing going. I hope we’ll find a happy mix. A meetup without the local flavor, and the camaraderie, would not be the same.

Even if handshakes are replaced with elbow bumps, and we learn to stop touching our faces and to sneeze into our shirts, we need a place to go where we can assemble to keep the polis lively. Change is inevitable, and there’s nothing new about “new normals,” but we don’t do ourselves any favors by canceling what we know works best. Our exile on our personal Elbas will end, and we must go back out into society not as frightened peasants but rather as Napoleons of the new normal—whatever that will be.