Speaking at GigaOM’s Structure:Data conference Wednesday, Harvard Associate Professor Karim Lakhani said crowdsourcing the genomics project did several things. First and foremost it generated dozens of different approaches to tackling the same problem.

Before the TopCoder contest was created, researchers were considering two different paths of investigation. The contest revealed 89 differing approaches to the problem, 20 of which were extreme values — possibilities Harvard and its National Institutes of Health counterparts had never considered.

Second, the contest was able to create motivation to solve problems that you wouldn’t necessarily find in a group of researchers. An institution like Harvard may have brainpower in spades, Lakhani said, but throwing a bunch of geniuses at a problem doesn’t necessarily lead to result if they’re unmotivated to solve it.

“When you go into a self-selection model you don’t have to worry about motivation,” Lakhani said. There are monetary rewards for winning a TopCoder contest, of course, but taking home a prize is not guaranteed. Everyone has their own motivation for participating, whether it’s cash, experience, scoring reputation points or even the free T-shirts given to each participant. “Because there are large numbers of people participating, there’s a greater chance you’ll find the right skills and the right motivation,” Lakhani said.

Ultimately crowdsourcing your science isn’t a replacement for having smart people of your own, Lakhani said, but it certainly helps, something Harvard’s counterparts at NASA have discovered.

CHeck out the rest of our Structure Data 2013 coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below:

A transcription of the video follows on the next page

Go to page 2 (of 2) on GigaOM .

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On Monday, Codecademy launched a DIY program that lets anyone code their own holiday card in a drag and drop environment that also enables them to see the HTML and CSS behind them. To create the “CodeCards,” you select from a variety of backgrounds (like a snowy landscape or a row of Christmas stockings), objects (ornaments, snowmen, etc.) text options and effects (falling snow or music). For each component of the card, Codecademy provides the code, which you can then copy and paste (and manipulate if necessary) into the coding environment.

Once they’re created, you can share the cards with friends, as well as see the most popular cards and others recently created by users.

“We think project-based learning is super important and this is an awesome way for people to apply the skills they’ve learned with Codecademy, or elsewhere, and make something cool to share with their families and friends,” said Zach Sims, CEO and co-founder of the New York-based online learning startup.

On its site, users have long been able to choose from a range of courses that help students learn  the basics of coding languages, such as Python and Ruby, as well as how to build specific features and tools, such as a tip calculator or a recipe card.

But earlier this month, the startup launched Codecademy Projects – a new set of courses that help students build concrete applications, such as a CSS-styled button or a web form — to take things to a higher level, Sims said. The CodeCards launch is another example of the company’s larger focus on project-based learning. There are more online options than ever before for learning how to code — and, as we’ve written about previously, Codecademy has been masterful in encouraging a growing learn-to-code movement. But I think the company’s bigger emphasis on projects and kits (an approach also embraced by new rival LearnStreet) is a smart way to give people coding lessons around the things that they’re interested in and then, ideally, get them interested in some of the platform’s other classes.

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But journalism students show what she sees as a lack of desire to learn about JavaScript, HTML, CSS and other tools to help tell a story on a web page, rather than the front page, Mulligan wrote in the Nieman Journalism Lab blog. It’s probably never been easier for students of any age to actually learn to code — there’s free or near free online coursework from Codecademy, the MIT/Harvard EdX program or Coursera. But Mulligan’s recommendation is that J-schools need to integrate these coding courses — or at least teach students about how web pages deal with or render their stories — into the base journalism curriculum.

Mulligan wrote:

We need to innovate our curricula, really looking at what we are teaching our students. Learning, or mastering, specific software is not properly preparing our future journalists for successful, life-long careers. No one can learn digital storytelling in a semester. Mastering Dreamweaver and Flash isn’t very future-friendly, and having a single mid-level “Online Journalism” course offered as an elective does more harm than good. We should be teaching code in all of our journalism courses — each semester, each year, until graduation.

There is growing belief in many quarters that software programming is no longer just for programmers – New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has promised to learn how to code; 6-year olds in Estonia may soon do the same. And with more news flowing through the web rather than print, what Mulligan proposes here is not surprising at all.

It’s our job as educators to remove fear of learning, a fear notoriously prevalent in journalists. HTML is not magic. Writing code is not wizardry; it’s just hard work. Learning to program will not save journalism and probably won’t change the way we write our stories. It is, however, a heck of a lot more fun being a journalist on the web once “how computers read and understand our content” is understood.

What is somewhat surprising, in my view, is the reluctance she sees among young would-be journalists to learn these skills. From what I’ve seen over the past few years, many young reporters are impressively proficient in these skills. It’s the geezers (ahem) who have a hard time with coding. But here’s the thing: Even geezers can learn. And if they want to stay employed, they will do so.

Feature photo courtesy of Shutterstock user argus

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Some people are taking the idea a little further however.

Just look at Estonia, the tiny Eastern European nation (population 1.3 million), where a new project is being put in place with the ambition of getting every six year old to learn coding at school.

The “ProgeTiiger” scheme, according to reports, will begin pilots this year with the ambition of getting school kids of all ages to start coding. There’s no suggestion yet that the classes will be mandatory, but the organization behind the move the Tiger Leap Foundation, says it wants to produce more creative computer users.

“The first e-courses are meant for primary school teachers and they will take place at the educational portal http://www.koolielu.ee (Koolielu is Estonian for “school life”) that the Foundation maintains,” the group’s head of training, Ave Lauringson, told me. ”We expect about 30 teachers to take part in the first course. So we are just taking our first steps now, but we intend to expand the program significantly.”

The idea — which is being developed with funding from the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research — is that children in grades 1-4 will take coding classes as part of their normal curriculum. After that, they can join extracurricular “coding clubs”, explained Lauringson. The foundation itself was developed by current Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves and education minister Jaak Aaviksoo in the late 1990s, with the aim of bringing internet connections to all schools in the country.

Given those credentials, it’s clear that while Tiger Leap has no concrete agreement to expand the pilot into a mandatory system, it’s clearly a stepping stone to a larger national program.

If it seems ambitious, you must understand the context. Not only do many Western education systems fail to teach computer science to any meaningful degree — the paucity of teaching in Britain left Eric Schmidt “flabbergasted”, for example — but Estonia is already a hotbed of technical talent. There are dozens of big companies that use Estonian engineers and whole startups (Skype being the most famous example) whose products were built on the back of Estonian skills.

So how do you inculcate an entire nation like that? It’s partially possible because Estonia is a small country, but also because it’s made some decisions along the way to prioritize technical literacy.

Since gaining its independence from Soviet Union more than 20 years ago, its politicians and business leaders have followed a deliberate, direct path to try and build the country into a technologically-advanced nation.

These days most of Estonia’s government services are run online, most of its banking is done online, and there’s a significant corps of programmers who have built some really important companies. It’s working, and Tiger Leap’s idea is clearly to try and muscle that advantage along even further.

How do other countries replicate that?

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Not only does it feature some famous faces (Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Niklas Zennstrom, Chad Hurley and many more) but it also actually made me chuckle.

Basic premise: a panel of kids is hiring for CodeClub. And guess who turns up to the interview…

I could have done without Prince Andrew’s appearance (here’s why) but still.

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It’s fair to say that the site, which provides game-like online courses to teach people how to code, has had a blockbuster year so far. It’s spent 2012 seeing enormous growth, adding new marketplace features, and gaining a legion of fans, including New York mayor Michael Bloomberg.

But even though the site has seen a breathless rise to prominence, the money isn’t just being used to keep the servers spinning while demand grows: it’s got ambitions too.

Ahead of an on-stage interview with me at LeWeb London on Tuesday, co-founder Zach Sims told me that the new funds “give us the ability to go international” — something useful given that 50 percent of the company’s user base already comes from outside the U.S.

And in a post on the company’s blog, he explains his belief that the latest investors are well-placed to help it achieve that expansion.

“A few weeks after we launched Code Year, we met Neil Rimer and Saul Klein of Index Ventures.  Saul told us, about the world he wanted for his kids – one where code was a foreign language as important as Chinese and English for people to learn.  Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins visited our office around the same time and painted a picture of a few industries that needed to be shaken up – education chief among them.”

“It became clear that we needed partners who both understood the importance of a global company… and the process of scaling a company far beyond the nine people we have grown to now.”

It’s actually the first investment from Index’s new €350 million early stage fund, but still, it’s only eight months since the business announced its last round of funding, a $2.5 million round from investors including Union Square Ventures, Ron Conway’s SV Angel and Michael Arrington’s Crunchfund.

This time round Union Square is following up, with Index’s Saul Klein leading the round and KPCB’s Mary Meeker joining in too.

So what do they see in it?

Index’s Klein told me that he was excited by Codecademy for many reasons, but not least because “it’s not a content-needy educational publisher” but “a marketplace for students and teachers.”

He also pointed out that with a global depression, it made sense to back a company that gives people the chance to learn new skills and potentially find jobs that they wouldn’t have otherwise been able to access.

That seems a proposition that is not just popular with VCs but also a magnet for billionaire tycoons: not only did Bloomberg express his support for the site, but investors include Russian Yuri Milner (who adds to his previous investment) and Virgin founder Richard Branson.

Here’s my chat with Zach Simms at LeWeb:

Photograph of Codecademy founders Zach Sims and Ryan Bubinski used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Hack NY

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And he’s not the only one finding a new stream of income from Udemy. This morning, the San Fransciso-based startup released the salaries of the top 10 instructors on the 2-year-old platform. In total, the group earned $1.65 million in the last year, with all of them bringing in more than $50,000 on their own and the top individual making more than $200,000. All of the instructors’ top courses focus on Web development, programming and tech entrepreneurship – not a surprise given Udemy’s roots in those field and increasing interest in coding.

“We’ve just seen over the last couple of years, amazing success that teachers are starting to have teaching folks online,” said Dinesh Thirupuvanam, VP of marketing for Udemy. “We’re moving from an era where the best teachers were teaching just 50 people in a tiny classroom to where they can teach hundreds or thousands.” In the case of Salman Khan, of the online tutoring nonprofit Khan Academy, that number is in the millions, he added.

To meet the growing opportunity in online education, a handful of startups have rushed in, including 2tor, Lynda, Codecademy, Udacity and Pathwright. But Thirupuvanam said Udemy is unique in its model that allows anyone (not just instructors affiliated with educational institutions) to potentially earn money for teaching audiences across all kinds of categories (not just technical and vocational topics but the humanities and sciences as well). Thousands of instructors have joined the site to teach class for free or for between $20 and $250 a course, the company said. (For paid courses, Udemy takes a 30 percent cut.)

Udemy: Non-technical courses are gaining traction

Of those instructors, just a small percentage are earning money comparable to that of a full-time job and many of the top earners had already made names for themselves as industry experts and authors. But it does show the disruptive potential of an open platform for online education. Thirupuvanam said Udemy courses tend to attract students who would have otherwise spent money on a community class or “scrounged around” on YouTube or just read book. The benefit of the Udemy class is that students can take the classes on their own time and have the option to interact with the instructors online.

For now, Udemy’s top courses focus on technical training, but Thirupuvanam said the platform is seeing increased traction in lifestyle categories, such as yoga. He thinks those areas could grow to be as big as programming over time. In the past year, the company said it’s experienced 700 percent user growth, with instructors adding 7,000 lectures every month.

For the full list of Udemy’s top 1o instructors, take a look below:

• 1. Infinite Skills instructors: $565,320 in total course sales; 10,505 subscribers (top course: “Microsoft Excel for Beginners”)
• 2. Bess Ho: $218,935; 2,588 subscribers (top course: “Learn to Develop an iPhone or iPad App in 4 Weeks”)
• 3. Victor Bastos: $175,168; 2,157 subscribers (top course: “Become a Web Developer from Scratch”)
• 4. Mark Lassoff: $162,051; 4,033 subscribers (top course: “HTML and CSS for Beginners”)
• 5. Zed Shaw: $126,585; 3,305 subscribers (top course: “Learn Python the Hard Way”)
• 6. Miguel Hernandez: $96,508; 1,549 subscribers (top course: “How to Create an Awesome Demo Video for Your Business”)
• 7. Huw Collingbourne: $88,285; 1,307 subscribers (top course: “Ruby Programming for Beginners”)
• 8. Robin Nixon: $86,797; 1,814 subscribers (top course: “HTML5 Beginners Crash Course”)
• 9. Chris Converse: $81,258; 1,327 subscribers (top course: “Creating Responsive Web Design”)
• 10. Eric Ries: $53,573; 5,889 subscribers (top course: “The Lean Startup”)

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Allegra is responsible for JailbreakMe 3.0, a web-based jailbreak tool released in July and designed to be used on iPhones, iPad and iPod touches running iOS 4.3.3. Before that, he created Spirit, which was an untethered jailbreak for iOS devices running iOS 3.1.2 to 3.2, and he was also a Nintendo Wii homebrew software developer.

Allegra has been described by other iPhone hackers and Forbes as somewhat of a prodigy, and he’s been compared to some of the most advanced computer systems security experts in the world.

Apple probably thinks it’s better to have Allegra working with it rather than against it. In theory, his ability to quickly and easily locate exploits in iOS code will give Apple advance notice of problems before they arise, so that it can patch holes before software updates hit the public. In practice, it’s unlikely to stop the cat-and-mouse game of jailbreaking altogether, but kudos to Apple for trying a solution that doesn’t involve civil suits and generally draconian behavior.

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That’s where DevOps comes in. DevOps is a new set of methods to encourage better communication and collaboration between corporate software development teams and IT and system administrators.

In an on-stage conversation on day two of the Structure 2011 conference in San Francisco, two of the DevOps movement’s biggest supporters — Puppet Labs CEO Luke Kanies and Opscode CEO Jesse Robbins — talked about how companies can use DevOps to streamline their internal operations and ultimately get more things done.

“DevOps is a cultural movement,” Robbins told panel moderator James Urquhart, a senior cloud computing market strategist at Cisco. “I come from a background in operations where I felt like my job was saying no.”

Indeed, removing knee-jerk no’s at the IT level is a crucial part of what DevOps tries to do. “It is about moving IT from being the gatekeepers of getting things done to becoming enablers [of productivity],” Kanies said. He compared DevOps to Agile development, the set of methods meant to encourage more productive software development. “You can treat DevOps as the best way to bring the Agile mentality of the world… into operations.” Just like Agile helps developers write applications, he said, DevOps can help companies push those finished applications to market as quickly and smoothly as possible.

But DevOps still has a long way to go before its adopted on a wide scale. “We are in the early stages of what will be a decade-long business transformation,” Robbins said. “However, there’s no standards, there’s no school, and it will take a long time for that to emerge.”

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Some of the lies being perpetrated are coming from firms that look otherwise legit. Lots of offshore development companies are cashing in on the trend by providing low-cost alternatives to in-house or domestic U.S. solutions, and some of those are taking serious heat for what appear to be bald-faced lies.

One of the more high-profile apps involved in the scam is TapBots‘ popular iPhone unit conversion application, ConvertBot. ConvertBot’s design and intuitive interface have earned it praise from both the press and iPhone users, and it remains a popular app in its category. According to Ars Technica, TapBots partner Paul Haddad recently received a surprising inquiry from a client about his program:

This prospective client wasn’t looking to hire TapBots for any development work, they were looking for confirmation that a development firm out of India did the coding on ConvertBot, a popular TapBots application. The client had found Trucid, the supposed coders of ConvertBot, on the Rentacoder.com website, a virtual cork board where companies can hang their business cards. Trucid quoted a sum of $2,400 for an application similar to ConvertBot. The only problem? TapBots designs and writes all of its applications entirely in house.

At least the company in this case was smart enough to make some inquiries before going ahead and hiring the coding company making the false claims. Other people might not be so discerning and cautious.

Another developer, Sugar Cube, Inc. operating out of San Francisco, only discovered that others were taking credit for its work when prospective clients noted that they’d already seen the screenshots included in Sugar Cube’s pitch materials in packages from other development firms. Apparently, Sugar Cube had been trying to secure referral relationships with some other firms, and in so doing had sent around a sampler package. Some of these companies were then redistributing the materials as their own.

It’s a disturbing trend, but one to be expected with something like the App Store, which many see as an opportunity to cash in quickly and easily. As the industry matures, expect to see this sort of thing become less and less common, but until then, check and double-check any claims that seem to good to be true.

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