The interesting blog: Betabeat highlighted a wonderful cockup by Art.sy's main programming squeeze, Daniel Doubrovkine. In short, he began a thread on the NYC-rb mailing list and like any other Internetz shit storm, things got bad fast.
Feel free to look at the whole thread by visiting NYC-rb mailing list here. The replys seem to be under the heading "RoR class for developers @GA in January". Just search for the heading and an amass of articles should show themselves.
My thoughts on the whole kurfuffle is as follows. Developers learn by testing and trying thousands of different platforms. Some of us learn languages better by grabbing several books off the shelf, others excel much quicker in a classroom/team setting (I usually fall under the latter). This specific class is 2800$ which seems like a lot… until you look at some interesting aspects.
Engine Yard and Pivotal Labs, two well known and exceptional Ruby and Rails shops are backing the project. Does this mean that both will cherry pick a couple of hungry devs from the class? Perhaps. However, if you are looking for a reason to get into a classroom with a bunch of brilliant people who might offer you a job at the end, why balk at the opportunity? In addition, the classes are 4 hours a week across two days. Which is potentially comparable with time spent on a 4 credit College course
The software craftsmanship / apprentice pattern seems to be here to stay. College and higher education is a stagnant game and companies like Engine Yard, Pivotal, and LivingSocial seem to be looking to help out the community by alternative means. There will be bumps along the road, but I(my opinion) don't feel like this class is one of them.