Convincing Colleges to Upgrade Their Classes? 115
Pray_4_Mojo asks: "I'm an engineering student at the University of Pittsburgh, and I'm currently taking a required class known as 'Computer Interfacing'. While I enjoy the instructor, I find most of the material to be severely dated. We will spend the majority of the class covering RS232/XMODEM/Token Ring means of computer-to-computer communication. Almost no mention of USB, Firewire, or IRDa is made within the class. I am trying to convince my professor that this material is relevant, as these types of interfaces will be dominate in the world we future grads will be working in. As an example, I demonstrated that the keycard access system to gain access to the Interfacing Lab has a USB port for data download/firmware programming. The professor seems interested, but it seems that I need to convince the department to revise the course requirements. Has anyone attempted to modernize their CS/Engineering program and met with success?"
The concepts you will learn are the same... (Score:5, Insightful)
In the specific case of serial interfaces, there really isn't all that much different between RS-232, RS-485, and USB or Firewire. They are all serial interfaces that employ the same fundamental concepts. In the real world you'll have to apply that knowledge to any number of serial interfaces.
The same logic can be applied to a discussion yesterday about using MS or open source programming environments in a CS department.
Re:The concepts you will learn are the same... (Score:2, Insightful)
You see this in other fields as well (e.g. psychology, business etc.) As long as you're getting the concepts, it doesn't matter what the mechanics of the course are based on.
You'll learn the real-world applications of those concepts quickly enough in the real world.
Fundamentally the same stuff (Score:3, Insightful)
Eventually, USB and FireWire may be what is taught in that class, provided they stand the test of time like *MODEM and RS232 have.
I'm not fresh on TR.... (Score:2, Insightful)
This is why CS curriculums include not widely used in industry languages such as LISP; just because they do things radically different.
More than fundamentals (Score:2, Insightful)
A school teaching the 'fundamentals' using newer technology, like php,
Re:The concepts you will learn are the same... (Score:5, Insightful)
You are told to forget the technology which was used to convey the concepts, but the concepts are where the value is.
Here's an example.
If you want to learn how to fly a 747 you don't start out on one! You spend many years and tens of thousands of dollars learning on the concepts on smaller aircraft. Granted, knowing the gauge layout of a Cessna has zero relevance to a 747 but the concept of watching your fuel levels applies equally well in either case.
So yes, when you get to 747 school they will say "forget all that other airplane stuff" but they're not really telling you to forget the concepts, just the nitty-gritty details that you don't need any more.
Compres vous?
Re:The concepts you will learn are the same... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The new technologies are bad to learn from (Score:3, Insightful)
Crank the speed up slowly, give the student a chance to listen to the differences and the good students will be able to differentiate between connection speeds by listening to the modem connect. Good students should be able to follow the traffic up through at least a 2400bps connection - after that it is a little difficult to follow individual byte traffic and all blurs together.
Crank it up some more and you can move 5000 bytes of information a second through the same channels - but you have lost the ability to relate to what is happening.
Crank it up to USB and 1394 interfaces and sure you are moving 1Meg/second or more
Bingo - the University isn't looking to put out six week wonders that can slap together objects from the MFC and VisStudio.NET, they want to put out engineers, scientists that can look at the binary dump of an executable and see where the code makes an unexpected jump to the end of the code listing (generally slop space of nulls) after the literal table and starts executing code that was not put there by the original compiler (I am discussing the way virus code overlays regular code in regular executables, of course.)
L/Nimon - I'm not disagreeing with you, this just looked like a good place to state my opinion.
Re:The concepts you will learn are the same... (Score:2, Insightful)
Now, token passing is a valid idea. For networks it may not be used currently, but for systems that cannot withstand collisions of any sort token passing is a valid algorithm.
My point is that just because you cannot find a way to apply a concept does not mean that there isn't necessarily a reason to not teach it. Sometimes its much easier to teach from a lot of older hardware and such because it can be simpler, or less integrated.
Consider if you were to try and write an OS now, it would be overwhelming because of all the details that need to be supported to make it equivalent to what there is now. Many years ago protected memory, virtual memory, gui, and many other things were not even thought up yet.
Re:The concepts you will learn are the same... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The concepts you will learn are the same... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not sure where you went to school, but I've never studied or taught anywhere that spent ANY money on designing the curriculum. And testing it? Forget it!
Most professors are left to their own devices to cover what they like in class as long as they hit a few basic points. For instance, compare the syllabi of the same Macroeconomics course as taught by a Keynesian and a Monetarist who studied under Milton Friedman. They will look like completely different courses!
The first course that I ever taught was a core undergraduate Microeconomics course. When I asked the chairman of the department what I should cover, he told me that I should take a look at the last semester's syllabus for ideas, but could really cover anything I wanted.
Boy does this sound familiar (Score:3, Insightful)
After putting intense pressure on this same professor, he did spend a couple of days at the end of the class talking about USB, but it was uselessly superficial. It would have been far more beneficial for us to have done some USB programming in lab, or something.
It is hard for schools to keep up with all of the modern hardware and software and protcols, as the industry moves to fast. But why should they keep right on the bleeding edge? While RS232 may be old, learning about RS232 teaches you the PRINCIPLES of communication, thus better equipping you to learn new interfaces. The same goes for XMODEM. USB and FireWire are pretty fucking complex protocols to jump right into when you haven't covered any time of communication standard before. But I think that considering how ubiquitous USB is becoming, it should absolutely be included in the curriculum.
On the other hand, there's no excuse for teaching TokenRing. For the love of god, spend that time teaching ethernet.
Teaching would be a great job (Score:3, Insightful)
I teach two undergraduate courses. I know what it's like to have students complaining about the content of a course, and I have two comments about this topic.
Firstly, changing what is taught in a course is very very very very hard work, and a course that has been restructured or had its content changed is very very very likely to have problems with said new content. It is simply not practical to keep updating a course to deal with new technology. Once a course is stable, it is far better to leave it that way. Also, the staff teaching that course must spend time doing research and likely supervising postgrad students. They must do this to keep their job and to maintain the reputation of the university.
Secondly, universities are not vocational training institutes. University teaches the basic theory and concepts behind the technology, and teaches students how to learn these concepts. The student should then be able to apply these theories and concepts in an employment situation.
If you want to learn how to use new technology solely to apply those skills to a job, go to polytech or do a training course. Don't sit around whining to the course instructor, because frankly he probably knows a hell of a lot more about how to run a course than you do.
Re:Teaching would be a great job (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I'm not fresh on TR.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Fibre Channel.
Well, it's not a literal descendent of Token Ring (is it?). But it's certainly a loop topology. And frequently, the primary cost of deploying a Fibre Channel SAN is in training Ethernet-centric people to administer it properly. (Indeed, the nascent iSCSI market is driven less by a distaste for expensive FC switches than by an aversion to sending one's admins to FC boot camp for six weeks.)
Incidentally... why a loop? Isn't the concept outdated? Not if you're a storage transport that needs to enforce fairness.
--
Dum de dum.
747? A poor example. (Score:1, Insightful)
If you want to learn how to fly a 747, I'm betting there are about a zillion more things that you have to do before even getting to taxi to the runway, as compared to a cessna.
On the other hand, if you want to learn how to program by learning C#.NET, all you need is notepad and a compiler. In other words, the existence of advanced stuff won't get in the way of the basics, and in the meantime, you're learning modern syntax and modern thought patterns.
Not only that, but remember that learning the syntax is vital to becoming proficient -- and employable. You are much less likely to be asked to "forget" Java/C++/C# than, for example, lisp or cobol.
- a.c.
Re:Teaching would be a great job (Score:3, Insightful)
As nearly everyone else has said... it's the concepts that matter. Whether it's at 128kbits or 1mbit, a serial communication interface with a tx line and an rx line will always have the same basic concepts.
Re:Teaching would be a great job (Score:2, Insightful)
Not to be too flip, but this issue is a minor one. The important issue is how to deal with student feedback
Reading your post, I think you missed my second point, which was:
universities are not vocational training institutes
it's also important to expose students to the most modern practices and tools in their field.
No, it is not. It is important to teach students how to learn these things.
This can mean the difference between them getting jobs, or being left in the dark
I can't speak for employers, because I am not one. But, the employers who come to graduate recruitment emphasise that they want thinking individuals who can learn new things, not people who already have all the knowledge. It seems that most employers who pick up graduates straight from university will train them in the areas they need to know.
I understand that basic theory must be taught, and using tried-and-tested material is the easiest approach
For a university, teaching the theory is more important than teaching the practice. Using tried and tested material isn't just the easiest approach, it is the best approach. Students don't like it when you use them to debug courses. I know this from experience.
It is so much work and so time consuming to rework a course, that by the time the course is reworked the technology the instructor is trying to incorporate is no longer cutting edge. Other problems include a lack of familiarity with the material on the part of other people in the teaching team. Also, as I stated before, the instructor will have to give up most or all of their research work to do so, which will impact the reputation of the instructor and school, and thence of the students who graduate.
Finally, a point that I should have included in my original post - there are only a certain number of weeks in the teaching semester. If you want to cover the basics as well as the bleeding edge stuff, then the depth and quality of the material taught is going to suffer. Students (in my experience, based on the feedback I have gotten from students) prefer depth of material over breadth of material.
suggest that you ponder whether you are doing what's best for your students, or what's easiest for you.
What is best for students is to give them the learning skills they need to pick up cutting-edge technology, for them to have an instructor and institution with good reputations, and for them to be taught a course that is stable and problem-free. Frequent upgrading of courses will jepordise all of these things.
Finally, I do spend a lot of time and effort eliciting feedback from the students, and in considering what they have to say. However, not everyone's suggestions are going to be acted on. One student in one presentation of a course isn't going to affect a change in that course, it's as simple as that.
RS232 Is EVERYWHERE (Score:4, Insightful)
Math (Score:4, Insightful)
counting -- a technology that is certainly tens of thousands of years old
arithmetic -- a technology that is many thosands of years old and was fully developed 5000 years ago
algebra of one variable -- a technology that is a thousand years old
geometry of 2 dimension -- a technology that is over 2000 years old.
And if you are really good at highschool you learn
calculus of one variable -- a technology that is over 300 years old
By college the undergraduates make it up to about the civil war.
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There is a difference between education and vocational training. Education teaches you how to evaluate information and how to learn new information. Vocational training teaches you specific information for a specific field. There goal is to teach concepts not technologies.
What you are learning are very simple hardware / software interfaces. Why use complex interfaces of modern hardware that confuse the issues on an academic course? Leave that for vocational schools.
Re:Fake Assembly (Score:3, Insightful)
Computer Science is not job training. If you want job training, take a CISCO or Microsoft certification class.
A good computer science program will teach you very little that is "practical"; it is expected that you can pick up C++, Java, or x86 assembly language on your own when you are done. If you can't, or if you don't want to, you are enrolled in the wrong field of study.
Re:College is not about getting a job (Score:1, Insightful)
In the commercial world, you're often given a project timeline and framework handed down from your managers, and a product from sales that could only exist in the imagination of somebody living on mars. And forget about learning from your mistakes. Your mistakes become the bedrock of the product!