Tag: education

Education for IT

For a while now I am thinking and re-thinking the misalignment of the computer science education system and the real world needs of IT industry.  And it’s not only me, and it’s not only in Cyprus.  I’ve seen it myself of course, but also heard it from many people around the world.  There are not enough candidates to hire, and the quality of the candidates even coming out of the top schools is very poor.  It’s not rare to see a candidate who has no idea what a loop is, yet holding not one, but two bachelor degrees from both UK and American universities.

While I understand that there are differences from school to school and university to university, and that Computer Science is an academic discipline, not a practical tutorial for the programmer wannabes, I still think that there is something wrong with how computers are taught today.  And there is more than one problem.  Here are just some of those that I could think of:

  • There should be a balance between theory and practice.  Computer Science graduates should have some practical value, not only theoretical.  They should be able to assemble and disassemble a computer, configure a simple network, and write a simple program, at a very least.  Without that all their theoretical baggage is useless.  Or so I think.
  • Technology in general and computers in particular have evolved a lot in the last few years.  And they continue to evolve.  Academia is too slow to react to the modern world and something has to be done about that.
  • Academia is too slow in adoption of the new teaching methods.  These days pretty much everyone has a computer and access to the Internet.  Anyone can use Google, Wikipedia, and other excellent tools.   But those excellent are only a the beginning of the integration with the official teaching process, even though some of them have been here for years.
  • The world itself is changing.  Younger generations differ from the older ones quite a bit, especially in their attention spans, the breadth of attention, and requirements for feedback.   They have a bigger need to see immediate effect than we had, and we needed that more than our parents needed.  The world is getting faster, snappier.  And I don’t see a reflection of that in academia.

So we with all those things I was thinking what can be done and how.   I don’t have a solution for any of these problems of course.  I don’t know what will work and what won’t.  But one thing that I was fascinated to see, for example, was this interview with Sridhar Vembu of Zoho.  These guys in India see the problem and even think that it’s magnified for them with an even faster rate of development and with lower access of the general public to the good education.  And it is absolutely amazing how they went about solving the problem, experimenting, and also the results that they have achieved!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zt5EMnATY_Q]

Via O’Reilly Radar.

On laptops in the classrooms

I came across an interesting opinion by David Cole regarding the use of Internet connected laptops in the classrooms, during lectures.

study found that laptop use was significantly and negatively related to class performance

While I was reading the article, I kept nodding my head a lot.  Yes, if I was back in college and I could have an Internet connected laptop on my desk, I’d be even worse of a student than I was.  YouTube, forums, emails, Twitter, and a whole lot of other attention grabbers would not leave much for plain old college education.  At least in my case.  I know.

But then, I started thinking if that was true for other people I know.  And I couldn’t be so sure anymore.  A few guys I know literally can’t stay for too much long wihtout a computer and some sort of Internet connection.  It’s like food or oxygen – they just have to have it.  And when they have access to a computer, it’s often amazing to see them use it.  Lots of interesting, topic related stuff coming up.  Fact checking.  Exploring the topic deeper and wider.  With quotes and all.

And that got me into this idea of a new generation.   Younger people, who grew up online.  Web is in their blood.  A desktop computer as an ugly concept, and an offline computer as a useless box.  This kind of people.  I don’t think they would be much distracted.  In fact, quite the opposite – I think their grades would go up with better Internet connection and laptop-friendlier environment.

And that’s where I started worrying a little bit about the studies that were mentioned in the article.  These studies may be very accurate now.  And they are performed by bigger universities and colleges.  The results of these studies will take a few years of propagating into smaller colleges and universities.  And that’s where the problem will arise.  By that time, most new students will of the web native generation, but their alma maters will be choosing to disconnect them and ban their laptops.  Even though it probably won’t be too relative by then.

But then again, isn’t it like this most of the time?  I think it is.

Legal and educational systems are lagging behind technology

I’ve mentioned this many times before and, I guess, I’ll need to mention this ever more – the technological progress of the recent years (the digital world, yes) has left many systems of our society behind.  Educational and legal are the most noticeable.   Here are a few words in the insightful and funny video (originally from the Ted.com – a place of many more insightful videos).  Here is a quote from a recent Boing Boing post showing the state of the legal system:

… pictures of Ford cars cannot be printed. Not just Ford logos, not just Mustang logos, the car -as a whole- is a Ford trademark and its image can’t be reproduced without permission.

Odnoklassniki.ru – Russian classmates, but abroad?

My last post about Odnoklassniki.ru became the most popular post on this blog. It’s by far more popular than all the tips, links, and tutorials that I’ve written here, combined. It comes up pretty high in related Google search results and brings quite a bit of traffic. It also brings in some comments.

Most of the comments are from people who mistakenly assume that this blog is some sort of support forum for all the troubles they have with Odnoklassniki.ru, or, even, that this site IS in itself Odnoklassniki.ru. I am trying to limit those comments, since they don’t belong here. On the other hand though, there are some really insightful comments.

For example, Gennadiy Zaretskiy has recently posted a comment with the link to this article. Here is what caught my attention:

Foreign users constitute a significant share of the project “Odnoklassniki” audience. According to Mr. Popkov, about 20% of the traffic comes from abroad.

Wow! “20% of the traffic comes from abroad“. That seems like a lot. Odnoklassniki.ru web site is in Russian. Only Russian-speaking folks can make use of it. Also, the whole topic of the classmates is tied very much into specifically Russian users. So, does that mean that about 20% of computer literate (at least to some deree), educated (at least to some degree) young (mostly) people either live, study, or work outside of Russia?

That. Seems. Like. A. Lot.

Photography education anyone?

Via Digg  I came across this nicely written piece called “Photography Students Are Being Taught — But What Are They Really Learning Today?“.  While I’m more of a lazy guy with a camera rather than anything of a photographer, I still can relate to what Mike Sheil writes:

 So there am I looking at work which looked very similar to what I was doing 40 years ago and being told that this is now the real cutting edge of creative photography. It certainly had that rather off-centered, badly composed and poorly lit look that my work had 40 years ago — wide-angle shots of people’s heads, girls with sullen/bored expressions, oddly focused shots and peculiar distressed colours. In all truth, I think my work owed its peculiarities to the fact I did not know what I was doing and anyhow had just started smoking pot, whereas the modern idiom seems to owe an awful lot to a desperate desire to be different — and hence ending up turning out the same mediocre rubbish as everyone else who is also trying to be different.

But what can we do about it?

Amateurs like myself learn most of what they know from numerous tutorials on the web and from looking at a lot of pictures.  And I mean a lot of pictures. (Thank you, Flickr.)  While this certainly helps, it doesn’t offer a base that formal education provides.  And if formal education is getting worse by the year, where is the hope?  Where can one go to learn the “real stuff”?