[TriLUG] OT: Education

[crimsun at fungus.sh.nu]

On Sun, Sep 25, 2005 at 08:20:55PM -0400, Jon Carnes wrote:
> A good basic education is a great advantage. The better and broader it
> is, the greater your foundation for launching your endeavors. Once you
> move beyond that base however and begin to specialize - class room
> learning can be too slow a pace. 

I concur that a _great_ basic education is essential. One cannot assume
his/her teachers are going to drive his/her success. Generally, those
people who excel in any number of given areas are motivated, excited by
"the unknown," and lead by example. It's fairly straightforward to pick
out these types.

One of the dangers of specializing, particularly in higher ed in the
USA, is that the route takes over one's life. Not many Ph.D. candidates
have the energy to pursue all the avenues that interest them - a pretty
good if not harsh illustration of opportunity costs. That isn't to say
that they _don't_, just that there are only so many hours in a wakeful
day.

> I once learned an entire semester of Thermodynamics in one long weekend
> spent in the library. Folks can learn rapidly when properly motivated.
> They don't have to cow-tow to the lowest common denominator. When
> something becomes "relevant" to them, they learn it faster and better.

As an educator, one of the most difficult things I've had to struggle
with is precisely how to approach individualized learning. As a student
I'm interested in pragmatic applications of the concepts I'm learning.
Only a few of my professors have seen that their students are drawn to
challenging problems and address those students' interests by laying
down crucial, creative resolution methodologies. To have students who
are excited by such problems seems rare these days, which speaks quite
critically of our educational system.

Although I teach a more conceptual course (programming languages), I
still judge my own progress as an lecturer by my students' interest in
their projects. I'm accountable to them since they'll have to apply
their knowledge once they're handed an industry project that expects
them to maintain someone else's code and to use their limited budget to
make something work better and faster. So this semester my students
need to extend some Java classes so their music player application can
read mp3s. If we have time, we'll hook in some C++ code (taglib) so
they can correct mistagged mp3s.

Yes, iPods are a force to be reckoned with.

Why take this approach? We like music. We like listening to music on
our laptops. Undergrads need something on their resumes that
demonstrates that they have at least rudimentary knowledge of writing
code. Everyone wins.

> In fact the prevalence of practical information contained in Open Source
> areas, make innovation much easier.

And this point is the crux of education.

Cheers,
-- 
Daniel T. Chen            crimsun at ubuntu.com
GPG key:   www.sh.nu/~crimsun/pubkey.gpg.asc
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