On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 11:21 AM, Eric Mugo <
kabugum@gmail.com> wrote:
> entrepreneurship and business skills....we have people with amazing skill
> but no clue at all on what business is...and by that i mean
>
> Topics:
> Business registration
> patenting ideas - where to go..requirements
> Selling ideas - e.g avoid queen bee
>
> etc
>
> On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 11:08 AM, Phares Kariuki <
pkariuki@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 10:52 AM, Ndungi Kyalo <
ndungi@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> This 'firm base of fundamentals' is ironically composed of elaborate
>>> examples drawn from the contemporary fields you have listed - or you would
>>> like them to be inferred from terse Mathematical formulae written in the
>>> alphabet of a strange tongue.
>>
>> Ideally, they should be based on what's on the market... Ideally... .
>>
>>>
>>>
>>>>
>>>> To use a more practical example, if you spent 3 months of your core
>>>> curriculum in University learning about how to code for the Symbian
>>>> platform, because it was the most widely used phone platform. Relevance,
>>>> right? No basic concepts... Said semester would have been rather useless,
>>>> given the movement to Microsoft last week...
>>>
>>> Wrong! You know very well that programming concepts borrowed from one
>>> platform can carry over seamlessly to another platform; A Symbian developer
>>> would fair better on WinMo than your average complete n00b.
>>
>> This proves my point, actually... If you think about it, you are talking
>> about a student who graduated from University, and is unable to Google to
>> figure out how to do a server installation... These are the same student's
>> who get confused because they 'learnt to code in VB' and they have no wizard
>> when they jump to PHP... The problem is that the student leaves campus
>> *unable* to transfer the thinking across to another platform and hence
>> thinks that the platform they learnt is the nirvana of platforms... Think
>> about it, we tell students to learn 'Oracle' to make money, while in actual
>> fact we should be preparing them for a career as a DBA, regardless of
>> profession. I had a chat a couple of weeks back with a student who wanted to
>> do Oracle "because it has money", but really did not know "what Oracle" he
>> wanted to do.
>>>
>>> Guys (the cs-theory purists that is), CS concepts do not exist in a
>>> vacuum. They were not conceived in a vacuum either. How then will we expect
>>> the current crop of scholars to come up with new concepts/ theory and ideas
>>> addressing contemporary problems if they are not exposed (in a raw way) to
>>> current technology ?
>>>
>>> Or do we suppose that all the solutions for cs problems already exist and
>>> they were described long before us and all we need is to read the books more
>>> carefully .. blah blah .. and so we shouldnt 're-invent the wheel' ?
>>>
>>> I would prefer that I was taught the technology first, then the theory,
>>> history etc later, to put all these things into perspective, otherwise the
>>> science could as well have been taught in a foreign language. In this
>>> regard, I have always held that CS students MUST go for their industrial
>>> attachments from as early as their first year. It even helps the young mind
>>> in self-discovery, which is more important than all these lofty concepts
>>> mentioned here.
>>>
>>
>> My problem with teaching the technology is that it changes. Give the
>> students a platform that they can build upon. e.g. A unit in embedded
>> systems will cover most new age devices, from the router to media
>> players... that's a good fundamental. Teaching someone about the iPod, may
>> not be as useful...
>> Think about it... Most 'market technologies' have certification paths
>> outside of University, Cisco, EMC, HP, Microsoft, Oracle etc etc. You can
>> get certified in. Without any pre-requisites. I'm yet to come across someone
>> teaching fundamentals of networking/programming in any of these training
>> centers. This is information you can get primarily in institutes of higher
>> learning, where the objective is to give you a firm and wide base, not to
>> get you certified in a particular product...
>>
>> --
>> With Regards,
>>
>> Phares Kariuki
>>
>> | T: +254 734 810 802 | E:
pkariuki@gmail.com | Twitter: kaboro | Skype:
>> kariukiphares | B:
http://www.kaboro.com/ |
>>
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