Its as simple as teach the students how to fish. Practically, 90% of what I do is either googled or assistance from colleagues. This does not mean that the University degree I acquired is useless. On the contrary, it laid the cornerstones such that I now know where to get info when I need it. Otherwise I would be stuck to sayings like, "This teacher did not teach us arrays". Lecturers are not meant to teach you how to make a ship, they should just tell you a ship floats and from there, build on the concept and move further to create a ship that floats as well as one that glides in air.

/Bonz

On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 10:52 AM, Ndungi Kyalo <ndungi@gmail.com> wrote:


Bwana Phares,

Majibu yangu inline :

A Computer Science degree is supposed to prepare you for whichever field you choose to dive into... If you choose support, it should be able to assist, if you choose to specialize in networks, you should be able to have a firm base. Should you choose to go into mobile apps, it should assit, because if you really think about it, the fundamentals are largely the same.... 


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.
 
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.

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.

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