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I wouldn't want academia to focus on business. That's more technical than academical. If I see a CS (computer "science") course teaching the latest front end JS

by sebcat 8y ago

I wouldn't want academia to focus on business. That's more technical than academical. If I see a CS (computer "science") course teaching the latest front end JS tech, I would be disappointed.

xiamx 8y ago
Precisely! I'd rather want to see the materials being presented with both theoretical and applied motivations.
- geophile 8y ago
  Right, so I have a mix of theoretical background and practice, including both toy examples, and not case studies, but brief discussions of real situations from experience. Now my question is how to combine prepared notes (the HTML lectures), live sessions, and perhaps other techniques in class.
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    Examples aplenty of companies that have serious problems because they did not understand the impact of their early decisions due to insufficient cs knowledge. Those are great cases to review, and then to work backwards to the root cause and to discuss possible fixes. That's both CS and practical knowledge in a way that it sticks, the best school I've found to be other people's mistakes.
  - neffy 8y ago
    Do you just give lectures, or can you also do laboratories? I've found having one session a week dedicated to practical exercises - using pre-prepared virtual machines where appropriate has been a very good teaching method - and popular with the students who can see themselves achieving the tasks.
  - bostik 8y ago
    For something beyond mere toy examples, I would look into online language-specific playgrounds. Those allow you to run code directly from browser - and if you include basic instrumentation (timing, step counters, item/memory use counters, ...) then it becomes really easy to show how a simple change makes things either better or worse. To keep things language agnostic, you can cherrypick a different language for different purposes. That way you get to ensure that the lessons are not tied a particular language and the concepts have to apply universally.[1] For an interesting twist, maybe pick some historical examples too, to show how things have evolved in languages over time. Then, when the basic concept of the lesson is [hopefully] understood, expand to a short case study to show why the dry theory matters in practice. For example, there's an old DoS attack against DNS servers, where a 56k modem could take down a root server due to unbounded O(n^2) worst-case complexity in the hash table implementations.[0] 0: https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/sec03/tech/full_papers/crosby/crosby_html/index.html https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin... 1: For extra points, you can pick examples where a particular language has chosen an implementation with amusing problems.
  - oldcynic 8y ago
    You've also surely got loads of anecdotes on how not to do it and tales from the coalface from your years in industry. I'm sure you can sprinkle some of those into the classes to give a little light relief if the students are really finding things too dry. You don't have to go as far as recreating TheDailyWTF. Perhaps use some to provide worked examples of designing yourself into blind alleys and how to get out again, or just to provide awareness of a few real world issues that might come up with whatever topic is the day's lecture.
BrandoElFollito 8y ago
Most people will go to industry after graduation, though. When I hire I prefer to Herve someone with some practical knowledge rather than the capacity to build a compiler. So having the "let's build something" experience is useful in the real world afterwards.
- hk__2 8y ago
  > So having the "let's build something" experience is useful in the real world afterwards. It is, but it’s not the job of academia to teach it. You have side-projects, internships, and your whole life to learn practice.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    Where did this whole thought process of it’s not the job of college to help you become employable?
    - pjmorris 8y ago
      It's also worth asking 'Where did this whole thought process of "it is the job of college to help you become employable" come from?' There are long-established, deeply-entrenched advocates for both viewpoints, but the 'it is the job' viewpoint is the new one. It's worth understanding the debate.
      - scarface74 8y ago
        When students go to college and either thier parents spend between $40K and 120K for a four year degree or a student takes out a loan, what do you think thier expectations are? If I have a choice between a hiring a junior developer who has a computer science degree and only knows theory and a junior whose only experience is a boot camp where they learned practical skills. I’m going to hire the boot camp graduate first. Yes I have a “computer science” degree in the early 90s from an unknown state school, didn’t learn anything and the only reason I was employable was due to my prior knowledge from years programming in AppleSoft Basic and assembly language and I fell in love with C and stayed on the comp.lang.c newsgroups.
geezerjay 8y ago
> I wouldn't want academia to focus on business. I don't believe that OP's comment counts as focusing on business. To me, it's an effective way to engage students with a real-world use of the tech they are about to learn, thus establishing a baseline to gain perspective of how the academical part matters. Otherwise you risk concentrating the course on a perspective taken from the top of the proverbial ivory tower that leads students to just go through the course without taking anything out of it.
scarface74 8y ago
What exactly do you do with a computer science degree that doesn’t make you hireable?
- Koshkin 8y ago
  Same as what you do with the degree, say, in physics. You become a software engineer.
uluyol 8y ago
Maybe what the OP was getting at is that before a topic is presented, it needs to be contextualized. For a single presentation, you do this by presenting some motivation and the surrounding space before diving in. For courses, the best I've seen is to present the structure at the beginning, and continuously revisit that as the semester progresses. What's the purpose of the course? To build to a solution to X or understand problem space Y. Most of the courses I have had have followed this structure, and whether I enjoyed the topic or not, it was engaging enough. Unfortunately, I've had a few courses by people who clearly didn't care and started the class by telling me why they are smart and I should follow them, then reading off slides prepared by the book author or whomever, without understanding the purpose or direction of the course themselves.
- sitkack 8y ago
  > it needs to be contextualized Contextualization can and should occur not just by need, as in where are we going with this, but also * Where did this come from * How hard was it to get there * When was it discovered * How was it discovered * When was it accepted Often times areas of Mathematics or Physics are presented in way that is completely disjoint from their history, that these n-pages of results actually took 50+ years are more to discover and argue over. That careers diverged and were ended over who was on what side. Too many concepts are communicated as a series of steps, do A, do B, do C ... but you have no idea that you are actually baking a cake. If it isn't a surprise, tell the other party the destination.

by sebcat 8y ago

I wouldn't want academia to focus on business. That's more technical than academical. If I see a CS (computer "science") course teaching the latest front end JS tech, I would be disappointed.

xiamx 8y ago

Precisely! I'd rather want to see the materials being presented with both theoretical and applied motivations.

geophile 8y ago
Right, so I have a mix of theoretical background and practice, including both toy examples, and not case studies, but brief discussions of real situations from experience. Now my question is how to combine prepared notes (the HTML lectures), live sessions, and perhaps other techniques in class.
- jacquesm 8y ago
  Examples aplenty of companies that have serious problems because they did not understand the impact of their early decisions due to insufficient cs knowledge. Those are great cases to review, and then to work backwards to the root cause and to discuss possible fixes. That's both CS and practical knowledge in a way that it sticks, the best school I've found to be other people's mistakes.
- neffy 8y ago
  Do you just give lectures, or can you also do laboratories? I've found having one session a week dedicated to practical exercises - using pre-prepared virtual machines where appropriate has been a very good teaching method - and popular with the students who can see themselves achieving the tasks.
- bostik 8y ago
  For something beyond mere toy examples, I would look into online language-specific playgrounds. Those allow you to run code directly from browser - and if you include basic instrumentation (timing, step counters, item/memory use counters, ...) then it becomes really easy to show how a simple change makes things either better or worse. To keep things language agnostic, you can cherrypick a different language for different purposes. That way you get to ensure that the lessons are not tied a particular language and the concepts have to apply universally.[1] For an interesting twist, maybe pick some historical examples too, to show how things have evolved in languages over time. Then, when the basic concept of the lesson is [hopefully] understood, expand to a short case study to show why the dry theory matters in practice. For example, there's an old DoS attack against DNS servers, where a 56k modem could take down a root server due to unbounded O(n^2) worst-case complexity in the hash table implementations.[0] 0: https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/sec03/tech/full_papers/crosby/crosby_html/index.html https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin... 1: For extra points, you can pick examples where a particular language has chosen an implementation with amusing problems.
- oldcynic 8y ago
  You've also surely got loads of anecdotes on how not to do it and tales from the coalface from your years in industry. I'm sure you can sprinkle some of those into the classes to give a little light relief if the students are really finding things too dry. You don't have to go as far as recreating TheDailyWTF. Perhaps use some to provide worked examples of designing yourself into blind alleys and how to get out again, or just to provide awareness of a few real world issues that might come up with whatever topic is the day's lecture.

BrandoElFollito 8y ago

Most people will go to industry after graduation, though. When I hire I prefer to Herve someone with some practical knowledge rather than the capacity to build a compiler. So having the "let's build something" experience is useful in the real world afterwards.

hk__2 8y ago
> So having the "let's build something" experience is useful in the real world afterwards. It is, but it’s not the job of academia to teach it. You have side-projects, internships, and your whole life to learn practice.
- scarface74 8y ago
  Where did this whole thought process of it’s not the job of college to help you become employable?
  - pjmorris 8y ago
    It's also worth asking 'Where did this whole thought process of "it is the job of college to help you become employable" come from?' There are long-established, deeply-entrenched advocates for both viewpoints, but the 'it is the job' viewpoint is the new one. It's worth understanding the debate.
    - scarface74 8y ago
      When students go to college and either thier parents spend between $40K and 120K for a four year degree or a student takes out a loan, what do you think thier expectations are? If I have a choice between a hiring a junior developer who has a computer science degree and only knows theory and a junior whose only experience is a boot camp where they learned practical skills. I’m going to hire the boot camp graduate first. Yes I have a “computer science” degree in the early 90s from an unknown state school, didn’t learn anything and the only reason I was employable was due to my prior knowledge from years programming in AppleSoft Basic and assembly language and I fell in love with C and stayed on the comp.lang.c newsgroups.

geezerjay 8y ago

> I wouldn't want academia to focus on business. I don't believe that OP's comment counts as focusing on business. To me, it's an effective way to engage students with a real-world use of the tech they are about to learn, thus establishing a baseline to gain perspective of how the academical part matters. Otherwise you risk concentrating the course on a perspective taken from the top of the proverbial ivory tower that leads students to just go through the course without taking anything out of it.

scarface74 8y ago

What exactly do you do with a computer science degree that doesn’t make you hireable?

Koshkin 8y ago
Same as what you do with the degree, say, in physics. You become a software engineer.

uluyol 8y ago

Maybe what the OP was getting at is that before a topic is presented, it needs to be contextualized. For a single presentation, you do this by presenting some motivation and the surrounding space before diving in. For courses, the best I've seen is to present the structure at the beginning, and continuously revisit that as the semester progresses. What's the purpose of the course? To build to a solution to X or understand problem space Y. Most of the courses I have had have followed this structure, and whether I enjoyed the topic or not, it was engaging enough. Unfortunately, I've had a few courses by people who clearly didn't care and started the class by telling me why they are smart and I should follow them, then reading off slides prepared by the book author or whomever, without understanding the purpose or direction of the course themselves.

sitkack 8y ago
> it needs to be contextualized Contextualization can and should occur not just by need, as in where are we going with this, but also * Where did this come from * How hard was it to get there * When was it discovered * How was it discovered * When was it accepted Often times areas of Mathematics or Physics are presented in way that is completely disjoint from their history, that these n-pages of results actually took 50+ years are more to discover and argue over. That careers diverged and were ended over who was on what side. Too many concepts are communicated as a series of steps, do A, do B, do C ... but you have no idea that you are actually baking a cake. If it isn't a surprise, tell the other party the destination.