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It has been my experience that outdated, overly specific, or incorrect terminology tends to make its way into computer science and IT-related learning material

It has been my experience that outdated, overly specific, or incorrect terminology tends to make its way into computer science and IT-related learning material and its corresponding test question banks. This learning material often happens to be drafted and paid for by technology companies but it seems as though little effort is spent in revising, verifying, and properly typesetting the material in question, to the chagrin of the students.

skissane 7y ago
As a high school student (in the 1990s), I found our computing textbook contained lots of mistakes. I tried to point out the errors to the teachers. I soon realised they knew absolutely nothing about the topic, they were just reading the textbook, so trying to convince them the textbook was wrong wasn't going to get anywhere. But, I think "outdated, overly specific, or incorrect terminology" is due to a lot of people teaching it (at high schools, etc), or even writing the textbooks, don't know what they are talking about. Specific examples: Our textbook claimed that TCP/IP used parity bits. If you actually read the relevant RFCs, you will find out that's wrong, it doesn't use parity bits, it uses a one's complement checksum. But, the teacher had never heard of an "RFC", and didn't know why she should care what one said. Obviously, whatever the textbook says must be right, and anything else must be wrong. The explanation of CRCs in the textbook made absolutely no sense. It said to treat the message as one long number, and then take the last part of the number. That would make the CRC just the last few bytes of the message, making it rather useless. What I eventually worked out – you really can't explain CRCs without polynomials, but the textbook author didn't want to include any mention of polynomials (and multiplication and division operations on them), since possibly not all students would have done that in high school mathematics yet. (The more advanced students may have, but the students doing the most basic levels of maths would not have.) The part about "take the last part of the number" was actually meant as a reference to the remainder of polynomial division. Once you understand the topic independently of the textbook, you can see how the textbook is a horribly garbled and mangled attempt to simplify the truth. The problem was, the teacher (same high school, different computing teacher) had no idea how CRCs are actually defined, all he knew was what the textbook said. If he actually knew what he was talking about he could have explained to me what I eventually worked out for myself.
- schoen 7y ago
  Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children
  - skissane 7y ago
    A "lie" presumes you know the truth. These teachers weren't consciously simplifying things for the students. If that was what they were doing, they could have explained the missing details if challenged on them. A good teacher really knows their subject, as opposed to just mindlessly repeating whatever the textbook says.
    - schoen 7y ago
      That's an excellent point.
mncharity 7y ago
I once saw a science education state standard, that required teaching both 'atoms are conserved in chemical reactions', and 'atoms are electrically neutral; when changed, they're no longer atoms, but ions'. Two historical threads of definition, left for students to reconcile. Terminology in primary-school science education can have a twilight zone feel, kind-of sort-of resembling science terminology, but as seen from a skewed alternate reality, disconnected from actual science community and practice. So it's not just cs learning material.

skissane 7y ago

As a high school student (in the 1990s), I found our computing textbook contained lots of mistakes. I tried to point out the errors to the teachers. I soon realised they knew absolutely nothing about the topic, they were just reading the textbook, so trying to convince them the textbook was wrong wasn't going to get anywhere. But, I think "outdated, overly specific, or incorrect terminology" is due to a lot of people teaching it (at high schools, etc), or even writing the textbooks, don't know what they are talking about. Specific examples: Our textbook claimed that TCP/IP used parity bits. If you actually read the relevant RFCs, you will find out that's wrong, it doesn't use parity bits, it uses a one's complement checksum. But, the teacher had never heard of an "RFC", and didn't know why she should care what one said. Obviously, whatever the textbook says must be right, and anything else must be wrong. The explanation of CRCs in the textbook made absolutely no sense. It said to treat the message as one long number, and then take the last part of the number. That would make the CRC just the last few bytes of the message, making it rather useless. What I eventually worked out – you really can't explain CRCs without polynomials, but the textbook author didn't want to include any mention of polynomials (and multiplication and division operations on them), since possibly not all students would have done that in high school mathematics yet. (The more advanced students may have, but the students doing the most basic levels of maths would not have.) The part about "take the last part of the number" was actually meant as a reference to the remainder of polynomial division. Once you understand the topic independently of the textbook, you can see how the textbook is a horribly garbled and mangled attempt to simplify the truth. The problem was, the teacher (same high school, different computing teacher) had no idea how CRCs are actually defined, all he knew was what the textbook said. If he actually knew what he was talking about he could have explained to me what I eventually worked out for myself.

schoen 7y ago
Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children
- skissane 7y ago
  A "lie" presumes you know the truth. These teachers weren't consciously simplifying things for the students. If that was what they were doing, they could have explained the missing details if challenged on them. A good teacher really knows their subject, as opposed to just mindlessly repeating whatever the textbook says.
  - schoen 7y ago
    That's an excellent point.

mncharity 7y ago

I once saw a science education state standard, that required teaching both 'atoms are conserved in chemical reactions', and 'atoms are electrically neutral; when changed, they're no longer atoms, but ions'. Two historical threads of definition, left for students to reconcile. Terminology in primary-school science education can have a twilight zone feel, kind-of sort-of resembling science terminology, but as seen from a skewed alternate reality, disconnected from actual science community and practice. So it's not just cs learning material.