Re: [JoLUG-General] CS Education These Days!

[Fadi Kahhaleh]

Aram, How are ya man J long time no see…   Hey I want to comment on something, now we all agree that students should take the role of reading and learning And not being hand-fed the knowledge by their teachers, but Khamis Omar went too far with this. (I am sure you agree).   The other thing, I believe that if our uni. PSUT, stayed with its old curriculum, the overall quality of the graduates would Be heading down a steep pit-fall, as you know, students these days tend to take the easy way out, and with our courses, You’ll end up with less people really caring about the courses, all just want to pass. Also going all the way to dream-land and teaching only .net and java and the like is not so good, what I really would like To see is some sort of balance, teaching theories, concepts and fundamentals to give the students basis to build on, and at the same time, try to give them a glimpse of the market needs through a couple of courses, and more non-credited courses, this way, by the time a student graduates, he’d be fully loaded to deal with the market. (giving the chance to students to learn on their own doesn’t work esp. in our environment!) As I remember Aram, no body forced us to take special topic C++ course J… till this day I see the benefits of that Course on my style of programming, these days I hear students say “I don’t want this course, its too hard”…   May the Lord have mercy on our souls, I can imagine how things would be in 2010 J (hmm I wanna build an ebay clone, ok drag->drop, next->next->next->…next->uploading files->finish) With .net 2005 you can literally do the whole login/logout/forgot password/user reg with drag/drop. (this just sucks!!!)         From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Aram Yegenian Sent: Thursday, January 19, 2006 10:18 AM To: Jordan Linux User Group Mailing list Subject: Re: [JoLUG-General] CS Education These Days!   great article, i especially like this part: "But what about the CS mission of CS departments? They're not vocational schools! It shouldn't be their job to train people to work in industry. That's for community colleges and government retraining programs for displaced workers, they will tell you. They're supposed to be giving students the fundamental tools to live their lives, not preparing them for their first weeks on the job. Right?" once i remember students at psut were debating with a doctor, Dr. Khamis Omar to be exact, saying that they'd finish uni without any job related skill. all the other unis were teaching Oracle, Java, .Net but we were getting theories in db design and data structures in c! the doctor was furious, he said that unis weren't a job training center and they shouldn't force you into learning "products" like oracle, java, .net. he argued that teaching concepts and sound algorithms would last longer than teaching a specific skill. they couldn't get to an agreement. too bad they enforced .net and java into the curriculum these days. i guess they caved in to the pressure of preparing the next "work force" into the "market". as opposed to having thinkers we're gonna get more click-happy programmers. on the funny side, let me quote this astonishing response, i'm gonna make it my slashdot signature! "... CS teaching standards are not what they used to be.. sad but true -- Saleh Odeh" dude you graduated like 4 months ago!? people reading this would think you handed in your cs homework on stone tablets! hehehe Yahoo! Photos Got holiday prints? See all the ways to get quality prints in your hands ASAP.

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