[Tfug] Re: CIS faculty at PCC west disavow existence of Linux
classes
Leo Przybylski
tfug@tfug.org
Thu Jan 30 11:30:02 2003
I have to agree with him. I'm not sure what he means by "coding" skills,
but I'll assume he is referring to basic knowledge and understanding of
various syntaxes (how to write a program). I'd definitely have to say
that "coding skills" have to be attained through experience. I also
agree with his last paragraph.
I even learned a few things. I had misconceptions that a majority of CS
is taught in undergraduate cirriculum. It sounds like it can hardly be
expected to learn much CS in the undergraduate cources.
My original thought was not over the CS vs. ECE college in general, but
rather the quality of education that is to be attained. Though ECE and
CS approach in different ways (practical and theoretical), students seem
to gain more from ECE than CS.
I know I also said that CS colleges in general (no matter which
university) don't impress me. When I said this, I was referring to the
skills and knowledge that have to be attained through experience. Mr.
Lubbock set me straight on that one.
On another note, I feel like I'm now kicking a dead donkey. Does anyone
feel the same?
Thanks for that note from Lubbock,
-Leo Przybylski
Angus Scott-Fleming wrote:
>On 30 Jan 2003 at 8:28, Sam Hart wrote:
>
>
>
>>My main thrust was not to mention how bad or good a particular CS dept
>>was, just that, if you want to learn /real/ programming, then I could
>>think of no other way than getting involved in some
>>Free-Software/Open-Source project. It also teaches teamwork, and
>>(possibly) even leadership skils (if the project manager suddenly
>>becomes sick of a project and hands it over to you).
>>
>>
>
>Here are some relevant possibly interesting comments from a former ECE
>instructor who taught programming and other computer-related classes at
>the UofA and is now teaching at Texas Tech in Lubbock. I forwarded him
>one of the messages in this thread to see if he had any comments ....
>
>
>
>>I believe he is right in some ways: that the ECE dept. has several
>>more practical courses than C.S. However, I think he has a rather
>>narrow view of what C.S. is...sounds like he expects the focus of a CS
>>program to be to teach good coding skills. From my perspective, at the
>>Uof A, the study of computers has evolved in two distinct paths. The
>>practical side, studying hardware, problem solving approaches, and the
>>engineering application of computers is in the realm of the Computer
>>Engineering wing of ECE. The theoretical, studying issues like the
>>mathematical rigor of fault tolerence, development of new paradigms for
>>computer languages, etc., is the realm of the C.S. folks, who, by the
>>way, are in the college or arts and sciences at the UofA, not the
>>college of engineering. Creating good programmers is generally not a
>>high priority of computer science these days...that has become a
>>practical problem, just as practical application of mathematics is done
>>primarily in the engineering school, not the math dept. When I did my
>>masters there, I don't believe the C.S. dept. even had an undergraduate
>>program, although they did have some undergraduate courses.
>>
>>
>
>
>
>>(Personally, I suspect that the best place for a straight-forward
>>this-is-how-to-get-it-done course for developing coding skills these
>>days is a place like Pima C.C., or even a technical school like Devrie
>>(sp?) up in Phoenix area. Those places focus almost exclusively on
>>"how", less on "why").
>>
>>
>
>
>
>>Even here at Texas Tech, where the CS dept. is in the college of
>>engineering, our focus is not on creating good programmers. We do put
>>our undergraduates through 5 or 6 courses where coding is a large part
>>of the class, but these are all lower level courses. The upper level
>>and graduate courses, where the (supposed) real meat is, are courses on
>>things like languages/compilers; computer vision; neural networks;
>>artificial intelligence; parallel computing; networking systems,
>>networking security; data compression; etc. Obviously being able to
>>write programs is important for many (but not all) of these, but not
>>the central focus.
>>
>>
>
>
>
>>Here is an interesting perspective on the issue: I took a graduate
>>neural networks course here in the CS dept a couple of years ago. We
>>looked fairly deeply into the math underlying the different neural
>>networks that we looked at (and coded up). The coding problems were
>>all very theoretical...fun but generally not practical -- solve the
>>travelling salesman problem; create a network to solve the XOR
>>problem, etc. Kudos were awarded for trying out variations, exploring
>>where they worked well and where they didn't, etc.. I am currently
>>taking a pattern recognition course over in the E.C.E. dept., and in it
>>we are looking at implementing many of the same algorithms for
>>real-world problems, like recognizing defects in cotton, separating
>>fish by type in a processing plant, etc.. However, the algorithms are
>>presented largely as: here's the algorithm, code it up, show that it
>>works, and, "we won't go into details, but here are some references if
>>you really want to understand the underlying concepts." The bottom
>>line: the C.S. course deals with the theoretical, the ECE course deals
>>with the practical. If I were a manager who needed an employee to
>>solve a pattern recognition problem in the short term, I'd send him to
>>the ECE course. If I were hiring a new graduate who might work on that
>>or any number of other problems, I might want a more theoretical
>>background.
>>
>>
>
>
>
>>Finally, I think it's highly unrealistic to expect an undergraduate in
>>any discipline to be particularly skilled yet. That has to be learned
>>on the job. All four years of education does is give you enough tools
>>to get started. Remember, a full-time student is only part time on
>>anything. It takes several years of making mistakes full-time before
>>one learns how to either avoid them or recover from them gracefully.
>>
>>
>
>
>
>>Feel free to share these thoughts with that discussion group.
>>
>>
>
>--
>Angus Scott-Fleming
>GeoApps, Tucson, Arizona
>http://www.geoapps.com/
>1-520-290-5038 / fax 1-208-248-3124
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