While the report's focus on the importance of career and
technical education is long overdue, it's wrong to assume, as the report does,
that public education exists only to prepare students to get a job. Students
also need to become informed citizens who can get along with others and work
toward achieving their personal goals …Curricula that focus solely on career
training … don’t produce well-informed, responsible citizens. The value of a well-educated
populace to the future of our democracy is diminished if we make it the policy
… that only business needs are to be served by the education system.
--Jill Wynns,What
boxes get blown up?,
San Francisco Chronicle
There seems to be one thing that, independently of the
height of the fence that surrounds the campus, any graduating student can take
with him into the world outside, and that is the healthy skepticism that goes
with a well-kept immunity for hype, for slogans, for fads and for fashions. And
that is important, for the latter seems to pass by in ever increasing
frequency. It is quite amazing --and a bit saddening-- how gullible and
desperate are willing to expect salvation from the next gadget.
--Edsger
Dijkstra, Convocation Speech
From: Fabian Pascal
To: DM
This is to introduce myself and let you know that I may be in
your area in October. If you are interested in a seminar or presentation,
please let me know.
I am including a bio note. Further information is available on my web site.
Looking forward to hearing from you.
From: DM
To: Fabian Pascal
Are you thinking of
this in regard to the Oracle Users Group or the classes here at the
University? And what topics would interest you to deliver to either of
these audiences?
From: FP
Both or either.
More to the point would be what would be of interest to them. There is an Education page on my
web site. Please take a look and see what topic(s) you--who know these
audiences--think would be of interest.
From: DM
To be perfectly honest I already did and I couldn't find
anything that would interest them as it is all too generic. The topics seem
more targeted toward IT management than my audiences. That is why I asked what
you thought might interest them.
From: FP
What you call generic I call fundamentals. And the major
problem is the industry is that practitioners don't possess foundation
knowledge, the implications of which are serious, except nobody realizes it.
The question is whether your people should only know what they think they want,
or also what they need. And that is up to you.
From: DM
I don't in any way disagree. But within the context of the
University of Washington it would not be my classes where it would be
appropriate to present that type of information. My classes are graduate level,
highly technical, and I don't allow PowerPoint slides or any non-technical
content. Similarly the user group is successful because all presentations, and
we do not allow vendors (not that you are one) are all purely technical and
almost always live command-line demos.
So while I agree with you that the topics you are
highlighting are important they do not seem to be appropriate for these
audiences.
From: FP
My guess is that by "technical" you mean
"product-specific", which usually implies that what is not
product-specific is not technical. If so, that is mistaken, particularly in a
university setting. That in itself validates my point about the poor state of
knowledge in the industry.
Having taught extensively at both the academic and business levels, neither the
content, nor the quality of presentations have anything to do with the mode of
presentation, PowerPoint or not. I'm afraid that the notion that disallowing a
certain mode of presentation is meaningful is sometimes a way to impress the
audience with style rather than substance.
From: DM
You are mistaken. By technical I mean the point of this class
is not to teach theory, not to teach opinion, not to teach buzz words and not
to teach what any corporation, including Oracle, wants taught.
Technical means code! And while we teach the course using
Oracle we cover aspects of DB2, Informix, SQL Server, and Sybase too. We can't
get free copies of every RDBMS on the market for the students and, quite
frankly, the students have expressed close to zero interest in DB2, Informix,
and Sybase. At least here in the Northwest the only players are Oracle and
Microsoft.
I disagree. Students don't need me, or anyone else, to read
PowerPoint slides to them. If they want to see slide presentations they can
download them and watch them to their heart's contentment on their own time.
Not at all. Academia is responding to the demands of students
for practical education and to employers to produce people that can perform. In
my program we strive to achieve the same level of education as that produced by
the School of Engineering and the School of Medicine. Those schools don't
produce people that know the theory of engineering ... they produce engineers.
They don't produce people that have watched slide presentations of surgical
procedures ... they produce people that can actually treat patients. My
students are expected to be able to walk into an Amazon.com or Boeing or
AT&T Wireless and be functional members of a team.
This is not to in any manner denigrate what you do but rather
to point out that while it has its place ... my program isn't it.
From: FP
No, I am not. You are validating my argument that the
industry and academia are becoming increasingly ignorant and focused on narrow
and superficial concepts of what education is. A university is not vocational
school, and education is not training. Nor is it for teaching programming
skills.
>Technical means code!
I rest my case. This is pure nonsense.
But these are still products and it is not the function of
the university to teach products.
You are missing the point, which is not that you only teach
one product, but that you ONLY teach product-specific stuff, which you narrowly
define as "technical" and appropriate for academia.
And students should not decide for the university what they
should learn. Once the industry took over academia, it's finished. See my
editorial The Myth of Market-Based Education.
Excuse me, but this is bullshit. That you perhaps cannot do
anything but read slides does not mean that somebody else cannot teach critical
technical info that is not code with slides.
It's really ironic that I, an academic, should be taught by
you, a non-academic, what is and is not technical and valuable at university
level. That says about all one needs to know about the state of education in
the US.
You are incorrect. Perhaps not in some 19th century view of
the purpose of academia but most certainly incorrect in terms of how it views
its mission at present.
And if not at the university where is the student to gain the
expertise and where is the organization to gain skilled employees? We are in a
product-oriented industry. There are few analogs in medicine or engineering but
they most certainly do exist. One does not learn how to install a generic
pacemaker ... one learns to install a particular brand of pacemaker. One does
not learn about cancer treatment as a generic subject but rather as
pharmacology with the application of specific branded medications in specific
cases. There is no difference between telling a physician to give Xeloda for
breast cancer and telling a software engineer to apply Real Application
Clusters for high availability: Both are product specific solutions to
technical problems.
Hardly. One must come down from the ivory tower and get one's hands dirty. It
is wonderful that you know the theoretical and mathematical underpinnings of a
bitmap index: That too is taught but not in my classes. It is equally important
that you actually build one and benchmark it. That is what my classes do.
Either one is sterile without the other.
Actually one rule in my classes is NO slides as I have
previously stated so I have no idea from where this idea originated.
To assume that because my curriculum is practical others are
not theoretical is a remarkable act of gymnastics. You condemn an entire
university, nay all of the universities in an entire country ("state of
education in the US") because of a single practical curriculum. That is
not the act of an academic.
In view of the invective, above, I am terminating this
correspondence with this response. You have a strange way of inviting yourself
into a classroom.
From: FP
No, I am not incorrect. The university is, if that's what its
"vision" is today. I've written on this extensively. Education is
going away in the US, replaced by training. If you want to know why so many
jobs are offshored to China and India, that's one reason why. Americans are no
longer educated, they are trained for jobs. That's why the political system is
in decay.
I am not surprised that an industry practitioner sees the
university as a training vehicle for products. That's what happens when
industry corrupts academia. It is NOT the function of academia to train people
in products; that's what vendors and vocational schools are for.
BS.
You have no clue what theory is and what it is for, nor do you have a clue what
my material is all about. There is NO math and theory in it. You simply don't
know what you're talking about and it's sad that you're teaching at a
university.
You don't understand what I said. No slides is a silly rule which means
nothing. One can teach drivel without slides and another can teach critical
technical material with slides. The use of slides says absolutely nothing about
the quality and nature of the material. The notion that the medium of
presentation means anything is nonsense.
Your notion of what is practical is narrow and nonsense. I have experience with
lots of universities and their attitudes towards their curriculum, so your idea
that I base my arguments on just your case is wrong, as is almost everything
else you believe in.
Once I decide that a cause is lost, I call a spade a spade.
Ed. Note: After I posted some of DM’s comments on the
function of universities as a weekly quote, a reader
reacted and the following exchange ensued. The reader is also urged to read Edsger Dijkstra's
Convocation Speech at University of Texas at Austin.
From: PK
To: Editor
Date: 25 Sep 2004
I've been an appreciative follower of your writing for some
time, and feel pretty much the same way as you about the corruption of the
whole discipline by marketing drool.
This particular quote of the week is the most extreme and
laughable I've seen so far.
The author speaks disparagingly of "some 19th century
view of the purpose of academia", but does not explain what he thinks is
the place of academia, or of commercial product training - and most importantly
where the division between the two lies. What he is saying makes no attempt to
define the place of these two, in my view, clearly distinct activities - but
rather attempts to knock the study of the subject, as opposed to the products,
out of consideration entirely.
His comparison to medicine throws this into sharp relief -
the ludicrous idea that medical studies are /purely/ based on available products,
rather than the "non-volatile" part of the field - the human body,
suggests that he is unaware that there even /is/ a theoretical basis for RDBMS
studies.
Perhaps the most telling part of what he has to say is his
statement that "Both are product specific solutions to technical
problems" - where one "technical problem" is the human body
which is not about to change, and another "technical problem" is an
assemblage of buzz-words which could be rendered obsolete by a vendor's product
cycle by the end of a degree course.
Muppet!
Keep up the good work - you help a lot of people, hopefully
myself included, to do their best to use unsound products in as sound a way as
possible, and that is worth a great deal.
From: Fabian Pascal
To: PK
Hang on and you'll see worse. There is no bottom to this.
It's not his fault. One cannot blame individuals or specific
institutions. It's a systemic problem having to do with the culture of
society and the education system, both of which are going down the drain (see Lenin, Trotsky, and the
Freedom from the Tyranny of Reason and Knowledge, and The Myth of Market-based
Education). This is the kind of professional that they produce and
there is no reason to expect them to know any better.
We do urge those who find our effort of value to support it
concretely and ensure its continuation via our papers.
Posted
10/22/04
