At 8:04 PM +0000 1/2/03, Priscilla Oppenheimer wrote: >Howard C. Berkowitz wrote: >> > >snip > >> >> There's also a commercial factor here. The market generally >> wants >> cookbook-style, command-oriented books. Personally, I don't >> think >> that's the best way to learn, but I'm now exploring that with a >> colleague simply in the interest of getting better sales. > >Hmmm. I would like you to get better sales, of course, but please don't fall >for the dummy books mentality. :-} If it were economically feasible, I would >like to see publishers of professional books show some backbone and market >highly-technical books for smart people, not just books for newbies.
Unfortunately, such books aren't selling well enough in the present environment, while they were snapped up four or five years ago. > >snip > >> As far as getting into the guts of OSPF, this came in a galaxy >> long >> ago and far away, when I was getting my original CSSI directly >> from >> Cisco. During my "apprenticeship," it became clear I went more >> deeply into addressing than some of the other instructors, and >> also >> had the theoretical training to understand the Dijkstra >> algorithm. >> Before too long, I was passed along to the Cisco OSPF >> development >> lead, then got involved in the IETF mailing list and working >> group. > >Cisco instructors used to (may still) insist that the students keep their >hands off the keyboard while the instructor was talking. I always thought >that hindered learning, (well, unless the students were busy creating a horrible message of the day on other people's routers! ;-) Unless doing structured mini-labs, and also assuming there is adequate time for hands-on, I disagree with you. It's been my experience that non-beginner students will start trying out problems in their own organizations that have nothing to do with the course objectives, or they will configure commands that might seem good to them, but screws up the overall lab plan (e.g., summarizing before summarizing has been presented). I don't have as much problem with show commands, but I have a strong objection to people that start configuring without listening. > >I like your approach of structured do-along mini labs as you go, rather than >(or in addition to) one major lab at the end of each section. > >By the way, another tangent: I think the instructors who insist on no >hands-on while the instructor is talking are the type that probably don't >make good course developers. Again, there's an intermediate ground. By all means let people type, but guide what they are doing. I've had too many cases where people concentrated on configuring, got into side conversations, and missed most of the important parts of the presentation. >One mistake that many companies and publishers >make is to let instructors write. A lot of them can't. They excel at oral >communication skills, but in some cases, not at written communication >skills. This is particularly important when teaching design or true theory, as configuration is NOT relevant to the matter at hand. A key part of teaching design is teaching interviewing and problem documentation skills, which certainly don't involve router configuration. I have no problem with someone taking notes or even doing calculations, but, if I do have a lab available in an advanced course, I frequently disable Telnet until it's time to configure. Now, if the class had a serious network simulation tool available, that might be a different matter. But when you have just a few routers available, you can get very confused about techniques that are essential for scalability, but are not particularly visible in small labs. A good example of this came in the old Cisco pods, which had groups of four interconnected routers, with a backbone connection or two from the middle routers, but often had direct connectivity from the end routers in one group to the end routers in another group. I can't think how many times I got into arguments that you can't go nonzero area to nonzero area in OSPF, and students would insist that they were doing so at the moment. What they were doing, and not realizing, is using direct connections (i.e., AD 0) rather than OSPF-generated routes. >A lot of them don't have the patience to do the analysis up front >either. They think they can just put what they say in class down on paper >and that will make a good book or course. > >Some instructos, like Clare Gough, for example, make great authors and >developers. Some do not, though, which is one minor explanation for some of >the bad material out there. > >Priscilla Message Posted at: http://www.groupstudy.com/form/read.php?f=7&i=60127&t=60111 -------------------------------------------------- FAQ, list archives, and subscription info: http://www.groupstudy.com/list/cisco.html Report misconduct and Nondisclosure violations to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
