On Sun, Sep 25, 2005 at 08:20:55PM -0400, Jon Carnes wrote: > A good basic education is a great advantage. The better and broader it > is, the greater your foundation for launching your endeavors. Once you > move beyond that base however and begin to specialize - class room > learning can be too slow a pace.
I concur that a _great_ basic education is essential. One cannot assume his/her teachers are going to drive his/her success. Generally, those people who excel in any number of given areas are motivated, excited by "the unknown," and lead by example. It's fairly straightforward to pick out these types. One of the dangers of specializing, particularly in higher ed in the USA, is that the route takes over one's life. Not many Ph.D. candidates have the energy to pursue all the avenues that interest them - a pretty good if not harsh illustration of opportunity costs. That isn't to say that they _don't_, just that there are only so many hours in a wakeful day. > I once learned an entire semester of Thermodynamics in one long weekend > spent in the library. Folks can learn rapidly when properly motivated. > They don't have to cow-tow to the lowest common denominator. When > something becomes "relevant" to them, they learn it faster and better. As an educator, one of the most difficult things I've had to struggle with is precisely how to approach individualized learning. As a student I'm interested in pragmatic applications of the concepts I'm learning. Only a few of my professors have seen that their students are drawn to challenging problems and address those students' interests by laying down crucial, creative resolution methodologies. To have students who are excited by such problems seems rare these days, which speaks quite critically of our educational system. Although I teach a more conceptual course (programming languages), I still judge my own progress as an lecturer by my students' interest in their projects. I'm accountable to them since they'll have to apply their knowledge once they're handed an industry project that expects them to maintain someone else's code and to use their limited budget to make something work better and faster. So this semester my students need to extend some Java classes so their music player application can read mp3s. If we have time, we'll hook in some C++ code (taglib) so they can correct mistagged mp3s. Yes, iPods are a force to be reckoned with. Why take this approach? We like music. We like listening to music on our laptops. Undergrads need something on their resumes that demonstrates that they have at least rudimentary knowledge of writing code. Everyone wins. > In fact the prevalence of practical information contained in Open Source > areas, make innovation much easier. And this point is the crux of education. Cheers, -- Daniel T. Chen [EMAIL PROTECTED] GPG key: www.sh.nu/~crimsun/pubkey.gpg.asc
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