Conversation

Notices

1. Embed this notice
   Dan Drake 🦆 (ddrake@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Saturday, 20-May-2023 00:27:40 JST Dan Drake 🦆

   • Paul Cantrell

   @inthehands , as a former math professor who worked at big research universities, tiny liberal arts places, and now as a professional, in-the-trenches programmer, I have so many thoughts about...the higher educational enterprise, both from a more research-oriented and liberal arts oriented angle...vocational/techincal/practical education...and the everyday practice of just shipping some code and working with others.

   So I have a good, broad perspective, I think.

   I'll summarize my reaction to your thread very simply as: YES!

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 20-May-2023 00:27:37 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     @ddrake I’m sure we could have a good conversation about that in-the-trenches view (my background too; I’m not an academic), how the enterprise of higher ed does and does not serve it, and the kinds of radical changes we forward-looking computer science departments are making to how we teach. The ones I can summarize in a few chars: our intro sequence is maybe 85% hands-on coding, and <15% lecture (often ~5%), and almost all our classes through the whole program have collaborative projects.

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 20-May-2023 02:38:58 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     @ddrake
     And was the class taught by candlelight in a building heated by hand-shoveled coal? Seriously, we have so much research now that says that every part of that mode of education simply does not work, and so many better alternatives, there’s no excuse for it anymore.

   • Embed this notice
     Dan Drake 🦆 (ddrake@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Saturday, 20-May-2023 02:38:59 JST Dan Drake 🦆

     in reply to

     • Paul Cantrell

     @inthehands indeed! I do want to get back to teaching, and in any educational setting I find myself thinking "I know of a better way to do this..."

     I took a compilers course recently, and it was all bog-standard lectures and teaching out of the textbook: each lecture was roughly just "section X of the text, converted from printed textbook form into slides, which the instructor narrates through".) Nice enough, but it could have been so much better...

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 20-May-2023 02:51:13 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     @ddrake If you’re interested in the topic, I thought this book did a nice job of showing what the higher ed conversation is like these days: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674248854&content=toc

   • Embed this notice
     Dan Drake 🦆 (ddrake@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Saturday, 20-May-2023 02:51:14 JST Dan Drake 🦆

     in reply to

     • Paul Cantrell

     @inthehands yes yes yes a thousand times yes.

     My take: lectures are a TECHNOLOGY. There was a time and place when that was a great technology! Namely, when books were very rare and expensive -- like, medieval universities, where getting a new book was a big deal. In that context -- think the University of Paris about 800 years ago -- a lecture is a great technology and efficient use of time!

     But perhaps just maybe you (the general "you", not you specifically, @inthehands) have noticed that this is not Paris circa 1200! We have better technology. Let's use it!

     </preaching to choir>