Re: Real-world education (was: Ariane 5 failure)

[mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman)]

In article <1996Sep29.193602.17369@enterprise.rdd.lmsc.lockheed.com>,
Chris McKnight <cmcknigh@hercii.lasc.lockheed.com> wrote:

[Rich Pattis' good stuff snipped.]
>
>  An excellent bit of teaching, IMHO. Glad to hear they're putting some
>  more of the real world issues in the class room.

Rich Pattis is indeed an experienced, even gifted teacher of
introductory courses, with a very practical view of what they
should be about.

Without diminishing Rich Pattis' teaching experience or skill one bit,
I am somewhat perplexed at the unfortunate stereotypical view you
seem to have of CS profs. Yours is the second post today to have
shown evidence of that stereotypical view; both you and the other
poster have industry addresses.

This is my 22nd year as a CS prof, I travel a lot in CS education
circles, and - while we, like any population, tend to hit a bell
curve - I've found that there are a lot more of us out here than
you may think with Pattis-like commitment to bring the real world
into our teaching.

Sure, there are theorists, as there are in any field, studying
and teaching computing just because it's "beautiful", with little
reference to real application, and there's a definite place in the
teaching world for them.  Indeed, exposure to their "purity" of
approach is healthy for undergraduates - there is no harm at all
in taking on computing - sometimes - as purely an intellectual
exercise.

But it's a real reach from there to an assumption that most of us
are in that theoretical category.

I must say that there's a definite connection between an interest
in Ada and an interest in real-world software; certainly most of
the Ada teachers I've met are more like Pattis than you must think.
Indeed, it's probably our commitment to that "engineering" view
of computing that brings us to like and teach Ada.

But it's not just limited to Ada folks. I had the pleasure of
participating in a SIGCSE panel last March entitled "the first
year beyond language." Organized by Owen Astrachan of Duke,
a C++ fan, this panel consisted of 6 teachers of first-year
courses, each using a different language. Pascal, C++, Ada,
Scheme, Eiffel, and (as I recall) ML were represented.

The challenge Owen made to each of us was to give a 10-minute
"vision statement" for first-year courses, without identifying
which language we "represented." Owen revealed the languages to
the audience only after the presentations were done.

It was _really_ gratifying that - with no prior agreement or
discussion among us - five of the six of us presented very similar
visions, in the "computing as engineering" category. It doesn;t
matter which language the 6th used; the important thing was that,
considering the diversity of our backgrounds, teaching everywhere
from small private colleges to big public universities, we were
in _amazing_ agreement.

The message for me in the stereotype presented above is that it's
probably out of date and certainly out of touch. I urge my
industry friends to get out of _their_ ivory towers, and come
visit us. Find out what we're _really_ doing. I think you'll
be pleasantly surprised.

Especially, check out those of us who are introducing students
to _Ada_ as their first, foundation language.

Mike Feldman

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Michael B. Feldman -  chair, SIGAda Education Working Group
Professor, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
The George Washington University -  Washington, DC 20052 USA
202-994-5919 (voice) - 202-994-0227 (fax) 
http://www.seas.gwu.edu/faculty/mfeldman
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       Pork is all that money the government gives the other guys.
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WWW: http://lglwww.epfl.ch/Ada/ or http://info.acm.org/sigada/education
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