Well, a start would be to get the students to understand the 
differences that should exist between "Computer Science", "Software 
Engineering", and "Commercial Hacking".

At Stanford, for example, a distressingly large part of the 
undergraduate experience is really learning how to hack commercially 
in JAVA. It's hard to find the other two disciplines even lurking 
behind the vocational certification that is going on.

Another point about this is that for most of the existence of 
universities, they have been institutions that have perspectives 
about knowledge that students want to acquire. One of the biggest 
implications in the old meaning of education is that you don't come 
out of as you went in, plus some "knowledge in a knapsack" but that 
you come out of it as a different person with a qualitatively 
different set of perspectives. Over the last 50 years, and especially 
with the baby boom, universities have increasingly turned themselves 
into market-driven businesses and vocational trainers.

So the big questions about GaTech and other major universities have 
to do with the existence of reasonable boundaries around parts of 
computing knowledge, pursuits and skills, and does the university 
have a theory about knowledge and learning that it is trying use to 
transform students (is it worrying about retention or quality)?

Cheers,

Alan

-------


At 1:31 AM -0500 2/17/04, Aaron Lanterman wrote:
>Part of the Georgia Tech culture is that people like to complain. (This is
>true for the faculty as much as the students.) Anyway, having a good sense
>of humor about these things, I was peeking at
>http://www.studentsreview.com/GA/GT_c.html and ran across this quote:
>
>'Before I came I heard the school was good for Computer Science -- it is
>afterall the biggest single major at the school. However, this is not a
>Computer Science school, and they teach you useless languages such as
>"Squeak", which you'll never use again in your life.'
>
>[Aside to Mark Guzdial: If hoping you have a good sense of humor about
>this... :) ]
>
>This got me thinking... what would it take to convince college students
>that Squeak is as cool as we think it is? Make them understand that C++ is
>not the bees knees?
>
>- Aaron
>
>-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>Dr. Aaron Lanterman, Asst. Prof.       Voice:  404-385-2548
>School of Electrical and Comp. Eng.    Fax:    404-894-8363
>Georgia Institute of Technology        E-mail: lanterma at ece.gatech.edu
>Mail Code 0250                         Web:    users.ece.gatech.edu/~lanterma
>Atlanta, GA 30332                      Office: GCATT 334B


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