You are so right.   The liberal arts colleges I am familiar with focus  
solely on educating undergraduates.  It is about providing new  
perspectives and the means to educate yourself.   In these schools, an  
engineering degree is considered a vocational subject!   Squeak ought  
to flourish in these kinds of places because it is a multidisciplinary  
tool.  ..and it is free.   I'll bet there are some small education  
departments that might be excited.  Introduce it to them with college  
level content and then sell the childhood education facilities.   We  
need a virtual Squeak College.  Heck, it's just one more website - why  
stop now?    ;-)


On Tuesday, February 17, 2004, at 06:07 PM, John Pfersich wrote:

> And a mind expanding  curriculum has a better chance of being  
> developed at a small liberal arts college than at a technical  
> university. At technical universities, a large number of the  
> professors are teaching outdated software engineering practices, for  
> example. I got so sick of retraining  newbies that I've turned to  
> consulting.
>
>> 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
>>
>>
>> --
>