Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jmtame 7020 days ago
Public education is way behind, especially in technology. I just made "my first website" in a CS class 3 weeks ago. And I built it with the same HTML code I taught myself at age 9.

I also am not a huge fan of the amount of "busy work." This is just the work that professors are required to give you to fulfill some degree requirement. Almost nothing I've learned in college has been applicable to any of my business-related work, although I don't think we can hold an undergraduate degree up to much glory.
2 comments
notabel 7020 days ago
[This is just about your first paragraph.]

The question is whether that is a problem. I for one don't really think that traditional secondary ed is the right place for teaching tech. Tech moves too fast.

We need to fix the school systems to more effectively cover their domain: sciences and humanities. Technology, however, is best learned as we learn it: free-form, self-directed, online. There is no need to merge that into curricula.

(Note, there's a difference between technology and CS: CS is algorithmics, theory; it's a branch of math, really. Technology is applied: websites, programming languages, things of this sort. Any curricular approach to technology is doomed to constantly lag the tech education available extracurricularly.)

link
notabel 7020 days ago
There are two distinct classes of work that are called "busy work". The first is heinous, the second is often loathed, but great.

There's real busywork: work assigned just to take your time, create something to grade. That's crap, it should go away. (And in my collegiate experience, largely has.)

Then there's "impractical stuff": people often malign work they do that doesn't directly apply to the real world, but I think that it is often worthwhile. Consider MIT's famed 6.001: few of its students ever use Scheme, or any functional language, professionally, but the work in Scheme is never the less worthwhile. (Disclosure, I love functional languages.)

link
palish 7020 days ago
One thing I'm hoping is that if teachers use the service I described above, they'd be less inclined to create busy work - it would be obvious to the rest of their community that that's what they're creating, and so they'd have an incentive to not do that.

Unless they make all their content private and don't participate in the community, which is an option too.

link