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From: dar@nucleus.UUCP (Dario Alcocer)
Newsgroups: comp.edu,comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: CS education
Summary: I agree
Message-ID: <5480@nucleus.UUCP>
Date: 16 Nov 89 19:43:30 GMT
References: <5470@nucleus.UUCP> <7012@hubcap.clemson.edu>
Organization: The Nucleus Public Access Unix, Clarkston, MI
Lines: 38

In article <7012@hubcap.clemson.edu>, billwolf%hazel.cs.clemson.edu@hubcap.clemson.edu (William Thomas Wolfe, 2847 ) writes:
> From dar@nucleus.UUCP (Dario Alcocer):
> > I think that the technical school and high schools are the ones in the
> > position to train people for the job market.  
> 
>    ... The only reasonable solution is to provide at least two tracks 
>    within the university system: a research track and a practitioner's 
>    track.  If this were combined with several other mechanisms by which 
>    meaningful dialogue would be facilitated between the two communities,
>    then we would be well on our way to a much-improved system.
> 
> 
>    Bill Wolfe, wtwolfe@hubcap.clemson.edu
>  
Your points are well taken.  I agree with your observation that practioners
and researchers do not communicate enough with each other, many new
developments in computer science are probably not taken advantage of quickly
because practioners many times don't share the same experiences and 
terminology that the researchers do, and maybe the researchers could benefit
from seeing their hypotheses proven or disproven when applied to real-world
applications.

Relating to this, what do you think of the cooperative education system in
place at the University of Waterloo?  I think that a good start would be for
students to get 2 or 3 years of experience, and then have 1 or 2 years of CS
or CE training to help them see how theory and engineering techniques can be
used to solve the same problems seen in their first 2 years more
effectively.  Practical experience becomes more valuable, I feel, when you
have theoretical framework to able to generalize on your experience and the
experience of others.  In fact, I see theoretical knowledge as partly being
the generalized experience of the whole.

Again, thank you for sharing your ideas, and I appreciate you correcting me
on some mistaken opinions I've had.


Dario Alcocer
dar@nucleus.mi.org