Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!rutgers!bellcore!faline!sabre!gamma!pyuxp!rruxa!gwl From: gwl@rruxa.UUCP (George W. Leach) Newsgroups: comp.edu Subject: Re: microcomputers - (nf) Message-ID: <288@rruxa.UUCP> Date: Mon, 17-Aug-87 10:30:19 EDT Article-I.D.: rruxa.288 Posted: Mon Aug 17 10:30:19 1987 Date-Received: Tue, 18-Aug-87 05:15:42 EDT References: <398@ndsuvax.UUCP> <18100001@infbs.UUCP> Organization: Bell Communications Research Lines: 92 In article <18100001@infbs.UUCP>, neitzel@infbs.UUCP writes: > /***** infbs:comp.edu / rruxa!gwl / 4:51 pm Aug 12, 1987*/ > > At the New Jersey Institute of Technology, each and every full time > > undergraduate is required to purchase a selected PC upon entering the > > university. > > [...] > > And from my experiences as an undergraduate dealing with long delays > > while waiting for my printout from a line printer, or punching hollerith > > cards I feel that today's students are lucky! > > > George W. Leach > > But there is nothing bad about waiting for something! > In fact it gives you a good opportunity for talks with all other > students waiting for printouts, too. Students that work on the same > problem. > I only remember being always pressed for time between classes to maybe get two runs in! I also quite clearly remember begging the operator to run my deck through one more time at 2:00 AM. Perhaps one benefit of all this was to make damn sure that those precious few runs were not stopped by dumb typos and other errors that could be hand checked. Today my students have Turbo Pascal, which not only detects errors, but takes them into the editor at the appropriate place in the code where the syntax error occured. My they are spoiled! > > You can read Gerald M. Weinberg's "Psychology of Programming" about this. > There is one place, where he writes about the change from batch operation > to time sharing systems. In short, he regrets the loss of communication > among the programmers. I have read Weinberg's book and the incident that you are talking about (I think) is when an intelligent manager removed some vending machines from the area in which printouts were picked up. He felt that the programmers we wasting too much time congregating around them. Well sure enough, that stopped when the machines were removed and so did the communication. People were talking about programs and comparing notes. The end result was people were taking longer to fix bugs!!! > > I think, the same applies to the students today and to the change from > time sharing systems to (further isolated/isolating) micro computers. > I'm not so sure about this point. From my own experiences as both a student and a teacher I have found that people tend to talk amongst their friends and not with total strangers about such things. And what about the communication opportunities that e-mail affords a student? Or what about all the students who have access to the net? (I know, it is but a small fraction, but still it is more than in the batch, card oriented days). Networking the PCs at school and providing phone links to the ones at home can provide the same benefits. > > I am badly aware at this CS dept. here, that more and more students do > all their work at home == on their own == without seeing different > concepts ( == without learning ?!?! ). Looking back over the past five > years I get the impression, that all activities amongst students, which > went beyond/beneath any lecture, have vanished and were not repeated or > even continued by younger fresh{wo}men. > > [ BTW: This *is* related to the last debate on assignments/cheating. > Sometimes I was very startled, how cooperation between students was > strongly discouraged. Yes, "the 1st language should be English" is > okay, but then let them use it, too! > ] The problem is the form that the "cooperation" assumes. For the most part you have one or possibly two very intelligent students from whom the rest are simply obtaining the solutions without regard for trying to understand them!!! This is the problem. They are not learning. They are simply getting the program done to get a grade. That is why tests are given in a classroom. Programs alone won't do the trick. > > Martin Neitzel > Tech.Univ. Braunschweig, W.Germany, Europe > ...!mcvax!unido!infbs!neitzel George W. Leach Bell Communications Research New Jersey Institute of Technology 444 Hoes Lane 4A-1129 Computer & Information Sciences Dept. Piscataway, New Jersey 08854 Newark, New Jersey 07102 (201) 699-8639 UUCP: ..!bellcore!indra!reggie ARPA: reggie%njit-eies.MAILNET@MIT-MULTICS.ARPA From there to here, from here to there, funny things are everywhere Dr. Seuss "One fish two fish red fish blue fish"