Thanks to Downes, I found this beautiful post on why asking for a NDA is like screaming that you are clueless. This comes back to the unnecessary lack of openess I complain about. For every guy willing to implement an idea, you have a thousand ideas out there if not more. Ideas are simply not that valuable.

What was Microsoft idea? You think it was to create DOS and sell it to IBM’s customer. No way! This only came onto them. Take any successful venture, look at the idea behind it and you’ll notice that it was either wrong or not that brilliant.

Good idea are not important, good people are. An idea without the brain holding it is nothing.

This is why we have universities and not merely libraries, btw.

Moving things up on the skill ladder, going to higher level skills and discarding lower level skills where “higher” means “more abstract”, doesn’t necessarily lead to a better education, but to a worse one. You should not discard lower level skills, you should value them: they are our foundation. If you can’t use a broom, don’t use a computer.

Here are a few things you may hear on your campus about CS education:

• Since this is not a community college, we should not teach more than one OOP language.

  Yes, of course. But even community colleges probably choose either Java or C++ or C# or (gasp!) VB. I have no problem with a school teaching only rudimentary Java as long as the students really know Java. I don’t mean knowing the syntax well or the API well… I mean, being able to do non trivial programming in it. And just generally being fluent with programming: if things go wrong, know how to debug them even when a debugger can’t be used; understand how to do research on newsgroups to help you out; know how to file a proper bug report.

  Either we are saying that a student who knows Java can pick up C++ on his own easily, or else there is something fundamental different about C++. You can’t get around it: it is one or the other. So, can the students who graduate from your program learn C++ easily on their own? If not, you failed to teach them about modern class-based OO. Can they recognize the STL data structures and understand their characteristics immediately, or are they stuck trying to reinvent the wheel?

  In short, teaching only one language is fine, as long as you do it because picking up other languages will be easy for your students, not because programming in various languages is not important.

• Now that we are using Java, there is no obvious excuse why we have tons of students who cannot program well… before, I thought I knew why!

  Part of the answer is what you value and what society values.

  University professors, generally, don’t know how to write industrial-strength software. They don’t know because they never had to do it and were never involved in real projects. So, they cannot teach it. Period. Note to self: I just made a lot ennemies.

  They have the same problem in the humanities or in business. Several managers can’t write 10 lines of English or French without filling it up with childish sentences. We don’t know about it because these people never really write anything beyond a note. Why should it matter? All they need to do is sign paperwork and attend meetings.

  So, if CS graduates are just supposed to attend meetings and sign papers, then why should they know how to program or how to write in English for that matter?

  The next logical step is… why do you need a degree at all? Oh… you need the degree for the resume… but why do you need the education that comes with the degree?

  We are back at what society values… If all that matters is to direct and manage, then fine, but I don’t think this is a safe road. It will certainly lead to a commercialization of university degrees.

  Of course, the really good students already know programming by the time they get to university, or at least, they can pick it up on their own. Others will never learn programming because it is too hard. But most students won’t learn about data structures and algorithms on their own so a university degree can really take the best students to a higher level. What to do about the students who can’t pick up programming (and in some places, it seems like very sizeable fraction)? Please don’t water down the education for their sake. Help them the best you can and then, let them sink.

Harold reminds us that sharing knowledge is not part of everyone’s culture:

One interesting observation I made this week is that not everyone is as open to sharing their thoughts and opinions in a public way as my fellow bloggers are. Coming from a community of practice that shares ideas and uses sharing mechanisms like Creative Commons, public Furl and Bloglines archives, you sometimes take for granted that everyone has this outlook. I came across some strong opinions that knowledge is power and it must be kept to oneself or a small circle of people.

I keep being surprised at how such a large fraction of people around me want to hoard knowledge as if it was food. It is wrong on many levels. Your knowledge is more valuable when you share it. We are not competing for knowledge because knowledge is not scarce. In a global economy, if you don’t share your knowledge, someone else will, you will simply be put out of the loop. You have to think yourself as an information node. Information nodes where data comes in but not out are broken and of little value.

In What was Sun thinking? (CNET News.com), Charles Cooper tells us that storage is now in high demand:

What with some of the confusing–make that idiotic–federal regulations governing corporate behavior that have appeared the last couple years, there’s a near bottomless demand for big storage systems. After the passage of Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA, CEOs are so keen on covering their posteriors these days that there’s no such thing as too much documentation. Identity and management access is the hot ticket these days as every management team worth its salt wants to tout how tough it now is on compliance.

Wow. Seems like it is going to be a nice era for data warehousing and OLAP, no?

Jeff Erickson makes available a fixed ACM proceedings template. If you’ve had trouble with the default ACM template, like me, this might save you some headaches.

Atlantic Canada (and Stephen Downes) is finding out about the creative class theory (see Richard Florida). Downes point to a post by Robert Paterson explaining why things go badly over there:

Culture? Adventurous people create sustainable jobs not government. Buildings don’t create sustainable jobs. Creative people create sustainable jobs. PEI works hard to marginalize those that are creative. This is I believe the heart of our problem.

Precisely.

You see any gays around? People with long hair? People playing weird music? People doing weird adventurous things?

No?

Your economy will be so-so.

We’ve known this for some time. The key to economic growth doesn’t lie in better highways (Atlantic Canada has the best roads in the country), or more government money… The key is in the culture.

Progressive cultures grow economically, repressive cultures decline.

That’s how I know that the Bush-era USA is in economic decline. I don’t have the statistics, I don’t care to have them, I just know.

Want to better yourself? Want to grow? Don’t hang out with the rich folks, hang out with the creative folks. Not the gay weirdoes with long hair; being weird doesn’t make you creative, but tolerance for weirdness is tolerance for creativity. You won’t find the creative folks unless there are gay weirdoes with long hair in your society.

Update: Harold also made the link with Florida.

Expert Opinion has a thoughtful analysis of modern day university students:

They pay money, they want the tools and certification to get jobs, and they resent being subjected to “irrelevant crap”. I don’t know how to respond to this. Certainly, I feel that this is not the best mode of operation for a university. I’ve stated before that I don’t view students as ordinary customers of universities, both because universities have other customers (employers, governments, society as a whole) and because the “product” that we deliver is rather unique in that its true value is likely not to be seen by students or families until many years after graduation. So, are we failing in our jobs by not getting students to the point where they understand the idea of education as more than training? Should we change our core values? Or should we develop a bifurcated higher education system, either within existing universities or by ceding part of higher education to the universities of phoenixes?

What are you going to cede to the University of Phoenix or the Trump University? What exactly?

To realize the dream of a university without job training, it seems to me you have to take away from universities medical schools (that’s training), engineering schools (training again), architecture schools, nursing schools, business schools, communication schools, library science schools, software engineering schools, IT courses, environment sciences, forestry, meteorology…

Ok, then you are left with Physics, Mathematics, Chemistry, History, Philosophy. Even Computer Science, once you’ve taken out all the IT and software engineering will only remain as a shadow of its current self.

Oh! Wait. Many students take Physics or Mathematics so that they can teach the field. So you’ll have to create a Teacher schools covering these topics and turn down students who want to train as teachers.

I’m not done: you’d have to ensure that nobody can take a Ph.D. has a form of training in order to become a professor.

Now, after taking out pretty much everything, you are left with the pure minded students. Those students who go to college just to learn and growth. How many will you have? Not very many at all. Maybe 9 out of 10 faculty member will have to be let go; maybe tuitions will go up tremendously.

So, you’ll be educating a very small elite while being cautious not to “train” them too much. Better make sure these students come from wealthy family because with no marketable skill, it is very hard to find a job these days.

Can someone remind me why we went there in the first place and what problem we solved?