A lot of theory! But we trully need more practice
I have in my luggage 20 years of studies from elementary to high school to finally land at the university. The same way of doing things: theory, theory and theory. How boring. When in some countries students start to specialize themself in a specific field 3 or 4 years before high school diploma, we have here to wait 4 or 5 years more than them for this opportunity. A french colonial legacy, the same legacy for the countries of francophone West Africa.
For my part I will develop the topic about my field that is computer science, following my student experience in my country. The fact is a majority of students(LOL!probably me too) trained in this area, if they have not been doing necessary effort to train themselves in addition of the traditional course lessons are absolutely not ready to properly integrate the professional environment . And worst most of the students have never done a traineeship until they reach they last year in engineering class. Put the blame on the educational system that that does not take care of helping students to place and does not try to motivate them. Also companies who only offer trainee-slave stations do not help.
As an example when students are teached HTML3 and CSS2, website are working with HTML5 and CSS3 with all its framework. When students are teached the powerful but not all the time necessary JavaEE, Web application based on MVC are build in Rails(Ruby), Symfony(PHP), Django(Python), Laravel(PHP), … . When students aren’t aware of the possibility to do a mobile app with jQuery Mobile and can only do it with Android. To talk to the uninitiated what i want to show with these examples is that we are always kilometers behind the others. We have not, are not trying to be visionary. Do not try to catch up all the time why do not seek to exceed them. Wanting to be follower we will not go far.
On top of that you have some of the professor in the public or private that didn’t give you the good prerequisites, didn’t help you, dissociables and wan’t from you to give them the moon. Sorry gentlemen, but it is only in a peaceful environment, human and trustedthat ingenuity, rigor and respect from your students will be at your fingertips as well as theirs.
In conclusion I would still say that everything isn’t negative. There is hope because there are teachers who innovate in the way of teaching, by their ethics and how they embody respect. These teachers have marked me and thanks to them I have my conception of computing. There are also mentors, entrepreneurs, brave students (excellent by the way), the ICT community and bloggers who follows the “Stay hungry. Stay foolish” Steve Jobs.
Mister Jobs says: “ Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
