How our young colleagues are being educated....

Mon Dec 22 10:24:35 UTC 2014

Subject: How our young colleagues are being educated.... Date: Mon, Dec 22, 2014 at 04:13:42AM -0500 Quoting Javier J (javier at advancedmachines.us):
> Dear NANOG Members,
> 
> It has come to my attention, that higher learning institutions in North
> America are doing our young future colleagues a disservice.

Yes. Although, as long as they don't teach people that _every_ router
does NAT, we'll be fine.

> Are colleges teaching what an RFC is? Are colleges teaching what IPv6 is?

At the university I taught, yes.  But that is in Europe, on the Royal
Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, for 3rd year in a MsC
programme in EE, Physics or CS. I am seeing similar cluelessness at
smaller proto-universities in Sweden, where they have bought a branded
course. Lots of Flame Delay. And EIGRP. Branded course. Our trainee that
came out of that did prove to be highly trainable, though.

> What about unicast and multicast? I confirmed with one student half way
> through their studies that they were not properly taught how DNS works, and
> had no clue what the term “root servers” meant.

Multicast, check. 
DNS, check. 

> Am I crazy? Am I ranting? Doesn't this need to be addressed? …..and if not
> by us, then by whom? How can we fix this?

People who enter academentia in networking, especially to teach at
rural colleges, tend to freeze in time and stick to whatever fad was
"in" when they were young. Especially ATM is popular, since it has,
for all its uselessness, a nice theoretical undercarriage and stands
on the shoulders of decades of telco style "Warum einfach wenns auch
kompliziert geht?" (you will have to translate that yourself, it's German
and describes engineering well)

In Sweden, universities (where tuition is 0 for all citizens and can be
made 0 for all citizens of the EU) the universities have a third task
besides undergraduate production and research, and that is to interact
with greater society. The key to good education that fulfils the needs
of society is to ensure the interaction is two-way. Each course, get a 
industry lecturer in for at least one lecture. This, if chosen well, will
make it impossible to teach Flame Delay in 2014. 

-- 
Måns Nilsson     primary/secondary/besserwisser/machina
MN-1334-RIPE                             +46 705 989668
We have DIFFERENT amounts of HAIR --
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <http://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/attachments/20141222/2d8adebd/attachment.sig>