How our young colleagues are being educated....

Christopher Morrow morrowc.lists at gmail.com
Mon Dec 22 17:08:26 UTC 2014


On Mon, Dec 22, 2014 at 4:13 AM, Javier J <javier at advancedmachines.us> wrote:

> Not only are they skimming over new technologies such as BGP, MPLS and the
> fundamentals of TCP/IP that run the internet and the networks of the world,
> they were focusing on ATM , Frame Relay and other technologies that are on
> their way out the door and will probably be extinct by the time this

These sound like 'standard enterprise networking technologies' (still,
yes some other options are coming around, but .. there's still a
shed-load of atm/frame wan stuff to be bought, and really the 'mpls'
for enterprises is gussied up frame/atm without per-site ptp link
management at each site, no knowledge of MPLS is required on the
enterprise side of the connection)

> student graduates. They are teaching classful routing and skimming over
> CIDR. Is this indicative of the state of our education system as a whole?
> How is it this student doesn't know about OSPF and has never heard of RIP?

enterprise people hide in 10/8  ... why would they need to care about
/26 or 27 ? everythign in their world is a /24.

> If your network hardware is so old you need a crossover cable, it's time to
> upgrade. In this case, it’s time to upgrade our education system.

but, the cross-over cable means my network gear still works and I
don't have to spend on replacement gear (yet). Remember, enterprise
network.

> I didn't write this email on the sole experience of my conversation with
> one student, I wrote this email because I have noticed a pattern emerging
> over the years with other university students at other schools across the
> country. It’s just the countless times I have crossed paths with a young IT
> professional and was literally in shock listening to the things they were
> being taught. Teaching old technologies instead of teaching what is
> currently being used benefits no one. Teaching classful and skipping CIDR
> is another thing that really gets my blood boiling.

you must require a large cooling vat then.

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

enterprise networking... the name of the degree says enough to know
what's going to come out of the program :(

> 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.
>
> 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?

you are getting a bit ranty, if you keep in mind the target of the
coursework (enterprise people) then basically nothing in your mail is
shocking.



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