How our young colleagues are being educated....

Dennis Bohn bohn at adelphi.edu
Tue Dec 23 19:40:45 UTC 2014


On Mon, Dec 22, 2014 at 3:31 PM, Ken Chase <math at sizone.org> wrote:

> Learning how to do CIDR math is a major core component of the coursework?
> Im
> thinking that this is about a 30 minute module in the material, once you
> know
> binary, powers of 2 and some addition and subtraction (all of which is
> taught
> in most schools by when, first year highschool?) you should be done with
> it.


So... just finished up teaching a network course because the Math/Comp Sci
dept had lost professors  I can tell you it was really tough getting across
the idea of four bytes of dotted decimal from binary and  THEN subnet masks
and getting the students THEN to convert to CIDR.  Many glazed eyeballs.

We asked some of the students who had taken the network class in prior
years and it was true that they learned very little of the things we
consider basic, as Javier mentioned.  The profs seemed to have been
focusing on programming more than neworking per se, even tho the book they
were using covered the technology as well as socket programming.  We
covered all of the things in Javier's initial rant and more, like the
principles of TCP congestion control and the history of packet switching.

It was fun being able to let them in on some real world things, like say
the sinking feeling of making a change in a network and then the phone
starts ringing off the hook :-)    Unfortunately, this was likely a
one-time deal that the students got to really learn a couple of things
about networking.


Dennis Bohn
> Adelphi University
>



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