How our young colleagues are being educated....

Wed Dec 24 20:27:05 UTC 2014

As a student I feel particularly concerned about this.

Le 22/12/2014 10:13, Javier J a écrit :
> 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
> 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?

On the point about learning "ancient" technologies like X.25, I strongly
believe it's not useless when put in comparison with newer ones .
The purpose of some protocols depends on their environment at a specific
time. IMHO, the evolution that resulted SPDY shows how TCP *was*
relevant when you had lots of noise on the line (back-off algorithms).
Furthermore, getting to know the past is the best way to avoid
perpetrating the same mistakes all over. Eventually providing bases and
theory of a simple communication (channeling, OSI model,
error-correction, etc.).

The administration's opinion is not to get hands on the latest
technology (mostly pushed by companies) since it can be valueless tomorrow.

On the other hand, people have to be very careful not keeping the rusty
engine working.
I never knew if one of my teacher was aware of the existence of CIDR
notation, meanwhile he taught us about IPv6 (sadly not as a turning
point with IPv4 exhaustion but more like a fancy feature).
On other courses, it ended with VxLAN, LTE and multicast.
I agree that SDN is becoming inevitable and is showing the tip of its nose.

In my experience, I've never waited courses to understand DNS or BGP
(yet they gave me strong roots thereafter).
I'm also one of the few to attend networking conferences. I get a glance
at a more political than technical view of what will be the future
Internet, not taught in class.
I believe lots students aren't aware of theses events, of the resources,
and would be very interested : they just need a little boost.
Some others, as anywhere, won't be very implicated going deeper than the
courses. So, even if they had the latest knowledge, I don't think it
would be so much more beneficial.

In lab we get the opportunity to configure on high-end material.
Our subjects are sometimes very restrictive, not helping to see past the
few commands, not involving "creative" things like seeing everyone a an
independent network, routing through some...
One of my disappointments is we only work on a unique brand. I don't
think we should go over a cheaper manufacturer (removing a somewhat
"precious" experience on the famous one) but we should be given
alternatives, the equivalent of pseudo-code : the router is only a mean
to achieve : how does a Linux construct the BGP command comparing to
Cisco...