How our young colleagues are being educated....

Miles Fidelman mfidelman at meetinghouse.net
Fri Dec 26 00:21:34 UTC 2014


Cisco as the basis of networking material? Does nobody use Comer, 
Stallings, or Tannenbaum as basic texts anymore?

Miles Fidelman

Mike Jones wrote:
> I am a university student that has just completed the first term of
> the first year of a Computer Systems and Networks course. Apart from a
> really out of place MATH module that did trig but not binary, it has
> been reasonably well run so far. The binary is covered in a different
> module, just not maths. The worst part of the course is actually the
> core networking module, which is based on Cisco material. The cisco
> material is HORRIBLE! those awkward "book" page things with the stupid
> higherarchical menu. As for the content.. a scalable network is one
> you can add hosts to, so what's a non-scalable network? will the
> building collapse if i plug my laptop in?
>
> As I have been following NANOG for years I do notice a lot of mistakes
> or "over-simplifications" that show a clear distinction between the
> theory in the university books and the reality on nanog, and
> demonstrate the lecturers lack of real world exposure. As a simple
> example, in IPv4 the goal is to conserve IP addresses therefore on
> point to point links you use a /30 which only wastes 50% of the
> address space. In the real world - /31's? but a /31 is impossible I
> hear the lecturers say...
>
> The entire campus is not only IPv4-only, but on the wifi network they
> actually assign globally routable addresses, then block protocol 41,
> so windows configures broken 6to4! Working IPv6 connectivity would at
> least expose students to it a little and let them play with it...
>
> Amoung the things I have heard so far: MAC Addresses are unique, IP
> fragments should be blocked for security reasons, and the OSI model
> only has 7 layers to worry about. All theoretically correct. All
> wrong.
> - Mike Jones
>
>
> On 22 December 2014 at 09:13, Javier J <javier at advancedmachines.us> wrote:
>> Dear NANOG Members,
>>
>> It has come to my attention, that higher learning institutions in North
>> America are doing our young future colleagues a disservice.
>>
>> I recently ran into a student of Southern New Hampshire University enrolled
>> in the Networking/Telecom Management course and was shocked by what I
>> learned.
>>
>> 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?
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> Are colleges teaching what an RFC is? Are colleges teaching what IPv6 is?
>>
>> 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?


-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra




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