[ILUG] [Even More OT] general thoughts on another free Linux Internet s ervice?

[Aaron McDaid]

> ]Unless Queen's is an exception (which I doubt!) you haven't missed a
thing
> ]not going
> ]to uni - except for getting pissed 4+ nights a week, sleeping in till 3pm
> ]every day :-)

>Makes me wonder if this is the reason you didn't learn anything...


Fair Point! But I done well enough in the exams and the lectures i did go 
to weren't up to much. I also had a flick through the recommended books,
talked to some people who actually did go to most of the lectures.
I learned more spending the odd afternoon on my own dual boot computer doing

some C,Perl, Javascript and I remember being particularly annoyed about the
time spent on "recursive" functions. I just thought "a function that calls
itself, so what? I been doing that for ages". God knows how many full
lectures
were spent just saying "a function being able to call itself is a nice
thing"
but most of the class couldn't grasp it. He barely got a chance to squeeze
in
an example of what recursion can be used for.

> Pity really.  Why can't they do a few months during the summer before 1st
> year to bring these people up to speed.

The interesting thing is that students who didn't do well in their A-Levels,
Leaving Cert etc. have to do a year beforehand called Level 0 whereas most
including me go int Level 1. The factor which decides whether to have to 
do Level 0 should be:

> Do you know what a computer is?  No?  Then you start college early, buddy.

instead of "Did you get 400 or more points"


That way when I started Level 1 I could be pretty confident that everyone
there
knew at least something and the lecturer could get on with "advanced" topics
such
as, ahem, helloworld.c 


I'm not really looking forward to final year. I'll probably still end up
doing
assignments for 10-15 of my friends :-)


 


-----Original Message-----
From: Burke, Gary : GIG IS&T [mailto:Gary.Burke at guinness.com]
Sent: 16 March 2000 11:17
To: Aaron McDaid; Ilug (E-mail)
Subject: RE: [ILUG] [OT] general thoughts on another free Linux Internet
s ervice?


]Unless Queen's is an exception (which I doubt!) you haven't missed a thing
]not going
]to uni - except for getting pissed 4+ nights a week, sleeping in till 3pm
]every day :-)

Makes me wonder if this is the reason you didn't learn anything...

But you are right, Computer Degrees generally cater for people who don't
know anything about computers, which is annoying to those of us who do.
Granted they didn't go quite as low as 'this is the /on/ switch', but for
some people they probably should have.

Pity really.  Why can't they do a few months during the summer before 1st
year to bring these people up to speed.

Do you know what a computer is?  No?  Then you start college early, buddy.



Gary
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