[modi123_1]

FYI - citing wikipedia for a paper should be an 'f': at best to teach how to do proper research; at worst to prevent people from blindly citing unverified sources subject change by asshats winning arguments at bars (collateral misinformation).

[lordofduct]

NeoTifa, on 27 December 2010 - 02:01 PM, said:

No, that's not what college is all about. Didn't you know? College is all about partying, friends, and female "experimentation". There's no work involved in college. All the crap professors tell you to do you can just get from some azn off the internet. We don't have to study, that's for nerds! I have a football scholarship, I don't need to actually study. I'm popular. We need to coast along just like we did in high school, expect our teachers to hold our hands through the assignments, and let us hand in our homework well after the due date. I mean come on! Where's the fun in that?! Parties, girls, booze, sex, and weed is what college is about. Who said anything about learning? Besides, I'll just read Visual Basic for Dummies and program a better version of World of Warcraft next week and make millions. Easy peasy.

best summation of it!

There really are students who think that. It's sad.

modi123_1, on 27 December 2010 - 02:04 PM, said:

FYI - citing wikipedia for a paper should be an 'f': at best to teach how to do proper research; at worst to prevent people from blindly citing unverified sources subject change by asshats winning arguments at bars (collateral misinformation).

wikipedia has a citation section for a reason. And it would be proper research if one utilizes those 'sources'. And that was my point, I should be allowed to locate reputable sources, via wikipedia. But in my morale dignity I believe that I should be giving wikipedia credit in citation because I used them as a research tool to get to my other sources.

It's the whole point of a citation.

As I put it to one of my professors who was big on using the databases from other colleges for research. They were chock full of papers written by professors, undergrads, etc. And I asked him...

"So Mr. Smith, what makes those papers reputable?"

"Well the ci... citations... of... course... doh"

"The citations, really? And when researching in these directories... one should always be checking either the research [data from experiments, etc] or the citations right? So what part of it am I missing?"



Really they shouldn't be banning students from using public or free research tools (like wikipedia, or even public websites which I've seen banned as well). They instead should be teaching proper research methods. Free information can be good information as long as one does their own leg work in dealing with it. This even goes for private information, because even then, there is a level of accountability that you weigh against this source. And that is the key part about research is being able to weigh that judgement about the source.

For example wikipedia could easily cite a link to The Science Journal with a peer reviewed article on the matter by a doctor from Oxford.

This post has been edited by lordofduct: 27 December 2010 - 03:20 PM

[macosxnerd101]

@Kilorn: I think that's part of it. I also think a lot of it is the fact that Computer Scientists don't necessarily need to be able to program, so many professors choose to limit their programming backgrounds. I have no idea why they would do that. At the high school level, it's more just a general lack of experience. Often times the math department chair or the principal calls the Calculus teacher who has never written a line of code into his or her office and tells the teacher to take a couple of programming classes over the summer to teach the subject next year.

[Curtis Rutland]

Well, high school is one thing, but there are intro classes at college that will get people who've never programmed a line of code started on the right path, assuming they got the right prof to teach it. many places will foist it off to whoever isn't that busy, regardless of whether or not they're good at teaching beginners. I took a beginner's course once, and had to teach my classmates after class, because the professor wasn't used to teaching students below the graduate level.

[Kilorn]

I've also noticed that with the rate of change in new technologies, the people who have been teaching for more than a few years generally have outdated knowledge unless they spend their free time trying to keep up like the rest of us. I think I've seen only one professor that actually cared enough to stay in the industry and keep up with the trends as much as he possibly could, and it made his teaching much better in my opinion. Someone who wrote FORTRAN 20 years ago and hasn't really stayed current on the trends and/or new languages/technologies isn't exactly someone I would consider worthy of teaching programming courses, yet I actually had a professor who fit this description completely, and somehow the school deemed him worthy of teaching a VB.NET class. Maybe I'm wrong, but I really don't understand how he was qualified to teach that course and all he ever did was give us assignments directly from the book and make us read a chapter each day in the class. He never taught from experience which made his teaching style incredibly boring and hard to follow because my mind tends to wander and I have trouble staying focused if I feel that I'm starting to get bored.

[hookiethe1]

Kilorn, on 27 December 2010 - 02:15 PM, said:

the people who have been teaching for more than a few years generally have outdated knowledge unless they spend their free time trying to keep up like the rest of us

Ahhh, that reminds me of a business school "intro to technology" class I had last Spring, where we learned that some of the more fancy computers had dual core processors and even up to a gigabyte of RAM, because that's what was written in the several year old textbook. That lecturer also recommended that the students (business school, remember) crack open their home PC's and check things out, including opening the hard drive. It was tough for me to sit through that class with my mouth shut.

[modi123_1]

lordofduct, on 27 December 2010 - 04:07 PM, said:

"The citations, really? And when researching in these directories... one should always be checking either the research [data from experiments, etc] or the citations right? So what part of it am I missing?"

Really they shouldn't be banning students from using public or free research tools (like wikipedia, or even public websites which I've seen banned as well). They instead should be teaching proper research methods. Free information can be good information as long as one does their own leg work in dealing with it. This even goes for private information, because even then, there is a level of accountability that you weigh against this source. And that is the key part about research is being able to weigh that judgement about the source.

My personal issue is the fact wiki is mutable. I know I've altered pages to win a bet and never gotten back to making sure it was fixed. Hell who knows how many people may or may not have cited a stray wiki entry of some obscure topic only to say something odd like elephants have two wieners? People's de facto belief that wiki is a trusted source scares the blue poop out of me (cited on wiki). The same goes for websites and forums. Mutable = bad. Now if you need assistance for ideas or argument direction well that is what it is, but if my integrity is called into question because of a quote I used and that website, forum post, or wiki page is missing or altered since then my ass is grass.


Of course all this strays past the nature of the posts... yes.. kids are more dumb in this new generation than ever before! Now get off my lawn.

[lordofduct]

aw yes, very true. But that wasn't my point. I wasn't arguing with my professor to use wikipedia directly. I was arguing that using it as a resource to get to a proper source should be allowed. Which all of my professors never allowed... as in I wasn't allowed to locate a source THROUGH wikipedia, not ON wikipedia. And I think that's crap.

[modi123_1]

Oh I have really never came across that before. Exactly how did your professor know - your strong desire to site your chain of logic to getting to a source?

[lordofduct]

1) because I asked (yeah this doesn't mean they can prove I did, but they said no because I asked. And I had an English professor tell me she was going to pay closer attention to my papers because of it)

2) because I feel it proper to cite a resource that I used to get to another. There are 3 basic reasons to cite (as I was taught)

a) to backup any assertion you made (the primary reason)
to give credit to others for their ideas (citing wikipedia for their research tool falls in the category for me)
c) to demonstrate the work you did (again wikipedia would fall under this)

It wouldn't be a direct citation... like this line of my paper is pulled directly from wikipedia. But it would get an entry in the bibliography.

Of course one would say that I could do it and just not say I did, and not cite it. But IMO that goes against the whole point of citations. The point of a citation is support and encourage honest writing and research. And to undermine that (pretend you didn't do something because you were told not to, but do it anyway) undermines the whole process. But at the same time I feel it should be allowed.

So I would do it anyway, cite it, and some of the teachers would give me F's for it. I would get on my soap box, they would get annoyed, my peers would laugh and/or yell at me... so on so forth.

Yes I was that kid, the annoying shit head in the back of the class ranting about anything and everything he could. It's the main reason I left school, they usually weren't keen on what I had to say. Especially the English professor who I told was probably whipped by his feminist wife every night, and was an idiot if he didn't see the irony of being both a male-feminist and a Hemingway fan.

This post has been edited by lordofduct: 27 December 2010 - 04:04 PM

[Sergio Tapia]

lordofduct, on 27 December 2010 - 04:28 PM, said:

Shit I know people who took CS courses, got degrees, and barely had to touch College Algebra. I went cross-eyed (don't get this confused w/ computer engineering courses, like neotifa is taking, I know she is taking the hard maths). Really, no math? You think you're a programmer and you can't even divide 36 by 9?

I took some calculus and other math related subjects during my 2nd and 3rd year. Hell, I even went to the ACM programming contest twice and got 10th and 7th place nationally.

Ask me how many times I actually used math higher than basic arithmetic during my programming career; actual work, not that academic crap.

You don't need math for half of the programming related tasks your job requires you to do. Unless of course you are working in an area that demands it.

This post has been edited by Sergio Tapia: 27 December 2010 - 06:46 PM

[Curtis Rutland]

Sergio, I agree to an extent. I rarely need to use any higher math in anything I do, since I write business applications. But those times I have actually had to use it, I was damn glad I knew how.

Sometimes it's not even higher math. Just knowing how to use modulus is important, but damned if some "programmers" don't even know what it means!

[macosxnerd101]

Math on the lines of Linear Algebra and Calculus, I'd agree on. However, with Discrete Math, it's used more often for things like simply evaluating the Big-O of an algorithm. Then when you talk data structures, that draws heavily on Graph Theory. And for business apps, you're pretty likely to be doing discrete probability and statistics, as well as possibly some combinatorics.

[Kilorn]

I'd say the area of programming where you'll use more advanced mathematics than any other area is easily game programming. With all the physics calculations and dealing with 3D objects and having to deal with matrices. , since you mentioned that you develop business applications, do you ever use matrices for anything?

[Sergio Tapia]

insertAlias, on 27 December 2010 - 09:31 PM, said:

Sergio, I agree to an extent. I rarely need to use any higher math in anything I do, since I write business applications. But those times I have actually had to use it, I was damn glad I knew how.

Sometimes it's not even higher math. Just knowing how to use modulus is important, but damned if some "programmers" don't even know what it means!

If I ever encounter a programmer that doesn't know what modulus is, I will slap him with both hands.