Earlier I wrote about how the school of business here at the University of Alberta is requiring us to use FrontPage for some assignments.
I arranged to meet the program coordinator in his office during his scheduled office hours but when I arrived his door was locked and he wasn’t around. So I went and talked to our VP Academic at the Business Student’s Association. She essentially said that she didn’t have any control over the curriculum but that I should talk to my professor anyway. In class on Tuesday we chatted about FrontPage and he agreed that it was out of date and ultimately not useful in the future. However, where he satisfied me is when he started talking about how any real programs we learn in class aren’t going to always apply directly to our careers. He said it’s more the concepts and the methodology that we are learning which are important.
Surprisingly I agreed with him. Realistically we aren’t learning specifics in school, we are learning how too apply our general knowledge to a broad array of situations.
At this point I don’t think it’s really worth getting all worked up over. The semester is almost done and they will be re-engineering the course for next year.
March 20th, 2008 at 4:05 pm
“She essentially said that she didn’t have any over the curriculum” - word missing?
You’re right though - unless this is a vocational course where you’re being taught to do a specific task for a specific job, knowing the concepts and methods is more important than where the icon is for a particular function in a particular program - after all, once you know how to use one WYSIWYG web design program, learning to use the next one takes a couple of hours of messing around.