damondk

Comment Threads

• Charlie Stross commented on Are Professors Obsolete?
  Joan, I'm spectacularly rubbish at keeping plants alive, but there's a tank on my kitchen window-sill full of nature's insecticide (in the shape of a flourishing colony of sundews and a couple of raggedy pitcher plants -- the Venus Flytrap finally died after I was away on a trip when it flowered, and they're unfashionable enough in the UK that the local garden centres no longer sell them). Keeping them alive is mostly a matter of keeping 1-2 inches of standing water in the bottom of the aquarium, topped up from the ion-exchange filter jug we use for drinking water....
• Charlie Stross commented on Are Professors Obsolete?
  A person with an IT degree from a technical college has taken just as many programming classes as the person with a BS in Comp Sci unless the BSer filled out all his electives with programming. That's not what a CS degree is about. (And it's why I refer to my CS conversion degree as a "Cargo cult" CS degree -- you can distil a chunk of CS down into 12 months and drop it on someone's head in a death march, but you can't make up for 4 years of higher mathematics, which is what real CS degrees give...
• Charlie Stross commented on Are Professors Obsolete?
  Mechanical educators/learning from a can as a SF trope is an indicator species, like artificial uteruses. ... Also, weren't a lot of golden age writers autodidacts who were bitter about not getting a university education? I think you nailed it. Golden age authors with chips on shoulder about being an autodidact -> SFnal trope that makes those pesky professors obsolete. Modern authors are somewhat less prone to this cognitive disorder, if only because access to higher education is vastly more widespread....
• sabik.eta commented on Are Professors Obsolete?
  "One memory trick"... not really. Ah, that was a bit ambiguous of me — the "one" in that sentence referred not to the number of tricks, but to the number of skills — namely, rote memorisation. There may well be more than one trick to it, indeed the children are expected to become experts at it (10 years, 10k hours...) but it's still just one skill. One skill that's at best only moderately useful in the world....
• Charlie Stross commented on Are Professors Obsolete?
  My $0.02: it depends if widespread broadband uptake means the internet becomes a major distance learning delivery channel. In some fields, this may be possible -- ones where specialist equipment isn't needed, just lots of study. Mathematics, philosophy, literature: all you need is a pencil, and lots of sweat. Engineering or chemistry or experimental physics or medicine? You can't teach those without serious lab/workshop equipment, or a teaching hospital. Other fields may fall in-between: what about MBAs or law, for example? What are the requirements above and beyond textbooks, lectures, and tutorials? (MBAs need face to face time because one...