[Edu-sig] Low Enrollments - programming as anit-intellectualism.

[Rob Malouf]

On Wed, 2005-11-02 at 12:38 -0600, John Zelle wrote:
> Actually, most CS types would say that programming itself is 
> not an academic subject; rather it is a skill of some importance to
> the 
> study of "real" academic subjects such as Computer Science. 

It's also worth remembering that lots of programming and general
technology use goes on outside of CS departments.  Our computational
linguistics program is based on Python, and the biology and geology
departments here at SDSU also teach Python.  We're not training our
students to be programmers, we're just trying to give them the basic
computational skills necessary to study language, genes, etc.

Also, I just sat on the search committee for hiring a new director of
operations for our language lab -- there was lots of discussion of the
flashy new web frameworks that their tech people use.  Sure, it's all
going to be obsolete by the time our current students are 30, just like
all those laser disks we have are obsolete now.  But so what? They're
not teaching .net, they're just using it to develop new ways of teaching
languages, which is about as liberal-education-y a goal as you can get.

-- 
Rob Malouf <rmalouf at mail.sdsu.edu>
Department of Linguistics and Oriental Languages
San Diego State University