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Re: [ProgSoc] ipod battery



On 13/06/2006, at 10:14 PM, Roland Turner wrote:

On Tue, 2006-06-13 at 10:57 +0000, John Elliot wrote:

I had a discussion once with a UTS staff member (I'm not sure what their
name was, a lecturer in some IT field), because I was thinking about
leaving. Their advice was to stay, because, according to this person,
when he and his wife entertained friends who hadn't been to university
the level of conversation was low. I.e. people who didn't go to
university were dull, and "you could tell". (This comment struck me as
wrong, 'for so many reasons').

Confusing correlation with cause is a pretty common error, if indeed
there was a correlation in this case. Assuming that the prejudices of a
single academic are representative of the tone of an entire
school/college/faculty, or worse an entire university, is another.


Brace yourself.

Sadly, I tend to agree with him on a university scale. I mean, take a look at the Big Ass (tm) banner hanging from the UTS Faculty of IT building. It says "10 Reasons for choosing UTS: ...", and then goes on to list all the UTS faculties - such as IT, Science, Law etc. - which are available at EVERY Australian university (and TAFE for that matter). Think about that for a second...let's assume that there have been ~5 or so people involved writing up that banner. There's copywriters, designers, sign-writers etc. Each of them have seen this sign, done their part on it, and now we see it - hanging up for all to see.

You might be thinking to yourself, what the hell does this have to do with anything? It's just a sign after all, right? Well in my humble opinion, that sign and those who were involved in creating it are very much indicative of UTS:FIT and its' staff. Or perhaps even universities in general. The message on the sign indicates that even the university thinks it has nothing to offer its' students other than what all other universities and TAFEs can offer. The staff which were involved in the sign-writing process probably saw how ridiculous it was but didn't feel they could change anything. Even scarier, they might NOT have seen how ridiculous it was.

It's the same in the classroom; very few lecturers and tutors bring real world examples into the material that's been taught for decades. Reason? Either they don't keep up to date with the field they're teaching, they don't keep up to date at all, or they just don't see the point. What reason do they have to migrate from the syllabus they've been given? The university certainly doesn't encourage it, and now we've even got students who COMPLAIN when staff stray from the syllabus and teach relevant, real-world stuff. All they want is their piece of paper and a job-placement in some large bullshit conglomerate.

Yes, I'm jaded. Please excuse the rant - the production-line nature of universities angers me.


-- Nathan President, UTS Programmers' Society

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