The first course on my history degree is a general introduction to the humanities and so for the first year I’m basically doing a very general course that covers English, History, Art History, Philosophy and more poetry than I ever wanted to look at. At the first tutorial we were told that although most of the students take the course as a start to a history degree lots of us end up doing another degree because they discover that they enjoy something else more. Can I just state for the record that I am no nearer to enjoying poetry more than I was before hand. Don’t get me wrong, I like some poetry but I have to say that I prefer the meaning in the works of Spike Milligan over a sonnet any day.
Saying that I’m learning a lot doing each section. My photography should improve from what I’ve learn about understanding composition in paintings, and looking at poetry has reminded me exactly how badly I need to improve my writing skills in order to get my meaning over in a clearer way.
This week I am going to be learning how to listen to music. I didn’t bother looking to see which piece was the focus, but when setting the video for this weeks TV show (Note to people who don’t live in the UK: BBC2 show TV shows associated with Open University courses overnight which we have to record and then watch) I noticed that it’s a Beatles track we’re covering. I do hope that doesn’t ruin listening to their music for me because I start to over analyse it.
A couple of years ago I tried to start a computer science type degree on the OU. I didn’t last long because it was just so unrelated to what I do every day and either outdated or wrong in all the wrong places and I can’t escape the fact that I’ve learnt more useful skills in the first few months of this degree than I did during the computing degree. This goes along with something that I’ve noticed over the years: a computer science degree may not be the most useful degree if you want to become a software engineer. Our programming staff have training in areas like physics, chemistry and even ancient Chinese literature (which I will get killed for mentioning on the net). We have lots of computer science types too, but without fail they all say that they had to learn the skills they needed after they graduated.
I don’t know if this is a UK thing, but a degree in a computing related field over here just doesn’t seem to be that useful in the real world. Is it like that elsewhere, or is the fact that so many other degrees need you to code nowadays mean that the science areas set you just as well because they manage to teach the basic skills and mindset you need to be a programmer much better than you learn when you’re taught how to do those things specifically. Proper scientific method is still the best way to track down difficult bugs and so is a physicist better equipped to rationalise the problem than a CS person who has been taught that debuggers are there to allow you to solve the problem through what basically amounts to fiddling. OK, gross simplification, but you get my point. There’s no doubt that most people (and I include myself in this) use debuggers in the way of least resistance instead of hypothesising what might be wrong with the code and then attempting to proving it using the debugger or code changes. How many times have you all stepped through a program and reached a simple problem that if you’d thought about it beforehand you could have figured out much quicker?
This is getting dangerously away from ramble and nearing a rant. On top of all that I’ve not made my point apparent yet and so hardly anybody is going to have read down this far to see what it is. The deep and meaningful conclusion to this post is that I don’t know what I think at the moment. I can’t decide whether computer science degrees are just out of touch or if they’re just not needed in today’s world. The most useful algorithms that used to be taught are part of the basic runtimes of most languages today (lists and the like) and the real important skills such as UI design and usability don’t seem to be taught properly anywhere. Can it be that the basics of programming are now so simple that any intelligent person can pick them up and learn the rest of what they need as they go along? Or, and this is aimed at those of you who taught yourself to code, can it be that it was always that simple and it was just that the information was harder to get when you only had a Spectrum or C64.
