The Practice is not the Performance: Why project-based learning fails • Hacker News Board

Re: The Practice is not the Performance: Why project-based learning fails

#61

Post by thomasahle » Sat, Feb 24, 2018, 9:31 AM UTC

adamzerner wrote: post #49

djrobstep wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because education as a system isn't designed for actually learning, it's designed for perpetuating a meaningless and arbitrary game of credentialism to justify the socio-economic hierarchy. And to babysit children so that their parents can spend more time participating in capitalism.

I don't know why this is downvoted. I think that Bryan Caplan's book The Case against Education - Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money ( https://press.princeton.edu/titles/11225.html ) makes a pretty strong argument to support the related points.

Most people on hacker news have (as far as I've noticed) very much enjoyed their university programs and will defend them quite vehemently. Often these programs were quite high quality, with lots of close contacts with TA's and professors.

Further, for people who did theoretical CS or math programs, it can feel quite frustrated working in a field with so many "self-learned" people and find that these are often ignorant of what they don't know.

Finally, many people here have Ph.D.'s or have worked in academia or teaching in various ways.

This all results in people being somewhat skeptical of advice to "don't do school".

Re: The Practice is not the Performance: Why project-based learning fails

#62

Post by cthalupa » Sat, Feb 24, 2018, 9:36 AM UTC

tjoff wrote: post #57

mjburgess wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PhD is skilling in academic skills. Undergrad and most masters programs are still just going for information recall. This is why PhDs are specific, intensive, daily, guided, etc.These are all the characteristics of skill aquistion. Compare, say, with paino tuition. All skill acquisition is basically a form of apprentiship. PhDs are apprentice academics. Ask yourself the simple question: after finishing this education…

The answer is that you've learned to learn. You got some breath of knowledge, not everything is relevant but it helps putting things in perspective. This is crucial. But the most important thing is that you've learned how to quickly adapt and pick up new things. This is what is valuable and in combination with a broad understanding is very much worth the education. It is okay if the understanding is shallow or even o…

Learning to learn is an important skill.

But so is the ability to do a job.

Some companies have the resources available to take a fresh grad that knows theory, concepts, and how to learn, and then get them up to speed on how to actually do the job they've been hired for. Some WANT people that only know how to learn and the concepts, so they can teach them how to do it the "X Company Way".

But a whole lot don't. A whole lot of companies need to hire people that can slot into a position and hit the ground running. A whole lot of companies need people that can deliver on the job description.

A strong Computer Science education will probably make you a significantly better programmer in the long run, but if you can't get a job or keep one because you aren't prepared to step in and do the job, it doesn't really matter.

Re: The Practice is not the Performance: Why project-based learning fails

#63

Post by nextos » Sat, Feb 24, 2018, 9:38 AM UTC

eksemplar wrote: post #17

In Denmark we have a two universities that almost exclusively do project based learning. Basically students are put in groups and attached a mentor who is responsible for teaching them CS. To this is coupled traditional courses in basic math/algorithms/scientific theory. These lines produce candidates that are wasted supperior to our traditional universities. Well, if you need them to actually work with CS in the rea…

So do you think Aalborg students are better than DTU's?

Re: The Practice is not the Performance: Why project-based learning fails

#64

Post by mlazos » Sat, Feb 24, 2018, 9:40 AM UTC

I disagree with this article for the most part, it doesn’t make sense to say that just because some group projects are not optimal implies all project based learning is bad. I think doing projects individually is hugely important both from learning theory and also learning software design. In college we had group projects and individual projects going on simultaneously, one of which was building google maps for a US state given only some location data. This project simultaneously taught me about various data structures and algos (Kd-tree, graph search, autocorrect) and we later extended it to use networking in a client server architecture. I think it’s invaluable to have students do many parts of a project individually and then come together to build larger projects and this addresses the concerns of the author.

Re: The Practice is not the Performance: Why project-based learning fails

#65

Post by heisenbit » Sat, Feb 24, 2018, 9:41 AM UTC

Let's be clear here: An academic is writing about project based learning. Of course concepts are important. But then according to Edison Genius and many would argue Innovation is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.

Academic success or conceptual understanding alone are not good indicators of professional success. Perseverance and collaborations are at least as important as is the ability to sell. Also let's not forget: The market is usually buying experience and not conceptual knowledge with unproven track record for application.

Projects may not be the best way to learn in depth about an isolated aspect if the project is end to end. But that is setting up a straw-man to be torched. A proper way to learn about networking e.g. would be measuring TCP performance and experimenting with the ramp-up. Or writing a protocol decoder for something non-trivial.

Re: The Practice is not the Performance: Why project-based learning fails

#66

Post by muzani » Sat, Feb 24, 2018, 9:52 AM UTC

That's funny. I came to the same conclusion as this article after reading The Art of Learning, by Josh Waitzkin, which the writer also mentions.

Project based learning is inefficient because you repeat things you know lots of times. The repetitions are spread out too far to be burned into memory.

I find that even after 6 years of experience, I still have to Google to convert an int array to string array. I've done dozens of projects, but this thing was never optimized for. It works fine to complete a project, but becomes a drag when trying to implement more complex code.

The ideal would be to internalize as a kind of instinct. When something is instinct, the subconscious can calculate it and work out solutions.

I think the best kind of learning would be to a kind of coding dojo, where they repeat similar routines until it becomes a part of their instincts.

Re: The Practice is not the Performance: Why project-based learning fails

#67

Post by TheSpiceIsLife » Sat, Feb 24, 2018, 9:54 AM UTC

mlazos wrote: post #64

I disagree with this article for the most part, it doesn’t make sense to say that just because some group projects are not optimal implies all project based learning is bad. I think doing projects individually is hugely important both from learning theory and also learning software design. In college we had group projects and individual projects going on simultaneously, one of which was building google maps for a US…

I think this comment touches on the idea that, given a few hundred students enrolled in a course, there will be some subsets of students who get more out of one type of teaching/learning methodology vs some others.

Therefore, at random places at random times there will be courses that emphasise some methodology/ies where a majority of the students do well, or not, given some kind of bell curve distribution of student-methodology success.

The outcome of which is that, occasionally, someone can write a convincing argument for or against some particular methodology.

Teaching and learning, at scale, is difficult; outcomes are ill defined and hard to measure; correlation, causation, competing priorities and influences.

Re: The Practice is not the Performance: Why project-based learning fails

#68

Post by njstraub608 » Sat, Feb 24, 2018, 10:01 AM UTC

The author argues against project-based learning but then states his "5-minute attempt to come up with an alternative way to teach these skills" which are, effectively, all projects or pieces of a project. Ultimately it doesn't boil down to project-based learning being ineffective, but lack of teaching for communication in engineering teams. If a student's goal is to learn network programming, then they should speak up that they want to focus on that aspect of the project. I took a few CS course post-grad after already beginning my programming journey and found the methods of teaching to be highly ineffective (the practice problems were too abstract and most students couldn't draw the connection to real-life problems - this is at a uni with a top CS program). Upper level courses should definitely keep focus on the complexities of theory, but entry-level CS courses would serve students better by fostering their interest in a topic and showing what it's like in the work force, and then if it's still something they want to pursue then teaching the theory makes sense as it's something they would end up trying to learn about on their own anyway.

Re: The Practice is not the Performance: Why project-based learning fails

#69

Post by javajosh » Sat, Feb 24, 2018, 10:05 AM UTC

mjburgess wrote: post #39

djrobstep wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because education as a system isn't designed for actually learning, it's designed for perpetuating a meaningless and arbitrary game of credentialism to justify the socio-economic hierarchy. And to babysit children so that their parents can spend more time participating in capitalism.

I guess you're down-voted for both having a non-obvious opinion and phrasing it in a hostile way. You are correct however, but it's more understanable than you make out. Rather, the education system is designed to impart the skill of information recall -- which was essential to actually acquiring the target skills (ie., you needed to remember lots about chemistry before doing any). Remembering sentences about a skill…

School gives some a useful fiction, which is primary motivational. E.g. campus, classrooms, professors make you feel better about spending your time on some esoterica.

The other benefit is subject gate keeping. Departments at least in STEM, don't offer pointless classes.

An autodidact might not know what's valuable and might not always muster the energy to get through. They also might not have the integrity to give themselves a fair test.

So yeah, school is useful beyond addressing the scarcity of books.

Re: The Practice is not the Performance: Why project-based learning fails

#70

Post by nadam » Sat, Feb 24, 2018, 10:13 AM UTC

The problem with teaching programming in functional languages is that those languages use a different PARADIGM than imperative languages. Learning the functional paradigm is very useful, but it cannot replace programming in like C. They are different. They teach you different things. For my taste and my carrier as mostly a performance / graphics programmer reading the source code of DOOM was a much better, interesting, and inspiring school than learning to program in SML in a university course.