This program leads to the Master of Computer Science degree, which is a terminal, professional degree (as opposed to a research-oriented degree). Think of what I’m doing as the geek analog to an MBA.

I’ve actually been taking courses in the program since last year (which they helpfully allow students to do before they’ve been formally admitted to the program). Being able to take courses on a trial basis was vital for me since it helped verify that the material is at a level I can handle, although I’m carefully strategizing to avoid a few courses in the curriculum that involve a lot of crazy higher math. I’m a somewhat competent algebraist, but my last formal math course was in tenth grade.

The most common reaction I’ve gotten to this was “Why do you need to take more computer courses? You teach computer courses. You’re like mister software.” The truth of it is that there’s always more to learn no matter how much of a ninja you are (which is one reason why I love the field), but there’s a lot of academic CS I didn’t get in my undergrad years since I only took a few CS courses as electives (my undergraduate degree is in English). And although I’ve been doing technology teaching in various corporate settings since I was in my 20s, I want to open the door to potentially do more kinds of teaching later in my career, and having a Master’s would be a prerequisite for some of that.

A note to panicked clients and co-workers: None of this will change my work status or my city of residence; the Colorado State MCS program is all done online and I will be doing all of my coursework in my off-hours, mostly in my underpants. My plan is to progress through the program as slowly as humanly possible, taking a single course per semester until my planned completion in May 2013.

Soon You People Will Be Calling Me Master is a post by Jeffrey McManus of Platform Associates. Follow Jeffrey on Twitter.

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3. Building the Virtual Academic Computer Lab

Figuring out how to optimize the process whereby a developer starts using a given technology is a big part of my business, so I’m carefully studying the way that academic programs get student programmers going in a computer science course. As you might expect, there’s a lot to contend with, and even on a good day things are pretty messy. You’ve got ten different types of students coming in with at least three or four different types of computers and operating systems. Once you figure that out, you need to figure out how to get languages, tools, and database servers installed on your computer. The information technology management challenge is steep, and there’s a chicken-and-egg problem at work here: students can’t set up a development environment until they learn how to be developers, but they can’t learn how to be developers until they’ve set up a development environment.

When I was an undergrad starting in the mid-80s, most people had to go to the computer lab to get their work done. I had my own home computer to do school work and work-work on, but I was almost totally on my own when it came to figuring stuff out, and because there was no dial-up internet back then, I still found myself having to schlep into the computer lab and figure out XENIX to test and turn in assignments. That crummy logistical experience turned me off to the whole notion of academic computer science for many years.

The classes I’m taking this semester each devote a good week or two (out of an 18-week term) just to getting students ramped up. That means that almost 10% of the class is devoted to preliminaries. There is lot to do: you have to establish an identity on the college’s server, log in and figure out various unix commands and compiler options, as well as install a complete development environment on your own PC for development and testing. This kind of thing is not a challenge for a professional developer, and everybody should certainly learn how to do it, but a lot of the people in these classes are teenagers with little more than advanced browsing skills; it may not be the case that week 1 of Introduction to Programming is the right context for these kids doing this kind of activity. It can’t help their desire to learn to have to go through a couple of weeks of fiddling with command-line parameters to get stuff to work, and they can certainly figure out the details in a system administration class to be taken after they’ve gotten “hello, world” working.

It seems like this process could be significantly streamlined if schools would make a standard, pre-configured machine image available to students that they could then download and use for their classes. They could use something like the free VMWare Player product to put together an operating system and development environment that students could download for free. Virtualizing the development environment has other benefits to this as well — for example, if a student were experimenting and did something to mess up their computer, they could simply blow away the VM and re-download it. So not only would this make the first weeks of an undergraduate CS class go faster, it would also cut down on calls to the campus support desk, and probably save a bunch of money.

Building the Virtual Academic Computer Lab is a post by Jeffrey McManus of Platform Associates. Follow Jeffrey on Twitter.

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“The group turned to registering for spring classes. In addition to biology, algebra 2/trigonometry, English literature and U.S. history, there were the electives: Dragon Lore, Comic Books, How to Shop for Bargains and the History of Snack Food. Past electives included All About Pirates, Spy Technology, Ping-Pong, Dog Obedience, Breaking World Records, Unusual Foods and Taking Things Apart. (‘I just wish they’d come up with a second-quarter class, Putting the Things Back Together,’ Nelson told me.)

“‘I knew it!’ Edwick complained, mashing about on the beanbag chair. He was disappointed because no one picked the elective he’d proposed: the History of Meat.”

Sort of makes you wish you were autistic is a post by Jeffrey McManus of Platform Associates. Follow Jeffrey on Twitter.

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Researchers have been grousing about the boisterous atmosphere and crowded conditions at the British Library for years. But the dispute — a philosophical battle, really, over who should be allowed access to a great national library — spilled out in public last week when The Times of London published an article quoting various distinguished figures complaining about the out-of-control mood over spring break.

The article described how the author Lady Antonia Fraser had been obliged to wait for 20 minutes in freezing weather just to enter the building, and another 20 minutes to leave her coat at the mandatory check-in desk.

It described how another writer, Christopher Hawtree, had been “forced to perch on a windowsill” because he could not get a desk.

To my way of thinking this has far less to do with British schoolgirls annoying people by giggling in a hallowed institution of learning and far more to do with the way that academics seek to impose their mores on students. It is a fact today that most students have mobile phones and a lot of them have laptops. Would it be unreasonable to adapt to this? It seems natural that the “net native” generation would turn to collaboration more readily than previous generations (and why is this necessarily a bad thing?). The problem isn’t these boisterous kids, it’s that our academic institutions (once again) haven’t caught up to the way that people want to learn, communicate and collaborate. The institution of the library clearly isn’t serving these students’ needs. That doesn’t make it automatically the students’ fault; it may not even be Lady Antonia Frasier’s fault. It seems more likely that we are actually in need of a new kind of institution, one with some aspects of a library but without its monastery-esque structure and mindless bureaucracy.

I’m running into this kind of thing myself as I take a community college class this semester (which I know I haven’t mentioned here yet — I’m planning on saying a lot more about this once the semester is over). Suffice it to say that when you see a huge sign outside a campus media center that says NO COMPUTERS ALLOWED and doesn’t permit students to photocopy out-of-print texts under the principle of academic fair use, there’s something fishy at work there — it certainly isn’t the interests of students that are being served.

In British Library Reading Rooms, Flirting and Even Giggling is a post by Jeffrey McManus of Platform Associates. Follow Jeffrey on Twitter.

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