“A program is a set of instructions in a language understood by a computer; used to direct the operations of a computer.” This was what students of class V had been muttering for the last half an hour from the book, “Jump-start Computers”. Some other kids were also there whispering indecipherable incantations from the book, bringing a touch of Hogwarts - the wizardry school of Harry Potter - to the kids’ study room. The kids were diligently trying to memorise the numerous definitions spread across the book as if trying to etch the words in their memory. On asking them whether they actually knew what a computer program looks like, the answer was, “it’s a round mirror like thing with a hole in the middle to let the air pass”, leaving the inquirer dumbfounded.
Well, part of the above lines has been modified adding the intentional pun to enable the reader to understand what this feature is all about. But it’s not much different from the usual condition of our education system. Over the years, young and grown ups alike have been made to adhere to rote learning instead of understanding the intrinsic meaning of what they’re learning. One feels this is because most parents prefer the so called English medium schools over the government run Urdu Schools which, apart from few, have a questionable standard. However, English being the second language of most children makes it very difficult for them to understand the actual meaning of the content and for doing well in the exams in such a case, rote learning provides an established solution.
Owais Anwer, a Software engineer in a local IT firm, had the opportunity to tutor some 9th grade students a couple of years back. According to him, the usual way of the teachers was that for the first 3 quarters in a one-hour class, they write lines of code on the board which the students jot down without many questions. While in the last quarter, the students run the same program on a computer, which naturally, runs without any error, since the only error there could be was in noting from the board. According to Shariq Muhammad, another software engineer who opted for CS in class 9th, the students were made to work on only those parts of the practical which have a higher probability of appearing in the board exams. One feels this kind of technique destroys the whole idea of teaching computer science in elementary classes. Computer science is totally different from other course subjects like history, literature or even science subjects like biology and chemistry. It’s more analogous to Mathematics since it requires problem solving, which consequently needs one to have proper concepts about the subject. The thing that sets it apart from Maths is that Computers are an ever-evolving phenomenon. Newer technologies keep popping up making it very difficult for one to stay on top of that. Still, being a good problem solver is so important that all the top notch IT companies look for prospective employees with natural ability to solve problems and the willingness to learn new things, not the ones with greater knowledge of syntax in any language.
Watching young kids working on a computer, one can clearly see that they’re most interested in games. The only serious software that most kids are attracted to is a program called “Paint”! The point is, kids are more involved in software that shows them doing something. Huge software applications with tremendous programming power but little graphic output are of no value to children. This is precisely why computer games, no matter how primitive, have always been most popular amongst kids. However, what they’re taught in the school is a boring three line definition which they may not even understand, with little graphics and apparently no hands-on encounter. Most schools have a separate head in their fee vouchers labelled “computer fee”, but on inspecting the lab, one can see that the machines these kids are working on are quite backward in comparison to the computers most of them are using back home. Also, there are only a handful of teachers who actually try to invoke creativity within the kids. Shariq recalls his best teacher was in class 7th when they worked on “Logo” - a graphic tool which has a turtle in the middle which one can program to move around plotting a line on its trail. The teacher required them to create graphics from a sketch which they made themselves first on paper and then on the computer. The sheer excitement of recreating something made the guy their best teacher, even if he made the kids do all the hard work. But isn’t it what a good teacher should do? Tell the kids what they need to achieve, and stand aside to let them do their work, giving his input only when required. In fact, this is the same kind of attitude project managers at serious IT companies assume; let the programmers know what they need to accomplish and then just facilitate them to work towards their goal.
However, many teachers fail to envisage that at the elementary level. They do all the hard work themselves, writing code lines on the board and selecting practicals which have a higher probability to appear in the exams. Probably most teachers empathize with the students since they already have a huge workload so they relieve them at some point. It has to be said this is not a favour that doesn’t do a lot of good to the students since they advance to higher classes without learning much. Also, a large number of teachers is not highly qualified, some only in their college while teaching computer science. “One cannot totally blame the teachers since the average pay for a computer science teacher, or for that matter any teacher in the primary schools is as low as 3-4 thousands a month”, this is what Sheheryar Azim, who works in the same company as Shariq, and has taught the class 9th students when he was still in college. “Also, why someone who had spent thousands of rupees on his degree would opt for a job in primary school for a handful of money. Would you leave your current job and start teaching? At least I won’t.” was his response.
If one browses the Computer text books from elementary classes to the higher classes, there is not much difference among them. All of them start with a definition of computer, followed by definitions of programs, memory, registers and so on. Every book has the same content with very little change. This is quite contrary to what it should have been envisioned.
The government is now trying to revolutionise the education system and one hopes computer education has its fair share of attention this time around. If our educationists desire to groom computer scientists from the elementary level, they need to reshape the whole computer science curriculum making it more purposeful, starting from being simple in the lower classes and raising the bar towards the higher classes. There is no dearth of Pakistani IT professionals who have written books for the foreign publishers, the textbook board can hire them to write the textbooks, so that the younger readers may look up to the writers and be inspired. So that when the same kids enter a university seeking a computer science degree, they have an already strong foundation of the subject and by the time they will pursue a master’s degree, they would be working on real world problems, after all, Google was a university project by two blokes. Teachers and parents alike should be let to air their grievances, have everyone on board before formulating a policy. If we are able to formulate a more focused CS curriculum, we may be able to farm such talent, and a home-grown Google or a Microsoft may not be a far cry at all.
Thursday, August 11, 2005
I "Rote" IT!
Wednesday, July 06, 2005
Unplugged
"Rage is the only quality which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing columns for newspapers," so said Jimmy Breslin, the legendary American columnist. And as i see it, most of the articles that would feature in this month's internet magazines of the country would reflect a strong feeling of admonishment thanks to the problems faced by Internet users across the country after last month’s breakdown of the SEA-ME-WE (Southeast Asia-Middle East-Western Europe) 3 cable that provides nearly 80 percent access to the Net. Work at government and especially in private offices slumped after PTCL announced they had no immediate backup for the virtual blackout.
Such is the scale of the mess caused by a single cable lying on the seabed of Arabian Sea, making a mockery of all official assertions that of providing the country with a flawless connectivity. SEA-ME-WE 3, as we all know the 40,000 KM long optic fiber cable, provides connectivity to as many as 34 countries. This is not the first time that it has had problems in the submarine section. In the November of 2000, Singapore and Australia, whom one would expect to be more technology savvy than a toddler like Pakistan, were almost cut off from the whole world just like we are these days. Still both countries had a good backup connection, which was up in no time. There were also similar problems in April and July of 2003 when the cable was damaged in isolated events. Pakistan and some other countries in the region were affected, but the problem was promptly identified and the connection restored. At that time, the longest break in connection was 12 hours whereas this time around, it has taken well over 10 days only to identify the problem.
Software companies are but a small fraction of the victims, but for banks, the problem could not have come at a worse time—it was their closing week of the fiscal year. Also if airlines think they’re the most affected victims, ask the scores of call centers spread across the country. No other business would have been more devastated by this Internet crisis than a call center for it needs a dedicated IP for its operations. And if material losses are hard to measure, there’s no limit to the loss of credibility for these startups. Attracting foreign investors was never easy anyway, but after this kind of Net crisis, keeping that list of foreign clientele is now a tough task altogether. No investor deserves surprises like this and with our rates already higher than what’s being offered just across the border, the call center industry seems sure to be struggling in the coming months. Potential investors backed off enduring a loss of nearly 10 million dollars which would have helped the inflated economy. So imagine how much present and potential business might have been lost simply because there was no back-up link to the country’s backbone connection. The scale of losses to the call center business was so huge that they had to submit a complaint to the government to intervene and direct the authorities to give priority to their traffic.
ISP helpdesks are helpless as well. One can only empathize with the poor guys who had to face cult music when disgruntled customers lambasted them for incapableness—they got the thrashing for something that was not even their fault. By the first Saturday of July, that is the sixth day of the crisis, quite a few ISP’s were supporting either Socks services or http, one used for all kinds of file and data transfer and IM software, and the other used for browsing. So if one needed to browse something, he needed to connect to a “browsing ISP” or vice versa. This is something the support staff mostly isn’t aware of. Most of them know the routine stuff that sorts out most problems with domestic internet users. But when it comes to network troubleshooting, there’s a lot to be desired in terms of domain knowledge on the ISP support end.
Couldn’t it all have been avoided by just having a good enough backup? After all, backups are the backbone of any professional organization. Ask any programming guru, any network or database administrator or any smart data store manager and you’ll know they have a fair collection of backups. So when a new version fails or if a potential problem in an older version actually pops up, they have something to hold themselves together. Every software company has at least one back up Internet connection, or at least one connection available on a phone call. That’s something we PC-kids call a ‘Simple Failover Strategy.’ To put it straight, in the internet world, if you’re not backing up your work, you’re sure to land in trouble. Ironically, these simple rules could not make it to the priority list of our IT think tanks, and that too at the federal level. With SMW 3 already overloaded, no alternative connectivity solutions were sought as late as July last year when construction of SEA-ME-WE 4, a $500 million project was approved by a consortium of 14 countries. Pakistan was to bear five percent of the cost for its share in the bandwidth. The project is estimated to be completed in December this year. Meanwhile, alternative connectivity was provided via Fibre Link Around Globe (FLAG), a smaller capacity cable with fewer recipients. But with the recent breakdown in the Internet connectivity, one feels all these arrangements are in vain.
When these lines are being written, this is the 10th day of virtual Internet blackout in the country, the fault area has been narrowed in to a 20 km piece. The weather is severe and the testing requires each and every meter to be tested. So it’s quite logical that the technicians have forecasted another 5 days for fully repairing the damage. Fascinatingly, our IT ministry has forecasted only a day is left for the problem to resolve. The base of their claim is unknown, but it only goes to show that it is the same attitude of dissipating misleading information that has lead the country to its worst ever internet crisis. Attracting foreign and local investors by spending huge sums of tax-payers’ money on the backing of such ill-planned network was certainly a wrong call whose damages are almost irreparable. For a country which claims over 10 million unique web surfers, a single connection to the outside world was thought sufficient. What could happen if the solitary connection breaks was anyone’s guess and now experience. And when something as inevitable actually materializes, one helplessly recalls what we know as Murphy’s Law which says, “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong!”
Such is the scale of the mess caused by a single cable lying on the seabed of Arabian Sea, making a mockery of all official assertions that of providing the country with a flawless connectivity. SEA-ME-WE 3, as we all know the 40,000 KM long optic fiber cable, provides connectivity to as many as 34 countries. This is not the first time that it has had problems in the submarine section. In the November of 2000, Singapore and Australia, whom one would expect to be more technology savvy than a toddler like Pakistan, were almost cut off from the whole world just like we are these days. Still both countries had a good backup connection, which was up in no time. There were also similar problems in April and July of 2003 when the cable was damaged in isolated events. Pakistan and some other countries in the region were affected, but the problem was promptly identified and the connection restored. At that time, the longest break in connection was 12 hours whereas this time around, it has taken well over 10 days only to identify the problem.
Software companies are but a small fraction of the victims, but for banks, the problem could not have come at a worse time—it was their closing week of the fiscal year. Also if airlines think they’re the most affected victims, ask the scores of call centers spread across the country. No other business would have been more devastated by this Internet crisis than a call center for it needs a dedicated IP for its operations. And if material losses are hard to measure, there’s no limit to the loss of credibility for these startups. Attracting foreign investors was never easy anyway, but after this kind of Net crisis, keeping that list of foreign clientele is now a tough task altogether. No investor deserves surprises like this and with our rates already higher than what’s being offered just across the border, the call center industry seems sure to be struggling in the coming months. Potential investors backed off enduring a loss of nearly 10 million dollars which would have helped the inflated economy. So imagine how much present and potential business might have been lost simply because there was no back-up link to the country’s backbone connection. The scale of losses to the call center business was so huge that they had to submit a complaint to the government to intervene and direct the authorities to give priority to their traffic.
ISP helpdesks are helpless as well. One can only empathize with the poor guys who had to face cult music when disgruntled customers lambasted them for incapableness—they got the thrashing for something that was not even their fault. By the first Saturday of July, that is the sixth day of the crisis, quite a few ISP’s were supporting either Socks services or http, one used for all kinds of file and data transfer and IM software, and the other used for browsing. So if one needed to browse something, he needed to connect to a “browsing ISP” or vice versa. This is something the support staff mostly isn’t aware of. Most of them know the routine stuff that sorts out most problems with domestic internet users. But when it comes to network troubleshooting, there’s a lot to be desired in terms of domain knowledge on the ISP support end.
Couldn’t it all have been avoided by just having a good enough backup? After all, backups are the backbone of any professional organization. Ask any programming guru, any network or database administrator or any smart data store manager and you’ll know they have a fair collection of backups. So when a new version fails or if a potential problem in an older version actually pops up, they have something to hold themselves together. Every software company has at least one back up Internet connection, or at least one connection available on a phone call. That’s something we PC-kids call a ‘Simple Failover Strategy.’ To put it straight, in the internet world, if you’re not backing up your work, you’re sure to land in trouble. Ironically, these simple rules could not make it to the priority list of our IT think tanks, and that too at the federal level. With SMW 3 already overloaded, no alternative connectivity solutions were sought as late as July last year when construction of SEA-ME-WE 4, a $500 million project was approved by a consortium of 14 countries. Pakistan was to bear five percent of the cost for its share in the bandwidth. The project is estimated to be completed in December this year. Meanwhile, alternative connectivity was provided via Fibre Link Around Globe (FLAG), a smaller capacity cable with fewer recipients. But with the recent breakdown in the Internet connectivity, one feels all these arrangements are in vain.
When these lines are being written, this is the 10th day of virtual Internet blackout in the country, the fault area has been narrowed in to a 20 km piece. The weather is severe and the testing requires each and every meter to be tested. So it’s quite logical that the technicians have forecasted another 5 days for fully repairing the damage. Fascinatingly, our IT ministry has forecasted only a day is left for the problem to resolve. The base of their claim is unknown, but it only goes to show that it is the same attitude of dissipating misleading information that has lead the country to its worst ever internet crisis. Attracting foreign and local investors by spending huge sums of tax-payers’ money on the backing of such ill-planned network was certainly a wrong call whose damages are almost irreparable. For a country which claims over 10 million unique web surfers, a single connection to the outside world was thought sufficient. What could happen if the solitary connection breaks was anyone’s guess and now experience. And when something as inevitable actually materializes, one helplessly recalls what we know as Murphy’s Law which says, “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong!”
Tuesday, March 01, 2005
Dooced For Blogging
This post has been published in Spider magazine's May issue and respecting their intellectual property rights, i'm removing this post from here. Will post a link to their online version of the issue as soon as i get one from them! Thanks!
Update:here's the link to the article:
Update:here's the link to the article:
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