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# Just thinking about university

Personal, technological @ 29 October 2007

Everything I work on right now is self taught (I am a semantic and social web developer - well, just a “developer” officially to my employees). I didn’t learn PHP or Ruby at uni, I didn’t do (much) about the semantic web, I did nothing about the social web, didn’t do much about standards (esp. not on the web). Yet its what I do, so did uni actually help?

Well thinking about it more, yes it did help, in all of my job I use my knowledge of:

  • Sequence
  • Selection
  • Iteration
  • Procedural/Structural, Object Oriented and Functional programming theory
  • Object Oriented Design Patterns (inc. Model-View-Controller and others)

To be honest it feels very weird. Oxford Brookes University, like many other Universities, focuses on the more practical/vocational aspects of software development and computing - yet the stuff that I have actually got from them is the theoretical/academic knowledge. Maybe its just my love of theory and research, and maybe its up to the individual to extract his/her own bits and pieces from the lectures, seminars and practicals. So is it good for a university to focus on the practical side of things? well I have mixed feelings about that, on the one hand theory holds everything together - on the other hand we need to practice somehow.

Daniel

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