From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Mar 1 16:28:40 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mail.twave.net (twave.net [206.100.228.5]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 5040537BE7B for ; Wed, 1 Mar 2000 16:28:37 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from brameld@twave.net) Received: from [208.219.234.60] by mail.twave.net (NTMail 3.03.0018/1.abwg) with ESMTP id la881047 for ; Wed, 1 Mar 2000 19:28:23 -0500 Received: from Bozo_3.BozoLand.domain (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by Bozo_3.BozoLand.domain (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id TAA60672; Wed, 1 Mar 2000 19:28:23 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from brameld@twave.net) From: Walter Brameld To: goodleaf , freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: In re: Certifications (long and rambling) Date: Wed, 1 Mar 2000 19:15:42 -0500 X-Mailer: KMail [version 1.0.28] Content-Type: text/plain References: In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Message-Id: <00030119282305.00719@Bozo_3.BozoLand.domain> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Now this is a money-making opportunity if I ever saw one, also a great chance to promote FreeBSD and other *nixes in general and help launch promising careers. Gather all ye *nix experts and runneth a Certification course. Do it by internet, setting up a server to deal with issuing course material and tests upon credit-card payments should be a trivial task. Ensure true qualification as opposed to possibly pooled knowledge by requiring graduate candidates to take the finals in person at varied convenient sites. I am not being facetious, I would be one of the first to apply. I would help implement it myself except for the catch-22. I need to learn the system to help set up the course so I can learn the system....... Revenues would be used to re-imburse people involved in the project to a certain extent (we mostly are volunteers, have I heard that somewhere from time to time?), maintain course servers and help promote the further development of the involved OS's. Hey, it's just a vagrant thought I had. I should learn to discipline my thinking a little better..... On Wed, 01 Mar 2000, in a never-ending search for enlightenment, goodleaf wrote: > I realize I risk extreme sanction here, but: > > I have known several certified idiots, but on the other hand I've actually > taken a short cert course in programming basics, and I have to say I > learned quite a bit. (A vast improvement over the absolutely nothing I > knew prior.) Of course this doesn't qualify me as a software engineer, but > I can do a bit in C and Perl. > > This was at the University of Washington, which AFAIK, does a lot of work > to ensure their cert courses are somewhat rigorous. I think that cert > courses in principle are a tremendously good idea, particularly where the > course teaches basic skills to people who don't know much about the > subject at hand, but who have some education in other things. Clearly, > it's not as good as a full computer science degree, but for people like > me, reasonably intelligent people who already have an education (I have > two degrees already.) a certification course is a Good Thing. > > The problem with cert courses as they exist in most places is that they're > extremely poorly implemented and not held to any particular academic > standard. But this is not an absolute; there are good cert courses, so > I think the knee-jerk prejudice against certification that I see among > UNIX folk is misplaced and unproductive. What would be nice is a > pooling of what we know. Which specific courses are bad? Which schools > are turning out too many idiots? > > I'd very much like to see a good FreeBSD cert course out there. If it's > well done, it would teach me a lot and pad my resume. Both things are > good. > > I may take the UW's Unix Administration cert course. I'll let you know how > it goes. > > Thanks, > John > > > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message -- Walter Brameld in·tel·lec·tu·al n. Someone who has been educated past his/her level of intelligence. Join the Army, meet interesting people, kill them. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message