Great thread on education at Wes Felter's Hacktheplanet.
[cluetrain News]
I've not had much opportunity for real team-building things at school yet; I do have a cadre of friends, but I'm taking some classes out of order (some with the clique's third-year segment and some with our graduating seniors) and we just haven't had any real team-based projects. So we never work together. The only real team project I know is the actual CS490 Group Software Engineering course that we can't take until the semester we graduate. The team-based paper I have this semester (the C64 thing) is with people I don't know, which was expected since it's one of those senior-level classes, but isn't good for my morale.
The one team item already this semester was in CS312 Data Structures, and was a failure because a) we self-selected headstrong people used to working on our own, b) we only had a weekend or so to do the assignment, and c) the assignment was pretty trivial for our group's skill level. I looked forward to doing a group assignment, but everyone procrastinated until I was uncomfortable--I did most of the work over the weekend, Donald had the time and inclination to do the parts I'd neglected to, and Wally, the member least tightly integrated into our compsci clique, did some final quality control.
I used Doxygen to generate automated documentation, so by the time we were finished, our sheaf of paper was a comical nigh forty pages. We joked as Wally put a "1st Rate!" sticker on the front. We got a 100 on the assignment; the professor's two comments pointed at the sticker and remarked, "Wow, award-winning software!" and professed ignorance of Doxygen. As a team project, it was a failure. None of us got anything out of it, which only made the shebang more farcical than it already was.
I don't feel like we're encouraged to work together, though one professor rhapsodizes about how that's OK because university is a "community of learning." It's another divide-and-conquer issue in the same thread as the right-to-pleasure article and "Capitalist Heaven:" we're supposed to be little islands of work sucking up theory from professors who couldn't apply it, then mix it like so much paint so our net worths can be cast to type float. Partly it's because UTC is mainly a commuter school, so everyone jets off to wherever after class, and even us lab rats have inconvenient schedules.
We've tried to combat that somewhat by starting the LUG, which we plan to generalize to not come across as so Linux-oriented, but as it's the end of the semester we don't even have the time or energy ourselves to be organized. There were workshops on Friday and Saturday, HTML and language survey, that we planned three and a half weeks ago and did not advertise about at all, even though the purpose of the HTML workshop was to try to appeal to a wider audience. I didn't bother going.
