> I have wondered about this as well.  School mentality teaches
> us to work
> alone, independantly, and not to collaborate.  This is
> absolutely the most
> inefficient way to get anything done, and mostly anything I
> have been paid
> to do was a collaboration on some level.  Only my hobby
> projects are done
> alone, and I don't even do that any more.

I think I always have been a realy good team worker, but for my
technical contributions I have relied a lot on what I learned at the
university. Godel's theorem, NP-completeness, B+-tree algorithms, the
student (t) distribution, arc welding (!), algebra, LL(1) parsing, you
name it. Even from filtering and feedback loop techniques (which was my
worst subject) I got sufficient ideas to know what the robot control
guys in a project needed, so I could press the software group to deliver
that (in essence: a jitter-free communication channel with as little
delay as possible, which would not have been what they had made
themselves).

The school I am working for is changing is education program to ~ 50%
learning-by-experience. One of the things I am worried about is that the
studenst will not get a decent foundation of knowledge in math, algebra,
C programming and the other basic skills that are best learned through
simple hard work and difficult exams.

> Once I had a class where they divided us into groups for a
> group project.

At the moment my school has a few group projects and in most cases there
are no fails given. I think when group projects get more numerous we
shoudl not refrain from giving fails, and - very important - the groups
should be able to from themselves. I think the students themselves will
soon find out who to group with and who to avoid.

Wouter van Ooijen

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Van Ooijen Technische Informatica: www.voti.nl
consultancy, development, PICmicro products

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