Thanks for sharing your experiences and insights!
Universities do a great job teaching abstract concepts and doing research. Web became a great and wide spread platform. Sadly they often dictate students not to work with web-technologies.
It's possible to teach the concepts and at the same time use state of the art technologies.
I believe there is plenty of room for improvments in universities. I would love to see distributed revision control systems as a standard for student projects.
It's great to see people like you challanging the status quo and try improve the environment.