The Future of Computing Education - Part 1 May 3, 2007
Posted by Mark Tennant in : Computing, Subject Support, future of computing , trackbackI’m off to Strathclyde University today for what I hope will be a very interesting couple of days. Interesting, as they have invited a cross section of those with an interest or stake in Computing education to meet and discuss the problems and possible solutions with the current curriculum in Scotland. Everyone from teachers, Higher Education, industry and business have been invited.
The conference has no official status or powers, hence the reason it has been a fairly quiet affair until now. Everyone attending fully acknowledges that change, if it is to happen, is a long process of which this is only a very tentative beginning.
Most interesting to me will simply be to find out if other teachers are finding the same problems in the subject, such as
- A difficulty identifying it as a seperate subject from ICT skills
- An apathy amongst pupils who feel they know it all when it comes to computers
- National Qualifications that don’t really give pupils real-life skills required by modern employers
- How do we keep teachers of the subject trained up to deliver courses in modern computing areas, especially when it is such a broad subject?
Anyway, that’s my $0.02 for now. Watch this space for an update from the conference. If anyone would like to leave comments I’ll happily air them over the next two days…
Comments»
Hope someone from SQA was invited to contribute - Colleges have suites of qualifications that are very closely linked to industry and vendors as an example - http://www.sqa.org.uk/diva
There have also been various successful training programmes for College teaching staff and techcians over last ten years. Local Colleges can offer great technical updates on most things computing.
I look forward to some challenging change drivers coming out of the conference - would be good I think if schools started to make more use of the uints around blogging , social software , internet safety or setting up wired and wireless networks - I hope someone at the conference knows the choice is broader than
Look forward to reading your thoughts Mark it sounds like an interesting discussion.
Joe,
Yes, there are representatives from the SQA too, Derek Middleton was in attendance on both days, representatives from HMI and HE were also in attendance. Anyway, I’m going to type up my notes onto the blog in the next few days, so you’ll get to pick it all apart and draw your own conclusions…
Hello Mark
Impressive! You more or less predicted the major themes we did discuss. :-) I intend to post some of my notes from the workshops over the next wee while too on http://edcompblog.blogspot.com/. It will be interesting to see the different takes on the sessions.