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Doing Something Useful

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    Doing Something Useful

    Several people on CUK have bitched about education and IT education in particular, this is your chance to do something about it.

    As part of my articles in The Register about IT education I've been talking to quite a number of IT teachers.

    IT education is desperately short of people who understand IT, less than 1/4 of IT teachers have any formal education in the subject and they keep changing the curriculum.

    I'm proposing to start a not-for-profit "agency" that will match IT pros up with schools and suspect that resting contractors might be a very useful part of this.

    The work would be anything from helping get their network and server infrastructure to a decent state, negotiating with vendors, tutoring in programming or even developing course materials and useful programs.

    One example project would be to develop a virtual machine config and setup that allowed teenage programmer to write code without letting them break anything.

    I will share that in UK schools a large % are banned from creating executables because of the fear of a 12 year old writing a VBA macro that destroys the world financial system. Yes really. We can fix this, or more accurately, you can fix this and I will merely unleash this at the target.

    I want to get this right and so any sensible feedback you have is really useful.
    My 12 year old is walking 26 miles for Cardiac Risk in the Young, you can sponsor him here

    #2
    Originally posted by Dominic Connor View Post
    IT education is desperately short of people who understand IT, less than 1/4 of IT teachers have any formal education in the subject and they keep changing the curriculum.
    This is quite surprising. Bearing in mind the phrase 'them that can't, teach' and the fact I have seen plenty that can't you would think we would be knee deep in IT teachers.....
    'CUK forum personality of 2011 - Winner - Yes really!!!!

    Comment


      #3
      Will fall at the first hurdle when it comes to CRB checks or what ever are needed these days
      Originally posted by Stevie Wonder Boy
      I can't see any way to do it can you please advise?

      I want my account deleted and all of my information removed, I want to invoke my right to be forgotten.

      Comment


        #4
        Sounds like a great idea.


        Edit: Whilst we contractors like to waltz in, fix stuff and waltz out (a few K richer!), in practice to be useful at a school you'd need some idea of what needed to be taught on the curriculum.
        I suppose an alternative is an after school IT club, which you could do a presentation/demo of something cool without getting too bogged down in curriculum etc.
        Last edited by MadDawg; 5 August 2013, 15:30.

        Comment


          #5
          Originally posted by Dominic Connor View Post
          Several people on CUK have bitched about education and IT education in particular, this is your chance to do something about it.

          As part of my articles in The Register about IT education I've been talking to quite a number of IT teachers.

          IT education is desperately short of people who understand IT, less than 1/4 of IT teachers have any formal education in the subject and they keep changing the curriculum.

          I'm proposing to start a not-for-profit "agency" that will match IT pros up with schools and suspect that resting contractors might be a very useful part of this.

          The work would be anything from helping get their network and server infrastructure to a decent state, negotiating with vendors, tutoring in programming or even developing course materials and useful programs.

          One example project would be to develop a virtual machine config and setup that allowed teenage programmer to write code without letting them break anything.

          I will share that in UK schools a large % are banned from creating executables because of the fear of a 12 year old writing a VBA macro that destroys the world financial system. Yes really. We can fix this, or more accurately, you can fix this and I will merely unleash this at the target.

          I want to get this right and so any sensible feedback you have is really useful.
          You are barking up the wrong tree with this one Dominic if you are expecting IT people to become teachers.
          Teachers need to communicate with children not behave like them
          Let us not forget EU open doors immigration benefits IT contractors more than anyone

          Comment


            #6
            Originally posted by northernladuk View Post
            This is quite surprising. Bearing in mind the phrase 'them that can't, teach' and the fact I have seen plenty that can't you would think we would be knee deep in IT teachers.....
            No we have thousands of IT teachers, just not very many good ones. When I went to do Computers Science there were three IT teachers. One was a mathematician and the other was a computer scientist and the head of department was a raving lefty with a degree in politics... I had the mathematician as my teacher and now have a fantastic career out of it. My mate got the bird with the politics degree and now fits smoke alarms for a living...

            Dominic, The only problem I can see is that there are loads of small business owners that do IT for schools now. How do we fit in with them? After all giving services for free will fall foul of various rules about OJEU etc...

            What we really need are Saturday schools for kids to come and learn how to do this stuff themselves

            Comment


              #7
              Curriculum here.

              http://filestore.aqa.org.uk/subjects...MPSCI-W-SP.PDF

              Reassuring - I thought it was all excel and drag and drop these days.

              Anyone know what language they're teaching?

              Comment


                #8
                Originally posted by DodgyAgent View Post
                You are barking up the wrong tree with this one Dominic if you are expecting IT people to become teachers.
                Teachers need to communicate with children not behave like them
                I absolutely agree and the teachers I've spoken to feel the same.

                What they desperately need is technical support and someone who can help teach the teachers.

                Programming is especially tough, as it's like learning to read. You can do a bit of standing up and shouting at kids, but ultimately for both adults and kids you need someone at your side to help debug your newbie code. For that great communications skills are nice, but the ability to grunt and point at the right line will do.

                I'm waiting for some legal advice here, but I believe I can get the CRB checks paid for.

                Some contractors of course won't pass CRB and for the avoidance of doubt SC doesn't count, but there is still a lot of work where you never interact with kids at all, hence the security example I mentioned. School security hits the opposite of a sweet spot, it is both onerous and full of holes, a rational, low impact security setup that doesn't enrich the outsourced service providers would do more for education than 100 fully qualified IT teachers.
                My 12 year old is walking 26 miles for Cardiac Risk in the Young, you can sponsor him here

                Comment


                  #9
                  Originally posted by bobspud View Post
                  No we have thousands of IT teachers, just not very many good ones.

                  Dominic, The only problem I can see is that there are loads of small business owners that do IT for schools now. How do we fit in with them? After all giving services for free will fall foul of various rules about OJEU etc...

                  What we really need are Saturday schools for kids to come and learn how to do this stuff themselves
                  I can't fix the supply of decent IT teachers, we can support the ones we have to make them more productive, I'm working with someone at the Open University who will supply cut price degree level materials for IT teachers. That's not an ideal fix, but it will make things better, so we're not all that far away from the sort of "perfect is the enemy of good enough" that we do in the real world.

                  Although there are some small businesses doing IT for schools, a more common setup is for the local council to appoint an outsourcer who does tulip like lock the system so that they can charge £800 to install Python. That's a real example BTW.
                  My 12 year old is walking 26 miles for Cardiac Risk in the Young, you can sponsor him here

                  Comment


                    #10
                    Originally posted by MadDawg View Post
                    Curriculum here.

                    http://filestore.aqa.org.uk/subjects...MPSCI-W-SP.PDF

                    Anyone know what language they're teaching?
                    Pretty much everything you've ever heard of plus a few more like Scratch and Sense, which is not a carpet cleaner.
                    My 12 year old is walking 26 miles for Cardiac Risk in the Young, you can sponsor him here

                    Comment

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