[Year 12 IT Apps] What Future IT?

Tue Sep 25 11:28:29 EST 2007

Hi Folks,

 It is rather surreal following this thread. Let me explain why.

1. Multimedia Victoria through the office of the State Minister of 
Multimedia has just spent $500,000 in a 12 stop travelling roadshow around 
Victoria trying to increase IT enrolments to fill the skill shortage out in 
industry.
2. Box Hill Institute repeatedly falls short when requested to supply IT 
graduates to Google, Telstra and others. For that reason they have held 
career information sessions to attract more students. The information 
sessions have been presented by industry employers.If anyone wants their 
names and email addresses I can find them and pass them on.

It seems we are not sure what the causes are to our problem of declining 
student numbers. The theories fall along the following categories:

 1. It is not rigorous enough. It is scaled down and therefore does not 
appeal to those who want a good ENTER score.
 2. It has been continuously eroded to the point tertiary courses prefer 
students to NOT have completed a diluted IT course with programming taught 
using outdated programming paradigms with monolithic 3G programmming more in 
keeping with the late 80s and 90s. The IT courses have been tailored to suit 
the teachers available to teach them rather than the demands of industry.
 3. IT in secondary schools is entirely disjointed from Year 13 at tertiay 
level unlike the much better links that existed with the old Computer 
Science at senior secondary level in the late 80s and unlike the better 
links that exist between Physics and Chemistry between Yr 12 and 13 as 
claimed in an earlier email by a tertiary level IT lecturer.
 4. It is too much/not enough FUN.
 5. It is too theoretical/business management based with never ending 
systems analysis
 6. It is/isn't practical enough.
 7. It is not being selected because there have been declining numbers of 
jobs since the tech wreck of 2000. That was 8 years ago.
 8. All the jobs have gone to India so there is no point chasing an IT 
career.
 9. IT is not a prerequisite for a job since you don't even need it to do IT 
at Uni or TAFE. So why take it if you don't need it ? You can take it later 
if you decide to follow an IT career.
 10. The teacher doesn't know anything/enough about IT and how to fix 
computers or how to set up a network so the students think they know more 
than the teacher so they can't possible learn from him/her.
 11. Students feel they know it all because they can download music, burn 
DVDs, edit home movies, update their geocities or myspace personal web area, 
use ipods, etc etc. What good would it do to take IT at senior level when 
they know it all ?
 12. IT is not compulsory at junior level so students do not see a link 
between what they have done with ICT across the curriculum and a specialist 
senior IT class.

 No doubt you can add to this list. What is curious is that during the 
careers seminars at Box Hill , industry people lined up a number of myths 
such as job numbers have declined and systematically "busted" each one of 
them in so far as the industry trends and employment availability. To be 
fair, their brief was more on encouraging students to select IT at tertiary 
and TAFE levels rather than any dicussion about IT at senior secondary 
level.
 To also be fair an enormous amount of work has gone in at the local level 
to make IT related courses more accessible to secondary students. Many 
schools have tried to make IT at secondary level more "work ready" in its 
delivery. For example, many schools teach :

 1. the VET Multimedia Certificate III
 2. the VET IT Certificate III
 3. Aries
 4. Cisco CCNA and even the first semester of Cisco CCNP.

 Despite this huge effort with up to 5 senior IT and IT related classes at 
my school ( IT apps, IT Software Dev., VET multimedia Cert III, VET IT Cert 
III, Cisco CCNA ) , I have had less than 12 students at Year 11 level , 
enrolled across these subjects for next year.

Whilst there are some valid reasons why students have turned off IT ( listed 
above ), I still feel that we have missed something obvious in the evolution 
of our subject so that it has become less attractive. Part of it has been 
the hijacking of ICT across the curriculum to relegate IT to a doormat ( 
service ) for other subject areas.The idea of ICT across the curriculum has 
as much merit as English or Maths across the curriculum.
I am not sure where the answer(s) lies but maybe we need to survey the 
customers more closely to establish what their reasons are in order to fine 
tune our efforts.

Yours in despair

Kevork Krozian
Edulists Creator and Administrator
www.edulists.com.au
kevork at edulists.com.au

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Russell Edwards" <edwards.russell.t at edumail.vic.gov.au>
To: "Year 12 IT Applications Teachers' Mailing List" 
<itapps at edulists.com.au>
Sent: Tuesday, September 25, 2007 8:41 AM
Subject: Re: [Year 12 IT Apps] What Future IT?

>
> On 24/09/2007, at 7:00 PM, Cameron Bell wrote:
>
>> Unfortunately the current assessment and VTAC admissions scheme  means 
>> that students tend to take a strategic approach to subject  selection. 
>> The ENTER score is the goal. While a few students have a  clear pathway 
>> mapped out and will chose subjects based on interest,  many aim to 
>> maximise the ENTER score, then see what courses they  qualify for (often 
>> making monumental errors of judgement as  evidenced by the drop-out rate 
>> in first year uni). Why would a  student take VCE IT if they felt they 
>> could get a better score by  taking say, history. There is nothing about 
>> having VCE IT as a pre- requisite for ICT courses at the Uni's - they 
>> want English and  Maths Methods. (Does that say anything about the VCE 
>> courses or is  it that they want to make it as easy as possible to 
>> qualify?)  Students could well end up in well paying careers in IT 
>> without  taking it in Yr 11 or 12.
>
> Well, that has been true for a long time. When I did my VCE in  1992/3, we 
> certainly had maximising our tertiary entrance score as  the primary goal. 
> Like all my computer geek friends, I actively  avoided choosing VCE IT 
> because it was boring!!  I then went on to do  an hons degree in comp sci, 
> another degree after that, and work for  several years in science with 
> strong software development component.  To a 16-year-old who's been coding 
> for half his or her life, spending  a year looking at application software 
> and business management jargon  looks like a big and boring step 
> backwards.
>
> My impression is that the VCE IT subjects (apart from Software Dev? I 
> have no experience of that) are not designed with the IT enthusiast 
> (=future IT professional) in mind. Instead they are designed to give  a 
> grounding in IT to people who will end up working in other areas.   This 
> is the type of grounding that will help people work in  environments that 
> use ICT (i.e. just about everywhere, these days).   It's not nearly deep 
> enough to provide any significant level of  preparation for an ICT career, 
> and in fact I'd go so far as to say  that anyone who didn't find it boring 
> due to its simplicity is very  likely, if they enroll in a uni IT course, 
> to end up in the drop-out  group you mention unless they are willing to 
> work very hard at it.
>
> hehe, I remember making a similar point last week on the yr7-10it  list. 
> Must be navel-gazing season!!
>
> So we may as well forget about "needing it" as a reason for choosing  VCE 
> IT. If we don't want it to go, it has to be made more interesting  and/or 
> easier.
>
> Of course, the other option that should always be dispassionately 
> considered, even though it's obviously uncomfortable for IT teachers,  is 
> that possibly it's fading as a VCE-level subject for good reason.
>
> Russell
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