[Year 12 SofDev] RE: Industry practice - Tertiary links

[Steven Bird]

On Sun, Apr 27, 2008 at 6:30 PM, Beattie, Kelly L
<beattie.kelly.l at edumail.vic.gov.au> wrote:
> Ultimately what we should be doing as educators is communicating with the
> tertiary institutions and making Senior IT something that they would
> consider to be a prerequisite for their courses.

It seems unlikely that tertiary IT courses would cut off a large part
of their market by requiring VCE IT.  Other conceivable roles for VCE
IT would be to give students "advanced standing" so that they might
skip IT 101, or (in the case of students not doing an IT major) to
give them valuable knowledge and skills that complement any subject
they choose to do.

Another approach would be to reinvent VCE IT as "informatics", and
focus on accessing, manipulating and visualising information.
Programming is still central in such a course, but it is programming
with a significant external purpose rather than programming for its
own sake.  It can be marketted across the board, and not seen as a
nerdy subject.  This is how we've been reprofiling IT at Melbourne
University, and it has attracted many students from outside our usual
catchment (e.g. commerce).

-Steven Bird
http://www.csse.unimelb.edu.au/~sb/