[Yr11 Information Technology] The Next Study Design

[Mark]

We are now halfway through the 'new' study design and moves will be
underway before too long to start designing the next study design. You
might want to start sharpening your pencils and knives for that bunfight.

To start the buns flying, I would suggest:

- Study design in general -

- Can we (I?) please get guidance on how defining scope is different to
determining solution requirements?  As I see it, defining one's functional
and non-functional requirements necessarily also defines scope. If they
don't completely define scope, what is missing?

- A personal annoyance of mine in the mandated PSM is that determining
evaluation criteria is part of the design phase.  Surely it's part of
logical design, not physical design, and could and should happen during
analysis?

- The PSM leaves out training from the development phase.

- Implementation has been omitted from the PSM. I think it needs to return,
as a separate step or at the end of development.

- Let's make sure the detailed examples actually obey the mandated
requirements of outcomes: ITA U4O2, I'm looking at YOU.

- Make sure mandated requirements actually appear in mandated sections of
the study design, and not in the "Advice" or "Recommendations" sections -
ITA U4O2's "organisations" with a significant S, I'm still looking at YOU -
was just unfair.
- All significant changes to a study design should be clearly flagged, and
not subtly changed.

- There should be a single (online) point of truth for all mandated VCE IT
course and task requirements: sprinkling them across a study design,
assessment handbook, FAQs and VCAA bulletins (some up to 3 years old!)
leads to accidental non-compliance by teachers.


- Units 1 & 2 -

- I'm pretty happy with the balance overall, but some 'sexying up' would
help attract punters - e.g. programming web apps, image/audio editing.

- Perhaps an 'integrated project' to bring together several IT skills into
one information product.

- Definitely keep the groupwork.

- Definitely keep the client project.  I loved throwing them out into the
real world on unsupervised excursions for most of the term 4 double periods
 :-)

- ITA -

- Let's please kill databases and normalisation.  They are killing us when
kids ask what they have to look forward to in ITA.

- Let's once again mandate spreadsheets for one outcome.

- Let's also remove the business-management remnants like
tactical/strategic/operational decision making. Like project management,
they are only tangentially-relevant to IT.

- Some juicy communication-based outcome would help attract girls to ITA.

- SD -

- Please let's sort out the strange attraction that the study design has
for the physical layer of the OSI model.  What is so magnetically
attractive about that layer compared to the others, especially the more
interesting higher layers?

- And what's with KK U3O1 KK04 - the OSI physical layer' connection to
TCP/IP?  AFAIK there is no connection. TCP/IP has its own parallel version
of the OSI layers. Kevork may be able to help me better understand this
baffling key knowledge.

- I'd like to see linked lists added to data structures.

- Let's remove laptops from the list of allowed "mobile devices". They are
certainly not retarded computers any more.  Mine is more powerful than my
desktop!

- Let's also remove "gaming consoles". If it's meant to refer to handheld
games, say so.  Otherwise it infers that Xboxes are "mobile computing
devices", which their cables certainly argue against!

- Completely new fields of IT -

- Most of my suggestions have been mere tinkering with what is already in
the study design. What important fields are unrepresented or
under-represented in the current study design?  Perhaps...

- 3D printing
- Data centres
- Social/psychological implications of omnipresent computing and
communication facilities on children, students, workers, and governments.
e.g. how many of the political revolutions in 2012 were incited and
coordinated by social media?
- Privacy in the digital age
- Changing attitudes to information ownership - open source software,
"acceptable piracy", Megaupload, Creative Commons, CopyLeft, GNU licences,
Facebook privacy settings, Anonymous, Wikileaks, jailbreaking/unlocking
(recently outlawed in USA) etc.
- Artificial intelligence, e.g. IBM's Watson, Amazon's suggested buys,
Siri, human/computer interfacing (e.g. Google glasses)
- Changes in computing paradigms - mainframes/dumb terminals > smart
standalones > cloud/dumb browsers.

Over to you guys. The beach is calling me...

--
Mark Kelly
mark at vceit.com
http://vceit.com
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