I'd like to thank contributors for the information on programmes and standards they've passed on. This is going to be very helpful. And I appreciate any others: I'll be putting together suggestions for the committee next weekend.
I found this "driver's licence" interesting, as indeed Lou's comments about the change coming with the arrival of more digital natives. I have been deeply impressed in the last year or two at the on-going changes in how our students work with computers. I think we really are just now getting first years who really can't imagine what it was like without the net, computers, and social networking. Even our fourth year students seem less native in their interactions.
The range between basic desktop apps and dbms is what we are trying to negotiate here. I'm thinking the answer might be to have a "driver's licence" type course as something that many students who are not interested in adding an informatics component to their degrees might find useful. And I am still amazed at how shallow some of the student's knowledge of basic office software really is.
But for the larger programme in informatics, it is exactly the issues Lou mentions at the end that are the skills we're considering:
knowing about the hardware? programming? project management? systems analysis and database design
The goal is that in a programme of eight or nine semester-long, North American style 3-credit courses, our students would graduate with an understanding of how ICT can be applied to research questions in their home domain, have some experience analysing information flow, in project management, HCI, and various other topics that would leave them equipped not so much to become ICT technicians or experts, but domain experts who would know enough about ICT to allow them to apply it intelligently and work with ICT technical experts in solving problems and designing solutions.
I'm hoping that we might find a variety of different paths in this area: one aimed at producing students with the type of skills we associate with programme at CCH or the University of Alberta (to name two) on the one hand, but that can also accommodate students with interest in other aspects of informatics or who only want to brush up immediately necessary skills.
Apart from perhaps a remedial course on standalone software, I think we'd be aiming primarily at covering networked technologies. And re Word--I'm also wondering if we could responsibly take an ideologically open source position without it becoming "tenured radicals" pushing their hobby horses.
Lou Burnard wrote:
Croenen, Godfried wrote:
In Britain (and probably elsewhere in Europe) there is the European Computer Driving Licence (ECDL). See for example the page at my University:
http://www.liv.ac.uk/csd/training/ecdl/index.htm
or the general site:
We used to teach this here, but found demand was dropping as more and more of the "digital natives" came on stream.
Cynics might say it is simply about training people to use all the Microsoft Office packages.
They would be right. On the other hand, there's no reason why the same course could not be customized to impart the same skills using e.g. Open Office. It should be all about transferable skills, surely!
Looking at the information there seems indeed to be a much greater emphasis on using desktop packages than on teaching generic IT skills.
Now there's a distinction worth unpacking. I assume that "desktop" packages are also the same as the things I use on my laptop, so what exactly are "generic" IT skills? command line abilities? knowing about the hardware? programming? project management? systems analysis and database design? These seem a bit ambitious for such a course!
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