Our NIge :)

[green_amber]

From the Beeb

"So why are young people in the UK choosing not to study IT, one of the more lucrative UK industries?

Professor Shadbolt said it was partly due to poor teaching and called for a thorough review of the way in which it is taught in schools

The industry also had an image problem, he said, with computer scientists often portrayed on TV and in films as "geeky". "

?? Hey I thought that was a GOOD thing:)

They need to get those primary kids on to LJ - that'll sort em..

I'm STILL FUCKING ILL. Still waking up at 4,5 or 6 coughing brains out. Still feel like rather warm moistened toilet roll. GRRR.

PLus Sky + man came (it has been dead since I got back from London) and declared fault is garden not box, and that although the tree was not blocking the signal three months ago, now it is. He spent a great deal of time explaining that as little as three inches would do it. I declared disbeleif that trees grew three inches in under 3 months, in autumn. He left.

GGGRRRRRRRR.

Comments

[makyo.livejournal.com]

My mum used to know him - until she retired a couple of years back, she was one of the departmental secretaries in the psychology department at Nottingham. I don't think they got along particularly well.

Professor Shadbolt said it was partly due to poor teaching and called for a thorough review of the way in which it is taught in schools
I was chatting to a friend of mine about this recently (he's a senior lecturer in CS at UKC, and usually gets roped in to help with undergraduate admissions). He made the point that in schools, ICT is pretty dull - basic word-processing and spreadsheets, and similarly unenthralling stuff. So the intelligent and creative people who `should' be doing CS at university aren't, because they think it's tedious, while the people who `shouldn't' (who think that it'll be like ICT - ie boring but easy) are.

He's noticed an increasing number of people who grumble when he sets a programming assignment - comments such as "do we have to? I don't like all this programming stuff..." are quite common, apparently. His initial response was along the lines of "look, you're doing a module called `Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming' on the `BSc Computer Science' degree course, in the Department of Computing. What on earth did you think it would involve?" and then he looked into it more deeply and found that at least some of them thought it would involve word-processing and spreadsheets, because that's what computing was about at school.

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

yeh this sounds quite like what my comp sci teacher friend teaches. A level Law seems similar - I'm being exposed to this for the first time through teaching predominantly English students - as far as I can tell they take all the bits out of law that make it interesting!

[andrewducker]

Yup. They're making it simpler and simpler, to get more people onto it, and then being dismayed when those people can't cope with the later, harder bits.

[blue-condition.livejournal.com]

Maybe you're lucky in that Scots Law is inherently more interesting than English - my parents wanted me to read Law and after looking at prospectuses and the career path it entailed I figured I could think of duller things, but not many ;P

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

It's perfectly possible for some types of tree to grow a metre in a year - that'd do your three inches in less than one month. True, they're not going to grow once leaf fall has occurred, but if you had leaf fall three months ago, I'd be surprised.

There's got to be some point at which there's too much tree. A dirty dish might also cause a tipping point.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Prof Shadbolt said there was increasing demand but decreasing supply of graduates in computer science

As with the "we're desperately short of scientists" argument, I'm not sure this is entirely the case. If it were, we'd be seeing the price of this scarce commodity (i.e. starting salaries for comp sci graduates) rising sharply. We're not, unless I've been misinformed.

[blue-condition.livejournal.com]

I'd sooner outsource than employ a lot of the recent graduates I've encountered. And I'd sooner employ grizzled veterans in their 30s and beyond who can do the job than outsource. ;)

[blue-condition.livejournal.com]

In my experience, computer science is largely taught by people who lack the brains, balls and gumption to go out and do it in the real world. I studied and researched in a 5* department, and I think there were maybe only half a dozen teaching staff who were actually worth listening to - one of them left when I was still an undergrad and went off to become rich and famous in computer forensics, one of them was the youngest professor in the UK when he arrived and within a decade settled into becoming a middle-aged parody of Morris Zapp without the sex, one of them was a brilliant teacher and solid researcher who left to go into industry because he kept being saddled with more and more admin work, one of them moved on because he took too much interest in teaching for a "research oriented" department, and a couple of others left for chairs at less prestigious institutions because of the 'Buggins' Turn' of gaining promotion.

In my younger days, Software Engineering was taught by people who'd never built a large software system in the real world. Vast tranches of the course were someone's pet subject, not anything of academic or industrial utility. Graduate demonstrators didn't know their material and were two pages ahead of the students in the course text.

And that was one of the best CS departments in the country, 10-20 years ago.

I'd hate to think what the crap ones are like now. But I've seen recent graduates, and no wonder people outsource...