On 07/03/2012 00:40, Rod Speed wrote:
John Rumm wrote
Rod Speed wrote
John Rumm wrote
Rod Speed wrote
John Rumm wrote
Rod Speed wrote
And if you want them to be able to do more than just trivial documents at work, they certainly need more than you
propose with Word too.
A bit more than a couple of weeks, perhaps - but certainly not years of it.
We dont do years even with the trade schools.
Your not in the UK I take it?
Nope, Australia.
The so called "ICT" (a name which means nothing to anyone outside of education), literally can get taught for years!
Thats not JUST Word tho if
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informa...United_Kingdom
is correct.
No its not just word, but it is largely using office applications"
(and that in reality if frequently MS Office apps). Publisher, and Powerpoint get a big look in, and some Excel...
So they dont spend years on Word.
Well if you study the same office suite for three to four years at
junior school, then all through secondary, what do you think?
After all, what sense does it make that kids leave school after doing the full time at school, without being able
to use something as common as Word for the sort of thing Word gets used for at work by so many ?
You mean writing one page letters, three page memos, and documents
that might use high tech capabilities like auto numbering! ;-)
Plenty of them do rather more than just that.
Has everyone had a sense of humour bypass tonight? ;-)
Nope, I was just pointing out that that overstates it.
As with most exaggerations there is a core of truth in there.
I dont believe there is with that one as far as the next point I made is concerned.
Yes plenty do more, however a sizeable majority don't.
Thats a separate issue to what needs to be taught to them tho.
I would say they are related.
I wouldnt. You do have to teach the more fancy stuff
even tho many wont ever have a need for some of it.
I think you are actually making the same argument as I was... That
*only* covering the basics over and over gets boring unless one also at
least touches on the more elaborate bits in such a way as students at
least appreciate the capabilities that are there and why and when they
may need them.
You can certainly make a case for using Word for 3 page memos
so that the one tool is used for most documents they are likely to
do, if only so they know that Word can do it if they need to, and
can refresh what they learnt on say style sheets if they ever do
need to do stuff that makes them worth using
Indeed
Being comfortable with technology,
I dont see a problem with that anymore with kids currently in school.
At the immediately practical level its far less of a problem than it
used to be. Although even many kids with years of computer experience
have miserable keyboard skills.
At a slightly deeper level however it is still and issue. Many people
(kids included) when confronted with a new bit of software are still
scared to explore or find out what it can do. Even though they have the
skills to drive the UI, and they seem reluctant to study each menu and
see what things do. Pop up each dialogue, see what is on it, even if you
only cancel it after etc. That confidence to actually explore and find
out is often missing.
and know the basic functions of office software is important.
Yes, and being aware that Word can do the fancy stuff like style sheets
if you end up producing stuff that benefits from that is part of that.
I would hardly say style sheets are "fancy stuff"... Even for one page
memos, there is a very good business case to use them. In this day an
age where businesses have a habit of re-branding every few years, and
often the company name is fixed above the door with Velcro, being able
to re-style all your past letters and memos etc with a quick tweak to
the styles rather than plodding through manually reformatting stuff is a
major gain in productivity.
As is decent mouse and keyboard skills. However repeating that over and over only gets board kids, not better trained
ones.
Showing them the more fancy stuff like style sheets doesnt risk that.
I was not suggesting it did.
The risk is quite different, that plenty of them like those who plan
to be plumbers and hairdressers may well decide that they will
never need to know that stuff and they may well be right too.
(what is it with plumbers and hairdressers by the way? is this some new
form of social class?)
I don't know exactly to which age group you are referring, but for the
bulk of primary and secondary education its probably a fair assessment
that the majority of kids don't yet know what they are going to do.
Hence targeting everything to what you think they will need in their
chosen occupation is not a realistic task. Also people change their
minds and do different things.
But then thats just as true of algebra and languages other
than english and history and geography etc etc etc too.
(note there is actually a fair amount of interesting stuff in the ICT syllabus - alas much of it does not get taught
or gets taught in a veru formulaic way because the teachers don't have deep enough skills either to really understand
what they are doing, and develop the concepts and explore a little.
Sure but thats inevitable with any technical area.
I am not sure that is really true... I can't see many physics teachers
saying "well I am going to skip over heat and optics because I never
really got that bit myself". The difficulty with ICT as we currently
have it, is that it seems to be perceived as a "soft science" rather
than a rigorous one.
Its never practical to just teach what a sizable majority of them
actually do with any subject.
As IT hack Guy Kewney used to say something like "people are in the habit of demanding tomorrow's technology today,
when in reality
many would be incapable of using yesterday's technology next week!"
Thats a separate issue to what should be taught in schools tho.
Indeed... although look round a school and the same principle often applies. IT suites full of "ok" computers, and top
end kit in the staff rooms that never gets touched!
Sure, but there is no solution for that sort of thing.
Plenty of times I have worked in high tech engineering companies,
where the engineers were slogging over 2000 page cross referenced
design and test specs or similar documents or crappy geriatric PCs,
Those are all quite adequate for running something
like Word or whatever else you prefer to do that with.
If they were adequate I would not have commented on it!
Corse they are adequate.
You don't do much technical documentation I take it?
It can be a bit galling when the process of loading, making a small edit
to a document, regenerating contents, and cross references, saving
again, and then rendering to a PDF takes 25 mins on the engineering
Pentium IV, with 1GB RAM, and the secretaries i7 64 bit machine with 4GB
could do the same job in five.
These things go in phases obviously - machines get refreshed from time
to time, and they new ones cope for a while. It however seems to be the
case that in many less enlightened establishments, the people making
most demand on the hardware are last in line for the refresh etc.
To be fair its less of an issues these days in that even relatively
poor machines will still perform fairly well on basic office apps as
long as you are not shifting large or complex documents about.
And even if you are.
But load up a graphics content rich 500MB doc on a machine that can't
hack it, and it will spend most of its time paging and not doing much else.
I just dont believe any engineer is stuck with a machine like that.
Not sure how to answer that, except you had better steer clear of the
likes of Marconi ;-)
Certainly it makes no sense to try and ram it down the throats of
most kids tho.
Anything you stick on a school curriculum you in effect "ram down
the throats" of the kids...
Nope, particularly when quite a bit of the curriculum is optional
and not compulsory.
If you are in a state school, and ICT is on the national curriculum,
then that is what you get...
I dont believe that thats compulsory for all say hair dressers etc in
ICT is compulsory at the moment if you follow the NC. As I alluded to, some categories of school have more freedom to
interpret manoeuvre within the constrains of the NC.
I still dont believe that all hairdressers have to be fluent in Excel for example.
Ok enough with the hairdressers. While I fully admit to not being
complete up to date with what options are offered in secondary schools -
and indeed I am aware that syllabi with vocational bias toward the
"beauty industry" are offered by some schools, I am fairly sure there
not a box one can tick at 12 years old, that says "future hairdresser",
which will then absolve you from being taught anything too difficult!
And I bet, whatever the NC says, hordes of them end up with only the vaguest
notion of what a spreadsheet is, let alone what you can do with Access.
Hairdressers run businesses as well remember. Being able to track costs
against income is a fairly fundamental ability if you need to decide how
to set prices etc.
Access skills are a slightly different case. Even in my many years as a
professional developer, I have had vary rare cause to use it even
tangentially. Knowing a bit about what databases do, how they work etc,
and what sort of problems one can solve with them however is more useful.
[snip]
I personally would like to see some of the basics of software development taught alongside the office apps skills etc.
I cant see thats going to fly with those you cant een manage to get to
show up at school at all, let alone do anything useful when they are there.
Well one could say that is a separate issue.
However if the reason some students don't want to turn up in the first
place is lack of interest and lack of challenge from what they are being
taught, it may actually help.
I suspect however that you would find it easier to generate enthusiasm
for a (say) a small robot being driven round an obstetrical course by a on board Pi, than one would for something
popping up on the screen of a PC.
Dunno, cant see too many of those that plan to be hairdressers getting interested.
A defeatist lack of vision perhaps?
It was hilarious watching that doco series
Gareth Malone's Extraordinary School for Boys
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1721246/
Even getting the buggers to read a damned book voluntarily
was a major challenge and those werent even the hair dressers.
I have not actually seen it, but it sounds like a problem with
motivation and not lack of ability.
- there are desperately few getting taught any useful development
skills prior to university these days (unless self taught)
Sure, but you can make a case that anyone who is likely to end up being much use as a computer engineer is likely to
do that seff taught stuff.
I disagree, and would also suggest that evidence would not support
that claim. We (i.e. the UK) seem to be producing far fewer people
going to university to study hard sciences in general, and
software/hardware engineering in particular than many other countries.
Sure, but thats mainly because they cant see that that got much future for them.
They may be right too, I cant think of much software wise
that stands out much thats ever come out of Britain, even
tho thats where the industrial revolution clearly got started.
Never mind the industrial revolution, the computing one as well! Much to
the American's disgust (they used to think ENIAC was something new);
I''ve just put my asbestos undies on, bet that will get a response |-)
While it might be fun to enumerate some of the counter examples, I will
leave that for another time.
Not so true of computer hardware, but its less clear
how many of those ever bothered with uni degrees.
Although it was a different world then...
A number of people have commented on this:
Yeah, that happens right around the world, particularly with the hard sciences.
And I have two degrees in the hard sciences myself.
The problem seems to be more what kids see as an area that has much future.
The employment prospects for those with degrees in the hard sciences arent that
great and they arent exactly fields where most can just coast thru effortlessly.
Bit different with engineering, but even then its more the
civils etc with the prospects rather than computing now.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14683133
Cearly when the BBC did what it did, it didnt help. **** all in the
way of any software that anyone uses today ever came out of that.
EPOC? Symbian as it became - although now on the wane, still represents
the lions share of feature phones in use out there.
Sage, Autonomy[1], Misys, Micro Focus spring to mind...
[1] Swallowed fairly recently by HP for some £7Bn IIRC
Also lots of comms, and telecoms related developers.
(three quarters of the UK software industries revenue are from exports)
Tho I spose we dont get to hear about many of those that did end up
in software development out of those who did get exposed to that.
http://royalsociety.org/Current-ICT-...ce-in-schools/
The first line of that blows quite a hole in the compulsory claim.
The study of ICT is embedded in the NC and is not optional, however
taking exams in it are not mandatory, and hence few do. THis probably
has a knock on effect on the teaching, since many teachers will treat it
as a non exam related subject.
Even when they do take exams in ICT, they really are quite weak when you
compare them to the full on Computer Studies or Computer Science courses.
The rest of its too much just sound bites for me.
Its different with something like say jet engine design.
And then you have the other entire can of worms, whats best taught
in primary, secondardy, trade schools and university level education.
We don't really have much in the way of trade schools as such here
So where do plumbers, electricians, hair dresssers etc etc etg get qualified ?
Plumbers and electricians, typically on the job. Often starting as a
junior or an apprentice with a larger firm.
I don't know about hairdressers, but probably the same, although I get
the feeling there probably are more vocational courses available for
those following that goal.
The formal part of their qualifications has to happen somewhere.
(I take it you refer to ones that major on vocational training rather than academia?)
That and where say an apprentice plumber gets to do the formal
part of their education to end up being a qualified plumber etc.
Plumbers here may well be well skilled, but few will find formal
qualifications necessary for basic plumbing. Many will then take courses
in areas like gas fitting to extend the range of jobs they can do into
the controlled activities. (unlike in Aus, plumbing in the uk is not
quite the closed shop that many trades are there - although regulation
is ever increasing).
The routes to becoming a trading electrician are a bit different and
somewhat convoluted. Typically requiring a mixture of real job
experience, and vocational qualifications, and membership of a suitable
trade organisation. Hence not something that can typically be acquired
in school before you start.
which is a shame. Some of the better comprehensive
schools do now have streams that lean this way however.
But surely thats not where you can get qualfied as a plumber or hair dresser or mechanic ?
Qualified in the having bits of paper to prove it sense, no not
generally - see above. However qualified in the sense of "filtered" i.e.
you have actually done something close enough to the real job to know if
that truly is a path you want to follow, and have an interest in and
aptitude for then yes.
I agree with I think it was Bernard who said that the basics of using
Word should be taught to something like 8 year olds just because that
would be useful for most kids even just for projects and assignments
but not neccessarily so true of Excel which might be better left till a bit later in school.
Its quite often surprising what kids are capable of if guided in the right direction.
And they dont necessarily have to be guided either.
Someone I know well started off with a Commodore 64
at home, nothing much in school at all, even tho it was
one of the better what you lot call public schools, and
ended up in software for our current submarines.
Probably not an unusual story when you think about it... most of us who
grew up in the '80s and ended up in technology related occupations also
had home computers of some sort, but little formal education in the
subject at the time. (in fact home computers took off in a big way in
the UK probably more than most places). Computers were only just
beginning to make it into schools in the early '80s, and it was still
some time before they became subjects in their own right.
He's the loony that called me from inside the loony bit later than that.
Huh?
I have never had one of ours come home and enthuse about having learnt how to set a margin in word etc, in fact it
never
gets much of a mention. However the day our eldest went for a "sampler" day at a potential senior school and they had
them
programming macros to pop up messages boxes etc in VBA, she actually came home and wanted to try it out here!
Yeah, its interesting to watch what lights some fires.
But I think you can make a case for teaching the sort of thing that
is useful for automating the production of quotes and for day to day
billing etc may be better left to trade school where you can teach
what is appropriate to a particular trade when say car mechanics
are likely to find that stuff less useful than say general builders etc.
Its not clear to me what the british system does with say the education of hairdressers and plumbers about computing,
whether they attempt to
Well a hairdresser running a business is as much a businessperson as
many others. The same skills are required.
Sure, but I meant whether they bother to teach computing
to all the hairdressers because some will end up running a
hair dressing operation, or leave that for those that do to
get some education in when the decide that they want to
be more than just an employee.
However, there is a danger of focussing too much on "life skills".
While it is an important part of eduction, and so is the acquisition
of qualifications (if that is your competency), there is a vital and
often forgotten aspect of education which is in effect holding up a
"mirror" to your students to allow them to form a better picture of
who they are and what they are actually capable of when challenged
and pushed a bit. To in effect push a wide variety of "buttons" and
see which one gets them going. Try a broad enough range of things to
stimulate interest, and let them decide where there interests and
vocations rest.
Sure, but most schools do manage at least some of that.
The better ones do certainly. However one of the problems with the
combination of NC and league tables, is that they tend to push schools
to teach "to the test" - i.e. teach the kids how to pass a particular
set of exams, rather than teach them about the particular subject, or
how to think independently. It can get your school good pass rates, but
ultimately does the students a disservice since they learn how to answer
particular physics questions for example, rather than have any innate
understanding of the subject.
[snip]
I know the germans particularly do make all the kids do all sorts of
things formal education wise even in trade school that isnt common in
many other countrys. They've been doing that for hundreds of years now.
They do, as do the Japanese. Although in their rigour and very constrained system they also tend to suppress some of
the inventiveness and creativity, which (historically at least) our educations system was better at preserving.
Yeah, bugger all ever came out of Japan technology wise except games consoles.
Might be understating it a bit ;-) But in general, very good at
commercialising an packaging products, less good at the initial ideas
perhaps.
Tho I Ispose you should include hybrid cars too.
Not sure what they do about that with sxy computers and hairdressers tho.
--
Cheers,
John.
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