[OT] HyperCard and the Interactive Web

[Richmond]

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ee58426a-df9a-11e0-845a-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1mU0BdboP

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http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ee58426a-df9a-11e0-845a-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz1mU3h024O

Mr Willetts said he accepted Mr Schmidt's widely publicised remarks that 
"your IT curriculum focuses on how to use software but gives no insight 
into how it's made. That is just throwing away your great computing 
heritage.""

Spot on......

------faintly tedious anecdote follows-----

This morning, on my non-teaching day, I got a Facebook call from on of 
the 15 year olds I teach, from her "IT" class.

I asked her what she was doing when they were having an IT class; she 
told me that the teacher was "rabbiting on about Word"
(well, at least I could feel happy that her English was good enough to 
use 'rabbiting') and all the kids were chatting on Facebook,
and, anyway, the teacher didn't care.

She asked me what I would do under similar circumstances; to which I 
replied that I would chat to my friends on Facebook
as how to format a paragraph in 'Word' does not constitute 'IT', and 
that the teacher should know better. She pointed out to me
that that is what the course outline for the year largely consisted of.

------end of faintly tedious anecdote stops here; but you may regret not 
having read it as what follows may appear decontextualised as a result--

This does not happen only in Bulgaria........

http://www.silicon.com/management/cio-insights/2008/06/17/boring-school-it-curriculum-slammed-39247688/

"called for a radical overhauling of the curriculum in secondary schools 
as "boring" ICT classes which focus on Word and Excel are turning 
teenagers off IT as a career. "

Which cretins (and by 'cretins' I mean CRETINS) arrived at the idea that 
IT consisted of typing in a word-processor or
mucking around with a spreadsheet?

------bitchy, personal bit follows-------

Having said that; this criticism comes from "my own" 'University' of 
Abertay where, on the MSc course I attended, we had 3 weeks of lectures
on Excel. And, having been told the course was about computers and 
computer programming, none of the lecturers seemed to have heard of 
Linux: probably as the result of a miasmic cloud of unknowing spreading 
out from the 'Microsoft Professor' there.

------smack yourself for having skipped the difficult bits------

Richmond.