Best posts made by worden2

Hello: I'm an educator in an IT school in Indiana and am looking to connect and learn from in-the-field professionals so that I'm staying current and engaged in my field outside of the "Ivory Tower". I've watched Scott Alan Miller's presentations on our LANless future and the definition of IT and based on those two videos feel this is a community I'd like to be part of.

@scottalanmiller said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:

Does college have value? yes and know.

There's the T-shirt people! Not what SAM intended I'm sure, but...

@quixoticjeremy said in If you are new drop in say hello and introduce yourself please!:

@worden2 said in If you are new drop in say hello and introduce yourself please!:

Hello: I'm an educator in an IT school in Indiana and am looking to connect and learn from in-the-field professionals so that I'm staying current and engaged in my field outside of the "Ivory Tower". I've watched Scott Alan Miller's presentations on our LANless future and the definition of IT and based on those two videos feel this is a community I'd like to be part of.

Kudos to you for doing this! The amount of teachers that I ran into when I went through college that were great teachers and people but were far behind in terms of what they were teaching was almost every teacher I had. It is difficult to stay current when you aren't working in the field regularly. Welcome to the community @worden2 I hope you enjoy it here!

I'll be the first to admit that academic institutions turn like oil tankers in a sea of icebergs, but given that we're in IT as it is our School is definitely aware of the need to stay current (no pun intended with the tanker comment btw). It's a catch-22 though since it is really hard to find "time away" from my job. Teaching is a full time job, without question, so with the IT component adding that much more it can be tough. Just trying to keep up with industry certs for instance... whew.

@thanksajdotcom - So, shouldn't it be "thanksadotjdotcom"? Perhaps "thanksadotjdotdotcom"?

As an IT educator, I'm constantly aware of how I have to be "up" on/in my field while giving my profession the respect it is due. This means not simply taking the latest trend as a need to disrupt the consistency of the academic process, while making certain we are not becoming outdated by the overall progress in the field.
Some examples:
I chair a program known as Server Administration (SVAD) that primarily teaches Microsoft to the MCSA level and Linux to the LPIC2 level. Some issues I've had to work with my curriculum committee on are; whether or not to allow synchronous online classes (face-to-face only right now), whether or not to change the name of the program to Systems Administration (not too many "Server Admin" positions listed), how to incorporate Azure, AWS, or even Docker into the program.
At some point I'm being disruptive to the status quo, which adds to my peers' workload and diminishes the necessary academic consistency. On the other hand there are technologies like Lambda and Docker that will significantly change my program, I think. We have to stay relevant.
So, with that background, how do all of you feel about the "state of IT education" and what can be done, if anything, to make it better?

I think Python is showing a lot of strength as a intro language as well, and it may come from a scripting background so to speak, but seems full featured enough to be easy to introduce (Scratch is based on it) and used in more sophisticated settings.

@dashrender :
We're a 2 year school, with an emphasis on getting students done in 4 semesters. Having said that we're working on getting things to be more flexible. We have an "ASAP" program that takes students from high school to a 2 year degree in 11 months, but right now that only has an informatics component from our School involved.
I like your point on taking the class from a subject matter expert and not a subject leader, but I would hope that if someone has been teaching a while that you can have some continuity. For instance, in one area I went from teaching "Data Communication" to "Intro. to Networking (Network+)" to "Cisco I (CCENT part 1)". Those classes are not the same, but they're not dissimilar either! You can see from that how "the meat of the class" is there.
I also like to use the talking point with software development that if you're a programmer a new language can be easier to learn than for someone just starting out that needs to understand the logical underpinnings of coding in general.

@kooler said in Stanford Removes Java in Favor of JavaScript in Intro to Computer Science Course:

@mlnews said in Stanford Removes Java in Favor of JavaScript in Intro to Computer Science Course:

In a bit of a surprise move in the educational space, computer science bulwark Stanford University has chosen to remove Java and replace it with JavaScript in their Intro to Computer Science class. Java has been the language of this somewhat famous class since 2002, a run of fifteen years. They say that Java is showing its age, although to be fair JavaScript is nearly as old. Java itself is 22 years old this year. Since being purchased by Oracle, interest in Java has slowly fallen from its lofty peak during stewardship under Sun.

Anybody who's starting with anything except assembly language is WRONG!!! If somebody doesn't know how CPU works he can't make a decent software engineer: he'll use bloatware, write things in interpreted languages and bring file systems to kernel from user-land.

As a matter of purity or getting down to basics when introducing concepts, I agree. But, when you're talking about trying to introduce CS concepts to people new to the field assembly is a nightmare. I had some simple assembly as part of intro CS when in college, but it almost soured me completely on programming. Of course, what really killed my nascent interest in programming (in college) was having to learn Cobol... Perhaps it's safe to say that the closer you get to the kernel the more you need assembly?

@dashrender said in Thoughts on IT education - the good, bad, and the ugly:

Teaching research is probably one of the most important skills for IT. Learning how to dig through logs, how to find solutions to your problems, not just ask sales people what to buy.

This is the biggest thing I've learned from being part of SW and ML.

This is a HUGE issue, and you've hit on something one of my students said to me, almost verbatim. I also try to let my students know, "at some point I'm just trying to make sure you're an educated consumer"
Forgive my ignorance on SW and ML, and you elaborate?

@dustinb3403 said in Thoughts on IT education - the good, bad, and the ugly:

@scottalanmiller said in Thoughts on IT education - the good, bad, and the ugly:

@dustinb3403 said in Thoughts on IT education - the good, bad, and the ugly:

@scottalanmiller said in Thoughts on IT education - the good, bad, and the ugly:

@dustinb3403 said in Thoughts on IT education - the good, bad, and the ugly:

IT education has to be dated, by some amount. If education was bleeding edge, the person teaching the course would be learning the material with the class.

You have to do that to be an IT pro. If the professor isn't learning with the class, you've got a big problem.

Um.. . . read that again. The profession at least needs to know what is going on. Learning is good, but they should be learning the material before the rest of the class.

It's why they are the professor.

Not really, if you need the class to hold back for you to catch up, you are the opposite of a professor.

This is a scott-ism. The point of being in the class is because you want to learn from an expert on the course material. Not because you want to learn with the professor.

It's weird. I agree with you both! For instance, we require our faculty to be certified in classes that lead to a cert, so if you teach the class that corresponds to the first MCSA cert (70-410 right now) you have to have that, but you don't have to have had the 411 and 412 passed to teach it. Should that change? I'm not sure. Also, we used to build the cert into the course, but we now have the "didactic" 3 credit hour classes that lead to a 1 credit hour "workforce preparation" class, so should we only have the cert requirement on the 1 credit hour classes so we're not short of qualified faculty to teach it? This is one of the reasons I'm on these boards now. I see SAM talk about LANless futures and what the "true" definition of IT is and I realize that at the very least I'll see a side I might be insulated from with your perspectives. Thank you for that!

@scottalanmiller said in Thoughts on IT education - the good, bad, and the ugly:

@dashrender said in Thoughts on IT education - the good, bad, and the ugly:

@jaredbusch said in Thoughts on IT education - the good, bad, and the ugly:

@worden2 said in Thoughts on IT education - the good, bad, and the ugly:

@jaredbusch said in Thoughts on IT education - the good, bad, and the ugly:

Also, mods add tags.

Sorry about that.

Meh, it is not the most obvious thing in the world.

You can add tags by editing your initial post if you want, or a mod will get to it.

LOL - while not IT related - the use of tags in general seems to be a pretty new thing. I know they have been around just about forever, but their actual use is pretty light. A good thing to toss into an intro class somewhere.

I was studying taxonomic classification in 2003, it was a major topic at the time because folksonomy of the web was really the hot thing of the era and that's where a lot of research and thought in IT was going. Long before these kinds of communities were arising. Taxonomy and folksonomy would be good topics for an IT curriculum.

Interesting. I'll look into it. For instance, I'm teaching an intro class in Informatics this semester, and I can see where this would be a good topic.

@scottalanmiller said in Thoughts on IT education - the good, bad, and the ugly:

Back to curriculum... one thing that might be well suited for an AS focused world (which I believe that you said was the program) is simply going to "Topics in IT 1" and "Topics in IT 2" and so forth. Make them so general that the department simply then gets to decide the order and content so as to build up a core understanding by the end.

That is a component, for sure. We're doing Assoc. of Applied Science to be clear, so keep in mind our degrees correspond to HVAC, Electronics, Supply and Logistics, and similar levels of more-than-just-training. We're NOT ITT for instance, and even as we're trying to meet demand for our students we will not promise more than we can deliver or become a diploma or training mill.

@scottalanmiller said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:

So for reference, student loans, for those able to get them (many of us cannot so these are not realistic numbers, many students must use credit cards for this) run from 4.3% to 6.8%. That's the first step.

Actually, 8% is far more common on US Gov't loans, even when the mortgage and other markets were FAR below that. The mandated cap is 8%, and on repayment it stayed at the cap even when it didn't have to.