Each time, I feel great pleasure of preparing the courses, the slides, the exercises.
Each time, I found the students too much focused on short term objectives. Everything they do is throwable and targeted to obtaining the best possible marks.
But, more and more, in the new enterprise 2.0, we need to teach them:
- To team with all kind of people. Teaming can be done locally (their friend), but also through Internet. Teaming should not be done only because you want to work with your friends. The team management in the enterprise is generally not under the control of their memebers. You have to work with others, and consider their weaknesses and strengths.
- To stop programming in a sandbox. They should learn the basics, like creating a build file, using a source code repository, controlling the quality and the performance of their code. So many students, and sometimes real world companies, are delivering their project result as an eclipse project or a war file. One of my students groups' put all the results of their work in a google code web site. And you know what, this is Great!
- To develop in the cloud. Why not making students of several universities develop the same projects using open source development platform and leveraging their work across the years. Everything energy spent by students to do something should be reusable for all. Google summer of code is a good idea, but what we need here is a more global approach.
Having University teaching the basics of IT (Java, algorithms, etc.) is no more enough for our students. This static corpus of knowledge, will not provide any advantage in the new economy, since:
- this corpus of knowledge is more and more offered for free (look at Itunes University and others training web sites on any of the subjects you want);
- millions of IT engineers are available on the market at lower cost than them. Most of them being very well trained and able to use High level framework;
- the first outsourcing vague is now transforming in a second real, profound and definitive sourcing vague. Each local market will be looking for experts only, and most of the rest of the job will be sourced to "low cost IT labor" countries.
We urgently need platforms in the cloud and educational programs done at country and regional level to train our students to be proNetarian, but also to create and protect their knowhow is a virtual economy. It could be with the support of the European Union, or with the support of IT companies, groups and universities. Today, in Europe, we still tend to create cluster, campus (, etc.) like done in the USA some years ago. But it's too late. We need to move one step further, especially for the information technology. Or ....
You are absolutely right. Teachers are too
ReplyDeletebusy talking about their research and giving marks (which
sometimes have no relation to our ability to work in
IT). As their future is at stake, students are forced to concentrate
on marks rather than on what the courses gives them.
By the way, I really enjoyed your course at university.
You're the first person to talk about the reality of
IT in companies and how things are done nowadays. I thank you for that.