Обсуждение

I was a tech-savvy teen - my dad was a PC hobbyist who had us building servers and LANs from the age of 12 - and my GCSE classes in ICT (the term IT hadn't been adopted yet!) were hilariously outdated. In 2002, our textbooks still said "one day, five million people will be using electronic mail".

Dr Jo Kershaw

Even if the government is right to be betting the house on AI (and I suspect the way things shake out will be different to what we expect), this is likely to have the problem Computing as a subject has always had in schools, ie it’s pretty much instantly out of date. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Cascaolas

28 июл., 12:59

Yup, fond memories of my pals running rings round the computing teacher/sys admin in high school in the late 90s.

AnnieBannie (She/Her🧶📚🌈)

28 июл., 12:36

I knew my objections to teach preschoolers mouse skills in ~2012 were well justified. I said it was because screen time for that age was not recommended and that mouse skills would be redundant soon. (Now I have to teach mouse skills to primary kids as they've never used them.)

devilsbit

28 июл., 12:50

God same, my dad's been a hardware engineer since the 80s. I was sitting in Computing being taught quite a bit of basic stuff that was torture to sit through and then a lot of the more technical stuff was out of date. I will say though they taught me Excel basics and I still use those!

Celestial M Weasel

28 июл., 11:04

Wikipedia claims: "The phrase "information and communication technologies" has been used by academic researchers since the 1980s.[5] The abbreviation "ICT" became popular after it was used in a report to the UK government by Dennis Stevenson in

Celestial M Weasel

28 июл., 11:04

1997,[6] and then in the revised National Curriculum for England, Wales and Northern Ireland in 2000. However, in 2012, the Royal Society recommended that the use of the term "ICT" should be discontinued in British schools "as it has attracted too many negative connotations".[

The Author, Séamas O'Reilly

28 июл., 10:58

I seem to remember that large parts of our study materials, and the tests we did, were specifically about Electronic Point Of Sale machines and how they worked. The primary use case of a computing GCSE - in 2002! - seemed to be knowing how to fix supermarket registers and cashpoints.

Dr Jo Kershaw

28 июл., 11:00

“Attuned to the needs of the local job market”

TerryLeopard

28 июл., 11:05

There's going to be a lot of barber and barrista courses.

Dr Jo Kershaw

28 июл., 11:11

Nothing wrong with being a hairdresser if that’s what you want to do. Good solid job. Perfectly adequately catered for by existing college courses, of course.

Celestial M Weasel

28 июл., 11:11

Unlikely to be replaced by ChatGPT too

Celestial M Weasel

28 июл., 11:07

The plebs' PPE - BBC - Barber, Barrista, Care-worker

Celestial M Weasel

28 июл., 11:09

(PS I can't spell Barista)

TerryLeopard

28 июл., 11:10

Me either apparently.

BlueDragonLandlady

28 июл., 11:07

And nail salon and vape-retailing courses.

Jane Goth

28 июл., 11:08

My computer science class at school covered punched cards, Kimble tags and iron cores! When I was in yr 7 the computer science teacher rolled out the only computer in the school for us to gawp at.

Joanna Abena Fianu

28 июл., 12:42

To be fair our epos system (less than a year old) goes haywire in new and unexpected ways every week so it was a reasonable assumption.

The Author, Séamas O'Reilly

28 июл., 12:29

I should also clarify: everyone knew this was absurd at the time! We were all online, this was a good few years into the Napster, MSN messenger era. Our teacher was embarrassed too, and would gruffly apologise when each new section of the course ended up being about humidity sensors or floppy disks.

KG 🍃

28 июл., 12:34

By 2004 we had outpaced the IT teachers own knowledge because we all had home computers by then and spent lessons trawling the internet for chat rooms that weren't blocked.

Stephen

28 июл., 13:28

I have fond memories of being asked in a GCSE IT paper circa 2009 to draw a diagram that illustrated the difference between portrait and landscape, presumably in the context of a word processor

Tom Duncan

28 июл., 12:42

Our Maths teacher was shoehorned into teaching us programming because, why not 🤷‍♂️. I had been a keen programmer for about a year already and ended the course doing the programming coursework for my 6 best mates, each in a way that would look unique and independent to Mr. Maths Teacher.

Tom Duncan

28 июл., 12:43

He had warned us that he would know if we had copied or colluded. He didn’t. 🙂

Fiona Wilkinson

28 июл., 15:05

I am reminded of computing 'O' level in 1980 writing programs using paper tapes, whilst the Sinclair ZX was making it's way into homes. But we also had a lecture on how computing technology was going to replace many tasks so we should prepare for much more leisure time in the future.

Fiona Wilkinson

28 июл., 15:06

So I take predictions of how AI is going to change things with a healthy dose of salt!

Margaret Harris

28 июл., 17:32

Aware that her roomful of 1990s Apple II GSs was obsolete, and unable to send all her students to the lone computer in the library with Internet access, my middle school computer teacher hit upon a novel solution. She taught us touch typing, which I'm still using >30 years later.

Matthew Smith

28 июл., 12:58

I attended secondary school from 1990 to 1995, and as the 16-bit revolution came and went and the PC ascended to be the format of the future, our weekly Information Technology class never advanced beyond poking about with horrible DTP programs on the Acorn Bleeding Archimedes.

Matthew Smith

28 июл., 13:00

At least the Amiga 3000 in the art department meant that, if no-one was looking, you could have a go at Lemmings with the sound off.

Stephen Drennan

28 июл., 13:54

Still need humidity sensors, Séamus - the real world is stubbornly analogue!

Sally

28 июл., 12:43

Wish I could have had a camera with me during the 2000 'Office Applications' GCSE (school wouldn't do Information Technology, that was 'too hard' for us) where one question around the middle of the paper involved circling the picture, from a bunch of clipart, of a mouse.

mairs123

28 июл., 13:28

I think a bigger issue now is how divorced young people are from the concept of desktop (even laptop) computers. My observation is phones and tablets dominate and the basic stuff (albeit outdated) is conceptually boring to them.

Alison C

28 июл., 11:20

Super local reference - when I did "Computer Studies" in 1st year we were all told to go to Superfare as they were the first place in the city to have bar code scanners on the tills.

Gemolisch

28 июл., 11:22

Shades of our primary school class once having an "excursion" to the school office to see a fax arrive. (We missed it.)

dyvanna

28 июл., 11:24

My computer studies class had BBC computers and we programmed in basic. Damn I'm old.

Helen O'Hara

28 июл., 11:21

Also, starting from 14? Feels late given that my nephew has been coding since he was 6.

AveTeresa

28 июл., 11:03

Funny, first year computing students at NCI initially are brought right back to pen and paper and logic games and puzzles, to start them thinking right. Imagine a class like that in secondary school? Would’ve loved it!

Ken Tindell

28 июл., 11:09

I was taught technical drawing and how to operate a lathe - years after CAD/CAM had cut a swathe through all that. It’s very easy to resolve the debate about whether schools should be doing training or education: it’s education.

squillace

28 июл., 11:11

It'll depend what sort of subject.

CursèdZebra

28 июл., 12:58

Listen, my European Computer Driving Licence comes in useful all the time. Constantly driving computers, I am.

Michael Cleary

28 июл., 11:02

I remember a textbook telling you how to click excel called Computer Literacy And Information Technology. CLAIT Isn’t that A redundant? Shut up Cleary!