Is the FOSS debate null and void?

George Siemens posted "Is the IT department Dead?". He pointed to a review of a book written by Nicholas Carr titled The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from Edison to Google.

I am interested in this from three perspectives.
How this thinking impacts on

1. ICT in schools
2. IT as a subject of study
3. skills and careers in my community

Some comments from the review

"The IT department is dead, and it is a shift to utility computing that will kill this corporate career path."

Carr's rationale is that utility computing companies will replace corporate IT departments much as electric utilities replaced company-run power plants in the early 1900s.

Carr explains that factory owners originally operated their own power plants. But as electric utilities became more reliable and offered better economies of scale, companies stopped running their own electric generators and instead outsourced that critical function to electric utilities.

I reckon that Carr has a point and that this thinking has implications for the skills debate we have going at the moment.

He says even IT professionals are indistinguishable from one company to the next. "Most perform routine maintenance chores — exactly the same tasks that their counterparts in other companies carry out," he says.

Maybe the job of IT professional has become just plain dull?

Carr offers a grimmer future for IT professionals. He envisions a utility computing era where "managing an entire corporate computing operation would require just one person sitting at a PC and issuing simple commands over the Internet to a distant utility."

The nature of software programming is evolving and morphing. We are currently lamenting the shortage of high level ICT skills but the future need for these skills does not seem to be there. The number of people involved does not seem to be a need in the future. The smarts will be few and involved in managing these large utilities it seems.

He not only refers to the demise of the PC, which he says will be a museum piece in 20 years, but to the demise of the software programmer, whose time has come to an end.

If nothing else, this supports my previous posts "The return to mainframes and terminals" and "Google releasing package for office". The PC will be dead and the terminals will be very portable. This also points to the importance of having and developing sound connectivity infrastructure.

In some ways it makes the FOSS debate in schools null and void. Certainly Linux OS with Firefox because they are free and provide that terminal like apparatus needed to access the online services. So where is the need for other productivity software like Open Office, GIMP, Inkscape, Thunderbird, etc when the technology is emerging for us to just do it online?

To me this also confirms my opinion that MS Vista is a non-event. What are these buggers thinking over there in lala Redmond land?

NZ Ministry of Justice discussion paper

http://nzoss.org.nz/system/files/moj_oss_strategy_1.0.pdf

Two of the quotes from this paper are of particular interest

The Ministry has stated its commitment to be an 'employer of choice' for skilled technical professionals. Adopting OSS in development and deployment is consistent with such a commitment. (Put bluntly, technical professionals want to keep their skills sharp and current; in 2007, working with open source tools and contributing to OSS projects are the way that's done.)

Broader issues within NZ government related to economic development. More widespread adoption of OSS is a form of 'Buying Kiwi' by means of encouraging growth of NZ-based software and service providers.

Could it be that a contributing factor to the high level skills shortage that we are facing is government sector preference for the use of proprietary solutions where the high level skills are effectively imported?

How to maintain creativity

I've not long posted "How to rejuvenate IT Studies" where the key seems to be to focus on creativity.

Then by magic is this post Staying Motivated and is all about developing and maintaining creativity. The site is for website developers but what is being said is transferable to other creative endeavours.

Whether your chosen medium is pictures or language, food or formulas, everyone has the capacity to be creative in their work. But we can often lose our motivation to create, making it difficult to stay focused and excited on a project. So how does one keep their creative well from drying up?

The post is divided into two sections.

1. Getting started with creativity
2. Maintaining creativity

This could be useful for those coaching jobs in class where you are trying to keep things moving as well as maintaining my own health in this area. I think I need a cheat sheet on the wall for this.

How to rejuvenate IT Studies

IT Studies or in some quarters, Computing Studies. Mark Guzdial has recently conributed two posts to his views about "Software Engineering and the Cause of the CS Enrollment Crisis"

1. Part 1
2. Part 2

Mark's posts are to do with tertiary level education.

Part 1
Mark's diagnosis

It seems to me that the cause of the student's disdain for "programming" and for the decline in CS enrollment lies there. As civil engineers need armies of construction workers to build their designs, and as mechanical engineers use armies of factory workers to produce their designs, so do software engineers use armies of programmers or coders, people who are explicitly not software engineers, to produce their designs. Few students go to college to become construction or factory workers. Why should it be surprising, then, that few Western students want to go to college to be the Information Age equivalent workers?

Boring and mundane - lack of creativity.

Computer scientists do not need to write good, clean code. Science is about critical and creative thinking

No fun

Our students want to be creative, not mundane. Many want to push hardware to do things that no one has ever thought about. Many want to explore new forms of expression. That is what computer science is about. That is not necessarily what software engineers need.

Part 2

Creativity

Realizing one's designs is motivating.

Summary.
He argues that we take care with the language that we use to teach programming. Use C based languages is a no go. Translating this to secondary school. Programming needs to be fun and encourage creativity.

I run a course called 'Negotiated Computing'. Students come to this class wanting to learn something about computers. For many that's as detailed as it gets but for others they want to learn HTML, Javascript, PHP, ..........

Students negotiate their learning contract and away we go.

The interesting thing is that I have a range of 'traditional' tutorials for these sorts of things and they are not particularly popular except for lesson 1. For example, in lesson 1 of PHP, students get a login to the LiveLAMP server, find out about the ftp settings and that's about the last I see of them in that course.

They are downloading code that others have made, uploading it to the server and trying to get it to work. This is particularly challenging for me as there is inevitably things that don't work and so we are looking at line 45 wondering why? It is hard because I am looked on as the expert and I should know the answer. I guess I get to model how I solve problems, offer an hypothesis and try out some solutions. Sometimes we win quickly, sometimes it takes longer and at other times we don't win at all and have to move on. We end up with chat, picture galleries and all sorts of things. They love to then get others to use the thing that they have got to work and then we see some modifications being made.

I guess I did the same thing 25-30 years ago. I used books with code, copied these and tried to get them to work. It took some time before I felt OK about trying to create something original.

This approach does not fit in with the formal senior secondary Information Technology syllabus. It does fit very nicely with Community Studies.

The future of senior secondary ICT

Published by The Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts
in June 2006 is a document called 'Building Australian ICT Skills - Report of the ICT Skills foresighting working group'

Page 10 of this document is in the 'Key findings and recommendations' section and deals with ICT in Schools.

The Working Group expressed concerns that the quality of ICT teaching in schools, and the outmoded image of ICT work presented, may be deterring students from considering ICT as an option for further study at university/TAFE and as a career choice. This was an issue that also received considerable attention at the partICipaTion Summit.

In particular the Working Group raised concerns about the teaching of ICT as a specialised subject in the later school years. The Working Group considered that the focus should be on teaching fundamental ICT principles, useful as a foundation for further study, rather than on specific programming areas.

It then goes on to make the following recommendation

Recommendation 7
The Working Group recommends that action be taken to review and enhance the teaching of ICT in schools. The working group suggests that:
• government fund detailed research on school ICT teachers to assess the characteristics (e.g. gender, age), qualifications and challenges of ICT secondary and high school teachers; and
• ICT industry bodies and leading ICT vendors work with education agencies and professional bodies to assist and support school ICT teachers and teaching staff in universities and TAFEs.

As a current 'later school years' ICT teacher I have an interest in the implications of the above statement. They say that the focus for my work 'should be on teaching fundamental ICT principles, useful as a foundation for further study, rather than on specific programming areas.' They reckon that schools "may be deterring students from considering ICT as an option for further study' because of 'the quality of ICT teaching in schools, and the outmoded image of ICT work presented'.

At this stage I just want to note this and reflect on it for a while. My gut reaction is that

• fundamental principles have always been what I was after
• programming areas is important for accessibility reasons - industry standards are bit like bathing costume seasonal fashions - important but doesn't need to prevent you from taking a dip.
  
• it adds weight to Bill Kerr's thinking and work around the advantages of using Squeak in secondary education (and mine in the related Scratch)
• my ideas for an IT student online community have had significant reinforcement
  

Final thought
A department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts?
Struggling to see the relationship. Why not stick Immigration in there as well? Or should it be called the Department for bits that we couldn't put anywhere else.

Reluctance to invest in our people.

The article of Graeme Philipson that I referred to in the previous post has some ring of truth but there is also some tension with it in my view of the world.

Two years ago, and three years after the Graeme Philipson article, I recorded an article that stated the there was a huge ICT trade deficit except for Open Source which was producing an export income.

There is not doubt in my mind, from personal experience, that there is a HUGE skills deficit in this FOSS area, so much so that South Australians, on the whole, may well have the idea that there is no choice but for proprietary software. By and large schools perpetuate this view by the mere fact that proprietary software is generally the only software on the computers in their classrooms. The perpetuate it in other ways as well.

So why would we perpetuate something which is contributing to our trade deficit rather than invest in something that is earning us exports? Graeme possibly hit on an answer -

They do not wish to train people, even graduates, because this costs money.

What sort of legacy are we leaving for our children?

Surely we are not that short sighted?

Is there a shortage of IT skills in Australia?

This article was published in June of 2002
http://www.philipson.info/files/f020618skills.doc

Graeme Philipson, the author, begins with

Is there a shortage of IT skills in Australia? It depends who you listen to.

He argues that the 'skills shortage' is a myth, created by business to justify outsourcing overseas and to get consent for work visa's in this area. His main evidence comes from asking people looking for work in the industry, not from employers.

Problem is, this consensus come from industry, not from people looking for IT work. There is a school of thought that says that many in the IT industry are manufacturing fears of an IT shortage to get handouts from government and to be able to hire cheaper immigrant labour. IT companies. They do not wish to train people, even graduates, because this costs money.

I know that it is hard for schools to find suitably skilled IT people to look after their networks. Maybe that is because the pay is poor? Maybe there really is s skills shortage.

Soooooo

Is there really a shortage of IT skills in South Australia?

The importance of hacker thinking

The word 'hacker' has evolved from a desirable trait to a word that implies evil and bad yet hacker thinking is so vital to creativity and innovation.

Watch the following set of videos that make up a documentary about the History of Hacking.

Part 1 of 5



Part 2 of 5



Part 3 of 5



Part 4 of 5



Part 5 of 5



Then lets add some FUD






















Image source

Is it any wonder that we have an ICT skills crisis?

Learning involves making mistakes, improvising, trying things out, experimenting. A good education is going to be messy. (some insight to that here).

Is a mono culture of proprietary software conducive to creating such an environment?

Are school networks and computers which are locked down so that kids can't 'break' them helping?

What about using programming languages that are not as accessible because of the cost?