title: Training or Education: What’s the Difference? link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2007/11/26/training-or-education-whats-the-difference/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 601 created: 2007/11/26 14:47:38 created_gmt: 2007/11/26 14:47:38 comment_status: open post_name: training-or-education-whats-the-difference status: publish post_type: post

Training or Education: What’s the Difference?

There are a couple of articles up in the BBC Technology section that bear reading. Both are by columnist Bill Thompson, and amount to laments about the woeful state of the average user’s understanding of computer technology.

In End of innocence for Mac fans, Thompson takes the occasion of the first “in the wild” Trojan for the “new” Mac OS to point out a major problem with computers in the schools.

From Thompson’s piece on the new Mac virus:

Despite the growing importance of computers and the internet in school I don’t expect that this real threat to home computer users will make it into the school newsletter or be announced in assembly as part of the general school concern for pupil safety.

And this highlights a real failing in the education system, one that betrays a lack of the sort of joined-up thinking that the government is trying to achieve elsewhere.

There is a fair amount of skills-based IT training taking place, so that students leave school knowing how to write a letter, make a spreadsheet and create a presentation, even if their skills tend to be oriented around Microsoft Office instead of being more general.

But this really is training, not teaching. IT has been embedded into the curriculum and students learn how to do stuff, but there is no space for discussion and debate that might lead to a deeper understanding of the technology or the issues it creates.

The closing paragraphs of the article Thompson gives a couple of examples of the kinds of activities that should be part of a truly relevant computer education, as opposed to the Microsoft Office based training that now dominates the landscape.

In the second article, in Lessons for the hi-tech future, Thompson takes the recent conversion of Sky broadband to Gmail for it’s customers, which resulted in a lot of complaints from users, as the jumping off point for reflection on the abject ignorance and laziness of consumers when it comes to dealing with technological change.

Some pretty significant insights from a Mac user.

Here’s the thing though, ignorance and laziness are the two qualities of consumers that Microsoft and Apple made their fortunes on. If people exhibited less of either vice, Linux (or maybe BSD Unix) would be much more widespread as a desktop operating system and free, open source, software would have swept away it’s more expensive and buggy proprietary competition a decade ago.

The same kind of human shortcomings led to the complete and utter failure of “computer education” in schools. Teachers and administrators are, after all, mostly consumers first and professionals second when it comes to computers. I doubt there are more than a handful of public school teachers with a computer science background, or even vendor certification in an enterprise operating system, programming language or application stack (e.g. Oracle, BEA or JBoss — MS Office is not an application stack).

It doesn’t have to be this way though. There are literally thousands of experienced, highly skilled, creative people out there with just the kind of education and communication skills needed to put public school computer education into high gear. These are the same kinds of senior technologists whom corporate America is laying off month after month and replacing with “good enough” resources from India and other offshore locations.

Might I suggest that school officials consider making a “raid” on these at risk professionals right now, before they move off into more stable and lucrative careers in things like law or medicine?

Just a thought.

Copyright 2004-2019 Phil Lembo