71% of students learn more about IT at home than school

Seriously though, I think it's clear, at least in CS, that if you only do your coursework you'll be left far behind your peers and what employers expect from you. It has to be something you can be passionate about on your own. Getting A's in all your classes but never doing anything outside of them isn't good enough.

Or another way to look at it: If young John Resig builds a tool that will save you time, should you wait for your professor to learn about it and teach you or learn about it from John himself? I'm not knocking academia (there's a lot of theoretical work going on in CS that's invaluable to the industry), but your professor is professional educator, not a professional programmer, so her needs and your needs (to have the right tools to build things competitively) are not perfectly aligned. In many fields the difference is probably inconsequential, but in something as rapidly changing as software I think it makes all the difference.

I've seen the effects of this lag in a different way living in Thailand. Since most of the developers here do not learn English well enough to work/research in the language, they're ability to learn new technologies is slowed waiting for the handful of bilingual developers that exist to learn them and then blog about them in Thai. The effect is that the technology base here is horribly outdated. New products are built aggressively, but they're almost all built on yesterday's tech. (The formal education system here is notoriously bad, but that's a different story.)

Most teaching revolves around the ability to use certain microsoft products (Word, Excel, Outlook and Access if you're "lucky"). In some cases, they may even teach you Dreamweaver. I remember one lesson being taught to create websites in Dreamweaver - we were told to use tables to design the website, told off for viewing the HTML or heck, even changing the view mode so that each panel was a window.

I trialled (and have friends and family at different schools that actually did) a GCSE ICT exam, and I was somewhat bemused at a program that simulated XP, in which the purpose was to do a number of tasks (designated by an Outlook lookalike program) such as create a database, write a word document etc. The program would record every mouse click and keystroke, whilst timing how fast you did each task.

It depresses me that that is what people regard as computers in this day and age. The teachers were often primarily of another subject (Art, for example), and refused to teach at a rate faster than "don't you DARE press OK in that alert! Has everyone got that alert? Right! Now press OK!".

I also find this disappointing:

“There is confusion between teaching IT, and using IT as part of the learning process,” Mr Fish said.

This seems to be very fashionable in many schools across the UK. I have no idea why - is French better taught through the medium of computers? Does the use of interactive whiteboards really increase productivity and ability to learn - or even attentiveness amongst pupils? Certainly Maths and English were not helped by an increase in technology, at least in my opinion. And exactly what are the pupils learning about IT in the process?

When top CS departments across the UK scorn ICT/IT A Levels/GCSEs, and in some cases appear to treat them as anti-requisites (Cambridge list ICT as a soft subject and I remember Oxford jokingly say at an open day that they look at candidates more favourably if they hadn't been taught ICT before), and when they don't appear to be teaching pupils anything that will be much use in the workforce (or rather, stuff that they don't already know that will be any use in the workforce) - what exactly is the point?

On the other hand, learning is something that happens at home, right? School mainly has the reason to help you structure your learning process, help you with finding exercises and good literature, evaluate your process with exams, answer the questions you have and last but not least kick your ass, if you can't motivate yourself. That you learn something while in school is actually not part of the schools description. So I wonder, how much these 29% "school learners" actually know about IT.

What the teachers need is a natural way of using technology in their classes. For that, they themself must start to use it at home. All these "Web2.0 Online Learning Platforms" that are actually just small CMS to download ppts can not really be all that is to it. My mother changed her major a short while ago and started studying to be a teacher for highschool. She actually thinks that these PPT-CMS systems and IRC-in-browser-integration are(!) Web2.0.

Falk and Dierking found that 95% of science education happens outside of school. They also found that American adults have greater scientific literacy than the adults of any other nation. Americans only do worse when they are in state schools. Once they are free from them, they become educated.

http://caise.insci.org/uploads/docs/FalkandDierking95perc.pd...

If one wants a more educated populace, the answer is less school, not more. School makes people ignorant, docile, obedient, and kills their natural curiosity and creativity. Also puts them into crippling debt if they keep on the treadmill too long.

As to learning about IT at school versus at home, I know that I learned more about computers at home but other students really didn't know much about computers until we were lent them by our school and used them in the classroom.

What this actually describes is a lack of respect for instructors who are unable or unwilling to work with students on challenging and difficult problems.

The truth is, most students this age are very good at applying technology but very unsure about creating technology. When you successfully strip away the marketing terms and start going after the actual concepts, it's remarkable how quiet the room gets.

I'd be curious how many readers on this site would even consider a teaching career. Personally, I'd love to teach, but lets face it, the pay just isn't that great.