CIO Folder: Literacy, numeracy more essential than tech ed

Pro
(Image: Stockfresh)

20 June 2016

There was a convention a long time ago, when PCs were just beginning to pervade the offices of our land in the early 80s, that job adverts said things like ‘Experience of word processing, preferably WordStar, essential for this position.’ That sounds daft today, even if you substitute ‘Microsoft Office’ for Wordstar, that first great star of the application firmament. WordPerfect, its great rival and market successor, is actually still with us as one of the Word alternatives, like OpenOffice.

But in fairness to the generation of the time, applications varied greatly in detail and Windows had not arrived so there were no shared O/S conventions. Many applications were not even networked. Now Office 365, GoogleDocs and others mean you can ‘word process’ (still a viable term in many respects) on pretty well anything, anywhere, anytime. It is to be hoped that some of you, gentle readers, remember WYSIWYG, one of the earlier bits of jargon that was impenetrable until you knew what it meant.  What You See Is What You Get was plain language, just like the vivid colour screen that was a seismic revelation to those of us who had to add the typographical coding after the text was composed — in mono on those blue or green screens.

“What do users and consumers do when things are shifting and changing so fast? They adopt and adapt, driven by fashion and budget and personal taste and chosen activities”

This bout of nostalgia is triggered by the notion, accepted universally by ICT people at this stage, that the technologies constantly evolve and mutate. Server-based computing paved the way to the cloud, which is now mixed like a west of Ireland winter’s day with umpteen shades of grey and dark land masses. In that metaphor, those solid objects would in real life be on-premises servers and networks and storage, plus the growing mass of data centres used as external but directly controlled ICT assets. In other words, the computing land- and cloudscape is as mutable as that Atlantic vista.

Now, what do users and consumers do when things are shifting and changing so fast? They adopt and adapt, driven by fashion and budget and personal taste and chosen activities. Some of them are even influenced by their work. Do they worry and fret about changing technical standards or security or indeed standards of service? Not a lot. Most of them are just a couple of beats behind the style leaders, so their tech stuff is of the moment but actually proven and mass market. Apple and Samsung spring to mind, funnily enough. But it is all immediately usable. Whatever clever depths are there to be discovered take minutes or hours.

There is no training required — it’s easy. Sometimes you hear conversations with people of no great seniority who wonder how ‘kids these days’ can use technology so readily. Yes, they are natively digital, in the simple sense that they encounter digital digeridoos from the pram. Yes, they can learn to drive mobile phones and tablets faster and better than the parental owners. But in truth there is no particular mystery or inherent generational advantage. They are kids. They learn fast and have no fear of failure. They will keep trying until they make things go and if they break them in the process they don’t care.

The other factor is something we have been hyping in the ICT sector for decades: making tech easy to use. We have succeeded. That is why kids with no understanding of functionality or methodology can make gadgets work. It is all too common to hear and read comments like “Today’s generation understand technology”. That is all too frequently untrue. They get it, certainly, in the sense that they are advanced users and quick to spot new opportunities. But understanding the technology? No. As always, only the nerds and budding engineers. Quad core better than dual, octacore latest and greatest. Popular media and traditional social showing off ensure that sort of appreciation. It has all the depth of a politician talking about Ireland’s opportunities in the cloud. In fairness, there was a PC generation that could blather on in the pub of a Friday about processor speeds (the mighty leap to 486) and RAM and all that, and WYSIWYG.

All of which leads to the melancholy conclusion that we may be wasting our time, national resources and parents’ money on general ICT training or what is sometime loftily called ‘education’. Most essential training, probably more accurately ‘familiarisation’, is around the applications people use daily in the course of their work. Most people are well up to grasping their work responsibilities and the bits and pieces of tech that support it. The consumerisation of business ICT, at least its front ends and interfaces, ensures that.

So we can accept that ICT specialists need and deserve the highest standards of technical education and professional training. As many TechPro contributors have pointed out in recent years, more and more those specialist roles are in service providers, technical consulting firms, systems design and software development. A diminishing few large organisations maintain ICT teams with skills across a spectrum of the technology they use. That is one of the major trends affecting the role of the CIO. S/he is no longer the leader of a technical team de facto, although there are many who still are because CIOs tend to be in large and legacy organisations.

Brace yourselves now, ICT professionals: in the current stage of the cycle — and probably a steady state for the foreseeable — you are members of a growing but introverted community. You guys out there with an interest in ICT — personal, business, entrepreneurial, hobby — carry on, have fun, but realise that you too are a minority.

For the general masses, ICT is going the way of the motoring car and television and mobile phones/phablets and any electronic kit with screens. Learn how to drive it, which will not be hard, and the new generations of technology will be made available to match your current skills and expectations. You do not and will not need to know what is under the bonnet, behind the screen or how it all works. Just use it.

But there are in reality potentially enormous social, educational and business implications from this trend. Computers in education, for example, are just teaching and communications aids. Even if you are in secondary school aiming for engineering, you need no more than an introduction to the concepts of computer science. If you actually specialise in some aspect of ICT or a close discipline like Data Analytics, the technology esoterics will hardly arise before about second year — if even.

CoderDojo: absolutely great for helping young minds develop. But so are music, painting and other arts, model making and hand crafts, acting and performing and above all else reading. We have spent a political generation or two piously sermonising about the need to teach computer skills to young people while doing very little of substance about it. It is true that many teachers are still ICT-illiterate, but their younger colleagues are natively digital and on a wavelength with their students. A good guess would be that a percentage in the high nineties of primary school children would be streets ahead of the general adult population in ICT usage, with the obvious exceptions of our more deprived minorities.

All of that raises serious cultural, educational and economic questions: what is ICT education and training for in today’s world?  We are quite rightly, from the science side of that spurious Arts versus Sciences divide, promoting the STEM subjects and especially for young women. Bluntly, ICT is only a small sub-section of that. Don’t do ‘coding for kids’—do better at maths! In truth, kids can manage both and it is all good.

The point is that ‘computing’ for daily business or personal life simply does not need formal training any more, other than introducing the specifics of some more esoteric applications or perhaps corporate security and other policies. Yes, of course there is a continuing need for primary degrees in Computer Science and Data Analytics and specialist training in everything from programming (with the tools of the day) and the proprietary convolutions of ICT vendors and their kit, soft or hard. Actually, it’s mostly going to be software-defined stuff anyway.

Alas, but training in ‘today’s ICT’ is largely as old-fashioned (and slightly nostalgic) as those adverts looking for Wordstar skills. Any job today demands some familiarity with ICT. But it is just a life skill, like driving a car or reading an instruction manual.

Read More:


Back to Top ↑

TechCentral.ie