exam season bitterness

[devi]

I have marked so many IT practice papers in this last week that my eyes are starting to bleed and my long-standing hatred for the IT syllabus has been stoked up till it burns with the fire of a million suns. I swear they have gone through it and taken out everything that might make students think computers are cool and amazing, and replaced it with endless grey screeds on how employers can profit from computer use, and the Eight Rights and Four Requirements, or hang on it's the Four Rights and Eight Requirements, of the Data Protection Act. No wonder students think people who are enthused about computers are sad. So here you go, my fantasy IT syllabus, concocted a few minutes ago to cheer myself up:


How Computers Think:

• Binary numbers
  
• ASCII code. See how a text file gets turned into a stream of bits!
  
• Programming languages (Write "Hello World"!)
  
• There Are Operating Systems Besides Windows, You Know
  

(In the real IT syllabuses, you never hear any of this stuff.)

The Secret History of the Internet:

• How it got set up
  
• There Was Stuff Before The Web, You Know
  
• There's This Thing Called Telnet (or more secure versions thereof)
  
• Field trips to Usenet, Mono BBS and LambdaMOO
  
• Who's Afraid of JavaScript? Or, how to look at webpage source code without turning white and fainting
  
• Make a Webpage in Notepad, or, Angle Brackets Don't Actually Bite
  

Issues and Debates:

• The Open-Source Debate
  
• Intellectual Property Law and the Hacker Ethic
  
• What "Hacker" Actually Means/Used To Mean (sigh)
  
• Artificial Intelligence (Practical session: chat to ELIZA and her cousins)
  
• Cultures of the Internet and how it's changed our way of life, beyond deadly dull supermarket stock ordering systems ect ect
  
• Online shopping, the Long Tail and how it affects little indie bands/writers/etc
  
• Self-publishing and print-on-demand
  

Look! Look! Ain't That Cool:

• Traceroute and network depiction software. See how your information actually gets to and from Myspace/Bebo/whatever! Watch it bounce off satellites and tunnel under the Atlantic!
  
• Group project: Assemble a working computer from parts! Then partition the hard drive for extra credit.
  

Structured Practical IT Tasks:

• Build a database ABOUT SOMETHING YOU LIKE, eg categorise your vast manga/hip-hop collection. None of this "Mrs Jones is a quantity surveyor…" rubbish.
  
• Build a website, DITTO (though you at the back drawing a bong in MS Paint can stop right now) (No, putting "this is an anti-drugs website" in tiny print at the bottom won't help).
  
• Desktop-publish a book/comic DITTO, using Quark, none of your MS Publisher crap, publish it on Lulu and get your mates and your mum to buy it.
  
• Play with graphics software (which is missing from just about all the existing syllabi, probably because IT'S FUN). Make yourself an icon/banner/whatever for Myspace/Bebo/whatever!
  

Things Definitely Not On The Course:

• Why it's eeeeee-vil to use personal email at work, why it's eeeeee-vil to OMG STEAL MUSIC!, Ways Employers can Save Money through Software Licensing, Why the RIP Act is a Good Thing because Employers Can Monitor what Employees are Doing (Yay!), every bloody question which demands that 15-year-olds imagine they own a company
  

I would do some of the less silly things, but I'm always trying to fit in the whole existing syllabus in not enough time, and anyway about half the students would start foaming at the mouth if I told them they couldn't get marks for it. Sigh.

Though I'm afraid if I was in charge, the exam papers would include questions like "How awesome is Google Earth? Justify your answer with examples (10 marks)."

(Edit: I went to XKCD to link to this ("Pop quiz: Here is a cartoon. Explain the joke") and the current strip was this one. Well, yes, quite.)