[Air-l] Technical competence

[Peter T.]

Again a comment from a student.

Once upon a time one could submit a hand written essay. As recent as 2000 
all written work in a GIS course had to be printed on a computer or a type 
writer.

One course called Law in the Information Society in 2003 required students 
to use blogs for their work.

In another course students were graded on their quality of posts to a course 
newsgroup. This was a sociology of science and technology course.

Ok these are simply editing of English software's. We are now at this level 
required by students. Thus we can assume the professors of these course also 
had these skills.

As a student I can do a class room presentation with an Open Office ( aka 
power point) presentation and know I will impress, even though up against a 
professional private sector power pointer my presentation will be very bad.

I can play real audio files in a presentation and score high.

Technology will help a student score higher at this moment in history the 
point is. Perhaps technical skills should be looked at with some suspicion 
as they may hide weak research.

Personally I am coming from the sciences and just completed a coding course 
in data mining within my legal studies BA and have found a scientist 
studying information security who may need my skills in data mining to 
support a study into computer crime.

I should also mention that searching the library is aided by knowing code 
and the idea of unforgiving coding.

Peter Timusk B.Math Just trying to stay linear
www.crystalcomputing.net >blog> http://logbook.crystalcomputing.net
www.webpagex.org >blog> http://notebook.webpagex.org