| When teaching in the area of Information Technology, it is necessary to constantly update curriculum, to deal with new challenges brought forth by students, and to modify teaching methods to accommodate these new situations. Challenges of Information Technology Education in the 21st Century strives to address a variety of pertinent questions surrounding the rapidly changing area of IT education, such as: What topics are important for the 21st Century? How does the Internet change the task of teaching? What is the role of the professor in a world of online learning? This exciting new book will be an invaluable resource for educators in the field of information technology.
In the two decades that I have been involved with IT education, the field has not just undergone evolution, it has undergone revolution. Both the degree and the speed of change have been spectacular.
One of the changes has been in what we teach. Twenty years ago, most schools taught on and about mainframe computers. Today you would be hard pressed to even find a mainframe computer at most universities. The emphasis has changed first to minicomputers, and then to microcomputers, and now to web-based networked computing.
Another change has been in how we teach. Certainly the technologies have given students greater access to information technologies. But even more fundamentally, we have learned from our experiences and research into how students learn and how best to teach them. Slowly but surely, IT education has taken its rightful place as an important research-based discipline. |