education

News

• Groups launch gigabit-per-second broadband project

  An Ohio startup company has raised US$200 million to fund gigabit-per-second broadband projects in six university communities across the U.S., the company announced Wednesday.

• Up-and-Coming Tech Jobs

  Any study of the IT labor market is likely to find that project managers and business analysts are in demand, but what about cloud transformation officers?

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  Salvos launch new game

  The Salvation Army has today officially launched its new game, Damien’s Dash.

• One Laptop Per Child Australia scores $11.7m in federal budget

  One Laptop Per Child Australia received a one-off boost in the federal budget, scoring $11.7 million of funding. In addition, budget measures mean that donations to OLPC Australia will be tax deductible from 1 July.

• The Grill: Arthur Langer turns the IT education model on its head

  Arthur M. Langer is chairman and founder of Workforce Opportunity Services, a nonprofit that uses an outsourcing model to train economically disadvantaged youth and match them with hard-to-fill IT positions. Langer's "skills first" approach stresses getting vocational training and a job upfront, and then gradually fulfilling general education requirements part time to finish a degree in five to six years -- leaving students with no debt. And since many families today can't afford the cost of college tuition, Langer's model is one that could have much broader appeal.

• HCL CEO Vineet Nayar: Outsourcing is dead, and there's nothing innovative in cloud technology

  The customer always comes first. Except when it comes to HCL, the $6 billion Indian outsourcing -- make that co-sourcing -- giant led by CEO Vineet Nayar, who literally wrote the book on a philosophy known as 'employees first, customer second.' In this latest installment of our CEO Interview Series, Nayar spoke with IDG Enterprise Chief Content Officer John Gallant about how that philosophy is fueling HCL's rapid growth and why more CIOs ought to consider adopting it. Nayar also discussed how HCL has set its sights beyond competing with other Indian outsourcers like Infosys and Wipro and is squarely targeting what he believes are the many unhappy customers of services giants like IBM, Accenture and CSC. The outspoken Nayar took shots at the 'fear psychosis' created by services firms in trying to peddle their offerings and used a barnyard epithet to describe public cloud computing, which he claims isn't ready for prime time. He also outlined HCL's aggressive plans for hiring locally in the U.S. and Europe, and defended the company's use of the controversial H-1B visa program. In addition, Nayar talked about the new goals for IT departments in 2012 and beyond, and explained why treating mobile as a technology 'misses the point.'

• Help for the Help Desk

  A help desk can be a real lifesaver for employees, not to mention a productivity boost. If a keyboard stops working or Outlook keeps crashing, a technician is just a phone call away. Even complex problems can usually be resolved internally, and relatively quickly, without the need for an outside vendor.

• CS Enrollments on the Rise, Up 10% in 2011-12

  Interest in computer science continues to grow among undergraduates, according to a survey conducted by the Computing Research Association (CRA). The number of students pursuing computer science majors rose nearly 10% in the 2011-2012 academic year, marking the fourth straight year of increases.

• MIT and others launch a tech education revolution

  MIT's free online course, 6.002x: Circuits and Electronics, is a hit. The course, which began in March and ends on June 8, prompted 120,000 registrations.

• Should the CIO know how to code?

  On the organizational chart between IT Director "Ray Walton" and his CIO is a vice-president of IT whom he considers dangerous.

• What tech managers can do to hold on to their best talent

  It's not an employer's market anymore, and organizations need to make retention of their tech talent a priority.

• Microsoft gets large India order for its Cloud suite for education

  Microsoft said it has gained in India its largest cloud customer ever, where the company is providing Live@edu, its free cloud services for student communication and collaboration, to 7.5 million users.

• One Laptop Per Child Australia set to launch 'One Education' program

  One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Australia is set to launch a new initiative centred on the Linux-based XO laptops the nonprofit organisation distributes.

• Computer science enrollments rise again by 10%

  Interest in computer science continues to grow among undergrad students, who pushed enrollments up nearly 10% in the 2011-12 academic year. This marks the fourth straight year of increases. Enrollments might have been even higher if not for enrollment caps that some schools have put in place because they don't have enough faculty, equipment or classrooms to meet demand, according to the Computing Research Association (CRA), which conducts the annual Taulbee survey. "We don't have a way to gauge -- at least in the current survey -- how many students wanted to be admitted," said Peter Harsha, CRA's director of government affairs. The Association reported a 10% enrollment gain last year as well. The steady gain in enrollments is a turnabout from what happened after the tech bubble burst in 2001. As dot.com fever built, so did enrollments in computer science programs at Ph.D.-granting institutions, which are the only schools the CRA surveys. Each school had a department with an average enrollment of about 400 students at the height of the bubble; by 2006-07, that enrollment average had declined to about 200. Average enrollments per department are now nearing 300, according to the survey. There are 267 Ph.D.-granting institutions, and nearly 70% of the schools responded this year. The National Science Foundation does a broader study on technology enrollments and graduation rates, but there's a two-year lag before its results are released. The trends noted in the Taulbee study have tracked well with the NSF's findings, according to the CRA. For the U.S. computer science departments that responded to that survey in 2010 and 2011, enrollments in computer science programs increased 9.6%. The number of bachelor's degrees awarded in computer science programs was 12.9% for those schools that reported this year and last. The total number of all students represented in the survey is nearly 61,000. That includes students enrolled in computer science, computer engineering and IT-related fields. Computer science majors represent about 49,000 of the total number of students represented in this survey. The Taulbee survey, which is named after the late Orrin Taulbee of the University of Pittsburgh, also looks at nationality and gender. Of the master's degrees awarded in computer science, 75.4% of the degrees were awarded to males, and 56.7% were awarded to nonresident aliens. According to the survey, the percentage of women among bachelor's graduates decreased in computer science this year, from 13.8% in 2009-10 to 11.7% in 2010-11. However, in programs other than computer science, the percentage of female graduates increased.

• Melissa P. Dodd

  Melissa P. Dodd speaks passionately about children and the importance of their education. That's not surprising, considering Dodd has a master's degree in education from Harvard University. Dodd opted not to teach, however, and instead chose to support teachers and students through technology. She worked as an educational technology administrator at Tufts University before moving in 2003 to the Boston Public Schools, which serve some 56,000 students. There she started as a technology strategic planner before becoming deputy CIO in 2006 and then CIO in October 2010. Here she shares her ideas on running a large school system's IT department.