EMPOWERMENT IN IT EDUCATION

Introduction This paper addresses a subject which, at first sight, may not seem directly relevant to IT education. The first part of the paper, therefore, explains what we mean by empowerment and why we think it is highly relevant, worthwhile and fun! The remainder of the paper shows how students can be empowered with examples drawn from our combined teaching experiences over many years (Dawson 2000; Dawson and Newsham, 1997a & b; Dawson, Newsham and Fernley, 1997; Jackson and Dawson, 1999; Newman, Dawson and Parks 2000; Newman, 2001a & b; Newsham and Dawson, 1996, Parish and Newman, 1999). Most of our experience relates to university students undertaking programmes with a significant IT content, so this provides the main focus for the paper. However, we also have experience of teaching, and using IT to empower, University students for whom IT is not a major element of their degree and also people in industry and children in schools. This paper presents three related messages: * ‘Empowerment’ is as important an issue in education as acquiring ‘knowledge’, although less time is devoted to it in the curriculum; * IT provides an ideal environment in which to promote empowerment; * Empowering students provides a means of ‘protecting’ them against the rapid changes that take place in IT. Background: What is Empowerment and Why is it Important? This section explains what we mean by ’empowerment’ and why we think it should be a focus for IT related teaching. We argue that empowerment is at least as important as knowledge acquisition and that IT is an ideal vehicle to empower people studying a variety of subjects at different educational levels. A dictionary definition taken from a Pocket Oxford Dictionary originally published in 1947 is: “Empower: to authorize or enable; empowerment: the act of enabling”. Definitions in other dictionaries are similar and have not varied significantly over time. In our case we are enabling students to cope with the unexpected in an IT context, a skill that seems to be desirable (Dyba, 2000; Sandburg and Vinberg, 2000). The relative stability of the dictionary definition, contrasts sharply with rapidly changing experiences of IT. This creates a problem for IT teachers and is the main reason that we are championing the empowerment approach. Basically, because of the rapid changes that are taking place in all IT related subjects, we believe that the most useful attribute we can give students is the confidence to find their own solutions to any given IT problem. The pragmatic value of promoting this idea was first recognized when it was observed that students undertaking an intern year in industry in the middle of their computing degree programmes were frequently being asked to carry out tasks for which they had not specifically been educated. For example, interns were expected to be proficient in a range of programming languages other than the languages they had been taught. However, it was simply not possible to add extra teaching to cover all the programming languages and other computing topics that they might encounter in industry. Yet, despite this, we found that, according to the employers, our interns were, in the main, rising to the challenge. The employers also indicated that our students were more capable, in this respect, than those from some of the other ‘computing’ degree programmes. Questioning the employers and the students to try to discover the reasons for this suggested that at least part of the reason was a second year project based course (module). In this module the students were set tasks which involved them writing a program in a language they had not been taught and working as part of a group to accomplish an open ended task. In both cases they were expected to find out the information they required for themselves and were, therefore, neither surprised nor worried when they were expected to do this again in their intern year. …