Technical Reports

A List by Author: Roland Vollmar

Towards Adjusting Informatics Education to Information Era

by Jozef Gruska, Roland Vollmar, A slightly extended version of the invited paper for IFIP TC3 WG3.2 Workshop "Informatics as a discipline and in other disciplines: What is in common?" May 1997, 33 pages.

FIMU-RS-97-03. Available as Postscript, PDF.

Abstract:

Since the very beginning of the modern computing era, the scientific and educational community in informatics has been in a continuous search for a proper philosophy, viewpoints, aims, contents, methods and tools. Advances in software, communication and hardware have played by that search the most influencing role, with theory advances having only secondary and declining impacts - in spite of the remarkable success of theory, quite well recognized by the community at large.

The recent developments and advances in computing, communication and informatization of the society point out strongly, that horizons of the field are much broader, and its impacts on the society are far larger than anticipated even by strong optimists. This brings new and strong impetus to reconsider again the aims, scope, contents and methods of education in informatics and in other areas.

In the paper we analyze: (a) needs to change education in informatics; (b) the current situation in informatics education; (c) a framework for a new approach; (d) steps to be done; (3) two case studies.