A friend at the Texas Workforce Commission sent me this article on the critical need for skilled workers. The article is based on a survey of 42,500 employers in 32 countries. The verdict - Engineers, Machinists, Tradesmen in Short Supply: ‘Hardest Jobs to Fill’ list reveals that many workers with traditional blue-collar skills are leaving the workforce. Read the whole thing.

It was December 19th when I last posted on the joy of seeing the success of technical education students. I should do it more often. I don’t see it as much as the faculty. It is the curse of the administrator to mostly hear complaints. If you didn’t see the Dec. 19 post, go back and read it here. It is a really great story.

Anyway - Today I was wandering through the academic faculty offices when one of our English teachers introduced me to a young man with a big smile on his face. He is graduating on Saturday from our ACT (HVAC) program. The smile was there because he had already signed up with a D/FW Metroplex company for $43,000/year with benefits. Young man, two-year degree, $43K to start -

I LOVE TECHNICAL EDUCATION ALL OVER AGAIN!!!!

There is a great article in the New York Times by Roger Cohen. He gives real perspective about what is good and bad about biofuels. It’s not very long, so read the whole thing.

I have blogged before about the FIRST Robotics Championship sponsored by National Instruments (here & here). Now Popular Mechanics has coverage showing some of the work done by the students.

I had a call early this morning from a desperate employer that services the natural gas industry just south of Ft. Worth (If you are not familiar with the Barnett Shale gas field, click here). The employer needs five good truck mechanics as soon as possible. His business is hurting. Despite the fact that we have a large Diesel program with more than 200 students, I don’t know if we will be able to help.

A recession with a 5.1% unemployment rate is a new event for me. Texas is closer to 4.8%. I’m not an economist, so I don’t claim to know what that means (If I were an economist, I would claim to know but I would probably be wrong). I remember the old adage that a recession is when your neighbor loses his job and a depression is when you lose yours. If more of our emerging workforce had the right technical skills, they could avoid the most devastating effects of an economic downturn while keeping the economy stronger.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that the pay was $16 - $20 per hour to start.

Ezra over at Rants, Raves and Rhetoric V4 has a great post that compares some of your favorite Learning Management Systems to ships. If you use an LMS for distance learning or to enhance your face-to-face classes, you should check it out and add your thoughts.

We are running Blackboard Vista (formerly WebCT Vista) at TSTC Waco (aircraft carrier).

… and then I’ll start on technical education again. Apropos to the discussion of the future of Windows, XP service pack 3 has reached RTM (release to manufacturer) status. The public can get it on April 29. You can find a positive cnet review here.

There is an interesting column by Jason Hiner over at TechRepublic on the future roadmap for Windows. With users clinging to Windows XP for dear life, the Gates gang will have to do something. I am a card-carrying member of the EVIL EMPIRE ™ as an MCSE and MCDBA, but I am still running Windows XP (or Server 2003) on all but one of my Windows machines.

I don’t dislike Vista, I just don’t like it enough to slow down for it. Driver issues keep it from printing to my old Brother laser printer. I would have to love an OS to accessorize it with a new printer. I was willing to deal with a lack of drivers to run Windows NT when most people were on 95 and 98 because NT was a real OS with great stability advantages. I’m not sure what advantage Vista brings me (Aero interface, gadgets, more mouse clicks?).

The column’s logic is compelling. Read it if you get the chance. His application of past Windows history to the future seems about right to me.

I will complete a Computerworld trilogy of posts by linking to this article on accelerating retirements in the IT field. It is well worth reading, and not only if you are interested in IT. The phenomenon the article describes is also happening in welding, industrial maintenance, electronics, instrumentation - pretty much everywhere.

Check out the labor market numbers and you will see a great need for new technicians in areas where little growth is expected. That is due to replacement of baby boomers. Even though they are hanging on a little longer to work (dropping 401Ks, rising expenses, and monster pay due to labor shortages), they can’t do it forever.

It is a great time to be a technician. Get technical now! (I personally would prefer that you do so here.)

Since I did a post on the ten dying IT skills, I really should talk about the other side. Computerworld also did an article on eight hot IT skills. Here is my take:

1. Programming/application development - The article mentions AJAX, .Net, and PHP. No doubt about that. Our Web Design and Development Technology and Computer Science Technology are both growing with plenty of demand out there.
2. Project Management - Back in my happy days of teaching, I had a large health care company hire a young man out of my class a little early so that they could train him in project management. They hired him out of a two-year networking program because he impressed them and trained him on their dime. That spells DEMAND to me.
3. Help desk/technical support - The media still won’t believe that most of these jobs never went to Bangalore. Some of them have even come back.
4. Security - IT Security programs in higher ed remain small (Link to our Network Security Technology). I think this is still an area with more lip service than resource investment. Of course, IT in general is much more security conscious than it used to be. Everyone- networker, database admin, programmer, service tech, etc. - needs some security training.
5. Data centers - Consolidated data centers with backup centers is the way big business is done these days. Consolidated services offered by data centers is the way small business is done, too.
6. Business knowledge - Absolutely! If you understand business and IT, you are golden as a system integrator.
7. & 8. Network and Telecommunications - I agree with everything the article says here, too.

The only one of these I really wonder about is the specialized security professional. My experience has been that very few people actually get hired to do security only. They are needed, however.

Some of these are areas where more programs are needed. Project management certainly would be a candidate. Often, the technical challenges of a project are nothing compared with the difficulty involved marshaling the resources and timelines.

This article came out in May of last year, but I still found it to be interesting reading. Is your school teaching these skills anymore? Here are some of my thoughts:

1. COBOL - no disagreement from me. Our computer science department mainframe programming is languishing while gaming & simulation along with C++ boom.
2. Non-relational DBMS - I really, really hope so. It is so simple. The data is what is important. The relational DBMS does a better job of protecting it while making it available. (I was trained as a relational database administrator and now I deal with a hierarchical database every day. It is like one of Dante’s punishments.)
3. Non-IP Networks - No kidding. When is the last time you ran into NetBEUI or IPX/SPX?
4. cc:Mail - Migrating from systems like this to Microsoft Exchange server used to make the companies I worked for a lot of money. There isn’t anyone left to migrate anymore.
5. ColdFusion - Everyone who develops with it tells me that it is REALLY easy to develop a database-connected web app with ColdFusion. Scalability is the Achilles heel, though.
6. C Programming - every developer needs more than one language these days.
7. PowerBuilder - irrelevant to any company that doesn’t have it (and they are trying to migrate to something else).
8. Certified NetWare Engineers - Ten years is a century in the IT business. That is how long it took Novell to go from monopoly to also-ran. (By the way, my secretary long ago stopped paying attention to my daily curses of the execrable Novell GroupWise product.)
9. PC Network Administrators - Server consolidation may eventually lead to need for fewer administrators, but the process will be slow. I am fascinated that this prediction was made by someone from an AS/400 recruiting company. A few years ago these guys were predicting that token ring was here to stay.
10. OS/2 - IT ISN’T GONE YET? Ten years ago I had a consulting contract to replace some OS/2 servers with Windows NT. When the decision was announced to the company’s IT department, nine people walked out in protest. Even then I was wondering where they thought they could go for an OS/2 job. (On a side note related to item 9 - the company was also running token ring networks on the advice of their AS/400 consultant. Coincidence or conspiracy? You decide!)

If you don’t have up-to-date advisory committee members keeping your curriculum heading in the right direction, your students could graduate tomorrow with yesterday’s skills. Even my disagreement with item 9 comes from the perspective of someone in education instead of on the front lines of industry.

The BBC site has an article on a material that may keep Moore’s Law going strong past 2020. It seems to have other possible applications in solar power and display screens, too.

According to the BBC, some users are still going to the Paypal site with IE 3, released 10 years ago and completely inadequate for modern security needs.

Paypal said it supported the use of Extended Validation SSL Certificates. Browsers which support the technology highlight the address bar in green when users are on a site that has been deemed legitimate.

The latest versions of Internet Explorer and Firefox support EV SSL certificates, but Apple’s Safari browser for Mac and PCs does not.

Come on folks, updated browsers are free! I switched from IE to Firefox a few years ago. I like the plugins. It also seems to work better with “The Learning Management System Formerly Known As WebCT Vista” - which is now known as Blackboard Vista. That is really important for me since I am in the education business. I don’t get involved in browser wars though. If you really believe in freedom of choice, then let people use what they want. For the sake of security, though, please use the latest version with all patches.

Paypal is planning blocking those unsafe browsers. I think that they have to do so for their users’ safety.

Check this out at Popular Mechanics. Excellent pictures are included.

I enjoyed reading some interesting thoughts on another binary division of humanity from Sylvia over at Generation Yes. I particularly like the following quote:

It’s a shame that this beauty is often lost in the K-12 curriculum. But that’s a problem with curriculum, not a problem with people’s brains.

Read the whole thing.

Reviewed here. For the record, I really want one of these.

UPDATE: YouTube video - this one has Windows XP. I want the Xandros Linux version:

I like it.

I suppose that this could be seen as a rebuttal to my post on digital natives.

This looks pretty cool to me - here is a note over in Liberal Education Today about using the content aggregation tool, Netvibes, as a teaching tool.

It used to take a LOT of work to make a page like this. Now the work has been done for you. Just pick the content you want to aggregate and share with others!

I haven’t tried out Twitter. I already have too many other communication and social networking tools to track. Academhack has an good post on using Twitter to teach, though.

I posted about the Hercules laser at University of Michigan just two months ago. My entire comment was, “300 terawatts!” The University of Texas has now unveiled a laser that makes 300 terawatts look like a GE light bulb (hyperbole alert!). The name Petawatt tells the whole story. Check it out.

UPDATE: An article with a picture can be found at the Telegraph web site.

If you found my earlier post on One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) interesting, you might want to read the Laptopmag blog. They have an interview with OLPC’s founder, Nicholas Negroponte. The questions are about Intel’s Classmate 2 and and other new low-cost laptops. One interesting observation that I missed in my last post on the subject:

I am surprised—read: astonished—that Intel is entering the domestic laptop market. I cannot imagine that Dell, HP, Lenovo and others will keep any allegiance to a supplier that competes with them.

That is a very good point. It appears, though, that most of the competitors to OLPC are now aiming at wealthier consumers looking for easily-toted UMPCs (Ultra-Mobile Portable Computer). OLPC is still aimed squarely at the world-wide education market.

My post on Generation Yes had me thinking about the term, ‘digital natives.’ I have been to a number of conferences that focused on the emergence of ‘digital natives’ in our schools. I was told that my students born after the invention of the PC and Internet view them as ‘appliances like a refrigerator or microwave oven.’ We elderly types are ‘digital immigrants’ and are struggling like our Ellis Island ancestors to learn the language and adapt to the modern society we have moved into since leaving the old world.

There is a great deal of truth in this latest version of “There are only two kinds of people in the world …” Like all binary categorizations of humanity it is also the gross oversimplification of a complex reality. We shouldn’t forget that immigrants often succeed brilliantly in new lands whereas natives frequently take their birthright for granted. It is hard to really appreciate something that you have never lived without. I can’t forget the history and civics teacher at my high school who was an émigré from Poland. He appreciated freedom and was a far more passionate patriot than the indigenous teachers and students. Consequently, he could recite the Constitution and understood the inner workings of our government.

That is my essential point: Growing up in close familiarity with a political or technological reality simply means that you are used to having it around. It does not mean that you appreciate it or are even particularly adept at navigating within it. Refrigerators are considerably easier to operate than computers. They generally only require that we plug them in. I have had many ‘digital native’ students come to me knowing how to easily navigate social networks while being incapable of refining an Internet search enough to find useful information.

To conclude, we need to think seriously about the fact that our students regard pervasive networks of useful technology as normal. We should consider all of the ways this might impact education and student development. We must consider how we will provide easy access to information and services 24/7, which is what they have come to expect. We should not in any case assume that they really know how to use that technology to the best advantage.

While surfing around the Internet (I love Saturdays like this!), I came across Edutopia’s ‘Daring Dozen‘ article on people making a positive impact in public education. There are some really great examples of passion, dedication, and innovation here. Read the whole thing.

I was particularly interested section in Dennis Harper, the founder of Generation Yes. The About Us page on their website says the following:

Generation YES works with schools all around the world to plan, implement and enhance student technology programs through innovative curriculum, online tools and research-based support services. Generation YES programs focus on student-centered, project-based experiences that impact student’s lives and increase student involvement in school and community through technology. In addition, all Generation YES programs improve the use of technology in the school as a whole. These include: GenYES (student support for technology staff development), Generation TECH (student tech support), and TechYES (student technology literacy certification).

What a cool program! It actually utilizes and channels that ‘digital native’ savvy that we hear so much about but don’t see being used positively. The students actually do professional development for the faculty! I’m sure they find, like the rest of us, that teaching is a great way to learn.

Unfortunately, I found that only two districts and one private school in Texas participate. Project-based learning is not easy, so I shouldn’t be surprised. Check out the locater and see if your state has participants.

UPDATE: Be sure to read the comments to see one incoming from Sylvia Martinez at Generation Yes. She wants us to prepare for an upcoming announcement to be delivered at the Generation Yes Blog.

My older daughter, blogging as The Escribitionist, has posted an article on one of our computer networking teachers at TSTC Waco. He has an electrical engineering degree from Texas A&M as well as some sort of death wish. He seems to really enjoy activities like motorcycle racing, sky diving, and hockey.

Blogging is much safer!

UPDATE: Yes - she is a much better writer than I am.

Mpowered has this post about the fight waged by students and faculty to keep the Construction Technology program from being cut at a California high school. We will see a lot more of this as money gets tighter and the clueless continue to make decisions.

Our employers are screaming for technically trained graduates, but the school boards and higher education boards are not listening.

Go here for the website of the coalition fighting to save CTE.