MPICT Conference, 8, 9 Jan 2009, San Francisco
MidPacific Information and Communication Technology
This is a new Center funded by the NSF to bring educators and industry together to create a technical workforce.

San Francisco City College hosted this in a very lively neighborhood in the Mission District. The Center is supposed to serve the western part of the US, but there were people there from all over the country. Lots of industry representation from Microsoft, IBM, etc.

Because it was the first week of classes, I didn’t get a chance to attend very many of the talks. But here is a synopsis of what I did see:

1) They want to standardize our field on the term “ICT”. Apparently this is the umbrella term used by the rest of the world, with the US the only one not using it consistently.

MPICT has commissioned a workforce study to research what are the growth industries and what skills the required workers will need to have.

2) There is a program at Ohlone College in the east bay where they use the old discarded hardware to train technicians.

3) Here at Foothill we have a program where student trainees take old discarded hardware from companies, fix it up and give the refurbished computers free to needy students. The trainee students that fix the computers then get placed in internships as technicians in industry.

4) There was an executive from IBM that talked about the programs that IBM has created for educators, and it convinced me that these companies really “get it” that we are the engine that they need to train their workforce.

She also talked about the “T” skills employees must have, these are skills that are both broad and deep. The top of the “T”, the horizontal line, is the broad skill set that is usually interdisciplinary, like communications. The vertical bar is for deep knowledge of some one skill or technology.

5) Together with my colleague Jane Ostrander, I led a session here, called “How to get your students to think for themselves.” This was about scenario-based learning, of course.