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Shelly Powers blogged about the state of technology education in a recent post. She said,
The tech industry is broken. This state isn't reflected just in the lack of women–it's programs like agile computing, which are trying to compensate for behavioral characteristics that we're finding out, now, cause more harm than good. Yet, the colleges gear their programs to people with these same behavioral characteristics. That's where we need to start. We need to completely change the curriculum of computer science in school. In fact, we need to eliminate computer science as a separate field.
I recently learned about two programs with a different approach. I don't know if Shelly would consider them progress, but they are a step away from the traditional way of doing.
An article in the San Francisco Bay Guardian about a program at Mills College in Oakland, California started my quest for information about programs for women in technology. The Mills College program, called New Horizons, is a reentry program that teaches computer programming to students with nontechnical backgrounds. Women make up roughly two-thirds of the participants in this graduate program. Mills is an undergraduate college for women with coed graduate programs. According to the article in the SFBG,
Introductory CS classes at most universities "act like weeder courses," scaring away all but the most confident students, [Mills computer science associate professor Ellen] Spertus says. Typically, up to half the students fail or drop out of introductory CS classes at other institutions. Spertus says this phenomenon hits women hardest because they may have less computer experience as well as less confidence...Spertus finds that many students going into her program suffer from low self-esteem — especially female students. She says they'll be earning A's in the program's classes but will be convinced they're not doing well and somehow "don't belong." Her teaching style, simultaneously rigorous and nurturing, helps change their opinion, she hopes.
As an aside, Ellen Spertus is a contributor at She's Such a Geek, a blog about science, technology and other nerdy stuff. A few resources found from She's Such a Geek include Women in Technology and Take Back the Tech.
The second program I found, at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, offers a degree called a Bachelor of Innovation. It treats technology as a part of the process rather than as an end in itself. The BI program has components of technolgy, entrepreneurship, creative communication, and globalization. UCCS says,
A major component of the program is multi-disciplinary innovation teams working on real projects for real companies...The strong multi-disciplinary teaming nature of the BI program provides critical experience working across fields and across ages as well as a positive and diverse social network for the students to draw upon. It is expected to further enhance our efforts supporting and retaining minorities and women in engineering.
Other programs like this either don't exist or are very low profile. A web search doesn't yield much. Do you readers know of anything noteworthy that would be of interest to women looking for a different approach to technology education?
