Geeks Don’t Need Charm Academy, Just a Well Rounded Education
I?m reading this morning that a Charm Academy has been founded in the UK in an effort to give social skills to geeks. In typically flippant fashion, The Times opens it’s article saying Computer geeks beware: your days are over. The cheapening of journalism is a pet hate of mine. If I want read something dumbed down, I?ll pick up the Mail, not the Times.
Yes I concur with Education Editor Alexandra Frean, that the social and business skills of IT graduates need to be improved. However, a measley course that runs in thirteen institutions will, however, do little to staunch the bleeding wound of flight from computing courses and the social ineptitude of grads. What needs to happen here is a repositioning of learning goals amongst our education planners.
In a way, our educators are creating these social hermits. Isn’t sitting on one’s own endless programming and debugging the most socially isolating experience? Imagine spending three or four years doing that most of the time. No wonder IT grads find it difficult to socialise in a business context after finishing college. They’re been battery-fed an education for their entire college lives. Yes, there is an element of group projects, but these tend to be cut and run affairs. Most comms can happen online, cutting off real one-to-one interaction.
So, what would I do if I was an educator? Well as a first step, I’d like to organise a year-long project and get a team of students together to form a mini company. Someone works PR, another Marketing, perhaps another on Project Management. Ancillary careers that link into IT. Give them a business problem. Let them brainstorm. Bring in someone from the Toastmasters and teach how to speak and present. Let it be challenging and fun.
Science and technology educators ought to learn that one cannot live on bread alone. And computer geeks cannot survive just on technology.