High-flying graduates are to be given a £20,000 golden handshake to train as computer science teachers.

Ministers have asked Facebook, Microsoft and IBM to help design the training for the new teachers.

Education Secretary Michael Gove said current information and communications technology (ICT) teacher training courses would be axed from next year.

The move “could not be more welcome or more necessary”, said Prof Steve Furber of the Royal Society.

» via BBC

The rapid spread of cellphones has fueled an appreciation among Africans for the practical uses of science and technology. And the children of the African elite are also seeing career possibilities in computing science and engineering, beyond the traditional disciplines of medicine, law and finance or the more typical scientific callings of crop and soil science.

“Computer science appeals to a generation of urban students raised on a diet of digital devices,” said Chanda Chisala of Zambia Online, a software development company and Internet provider in the Zambian capital, Lusaka.

The field also may appeal to chronically underfinanced African universities because the study of computer science is relatively inexpensive. No big atom smashers are needed, as in physics; no giant telescopes, as in astronomy.

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The teaching of computer science must become more relevant to modern needs, said the government.

The government said the current teaching of IT was “insufficiently rigorous and in need of reform”.

The call for change came in a response to an industry report which looked at technology teaching in the UK.

Without reform future UK workers would lack key skills and the nation would lose its standing as a video games and visual arts hub, said the report.

» via BBC

Prominent technologist Jacques Mattheij recently blogged an eye-popping salary quote revealed to him by an under-30 programmer at Google: “I’m pushing $250K per year.” So if software engineers at Google and other tech companies are raking in that kind of dough and are in such high demand, why is it so tough to get more students into programming?

The easy answer is that not everyone wants to be a software engineer, no matter what they earn. Mattheij makes no secret of the fact that he’s not a fan of students going “hip-deep in debt” for a degree in “history, literature, art history or any one of a large number of other ‘soft’ subjects”—like many, he believes they should earn degrees that “make it easier to make some money.” But some people actually want to be social workers or history teachers even though they’ll never make Google-style cash. You can’t knock the hustle of someone who decides to follow their dreams, especially when it’s a public sector job. That said, many students never know whether a tech field could be their passion because they never have any exposure to it in elementary and high school.

» via GOOD

When Keila Fong arrived at Yale, she had never given much thought to computer science. But then last year everyone on campus started talking about the film “The Social Network,” and she began to imagine herself building something and starting a business that maybe, just maybe, could become the next Facebook.

“It’s become very glamorous to become the next Mark Zuckerberg, and everyone likes to think they have some great idea,” said Ms. Fong, a junior, who has since decided to major in Yale’s newly energized computer science program.

Never mind that Mr. Zuckerberg, like other tech titans, did not major in computer science — or even finish college. Enrollment in computer science programs, and degrees from them, are rising after a decade of decreases, despite much handwringing about the decline of American competitiveness in technology and innovation from President Obama on down. And educators and technologists say the inspiration is partly Hollywood’s portrayal of the tech world, as well as celebrity entrepreneurs like Steven P. Jobs of Apple and Mr. Zuckerberg who make products that students use every day.

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Columbia University will soon offer a combined engineering and journalism degree. It’s a unique program the Ivy League institution hopes will produce cross-disciplinary ninjas prepared to develop the newsrooms of the future. The new Master of Science Program in Computer Science and Journalism is the first of its kind, according to Shree Nayar, who chairs the computer science department at Columbia’s Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, which offers the program with the Columbia School of Journalism. The university shared the details with Wired.com in advance of the announcement later Wednesday.

Journalism schools have frantically updated their programs in the last decade or so, as it became increasingly clear that traditional, newspaper-oriented skills were no longer enough to prepare students for the real world. But even fluency in broadly defined “multimedia skills” isn’t enough, with coding becoming as crucial to the news business as knowing how to use a computer was a couple of generations ago.

» via Wired