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Information technology (IT) is an enormously vibrant field that emerged at the end of the last century as our society experienced a fundamental change from an industrial society to an "information society." From its inception just half a century ago, computing has become the defining technology of our age, changing how we live and work. Computers are integral to modern culture and are a primary engine behind much of the world's economic and social change.
The field continues to evolve at an astonishing pace. New technologies are introduced continually, and existing ones become obsolete almost as soon as they appear. The rapid evolution of the discipline has a profound effect on Information Technology education, affecting both content and pedagogy. For example, networking was not seen as a major topic area in the early 1990's. The lack of emphasis on networking is not particularly surprising. Networking was not yet a mass-market phenomenon, and the World Wide Web was little more than an idea in the minds of its creators. Today, networking and the Web have become the underpinnings for much of our economy. They have become critical foundations of Information Technology, and it is impossible to imagine that any academic programs would not devote significantly more time to this topic. At the same time, the existence of the Web has changed the nature of the educational process itself. Modern networking technology enhances everyone's ability to communicate and gives people throughout the world unprecedented access to information. In most academic programs today networking technology has become an essential pedagogical tool.
The academic discipline of Information Technology can well be characterized as the most integrative of the computing disciplines. One implication of this characteristic is that a graduate of an IT program should be the first one to take responsibility to resolve a computing need, no matter the source or description of the problem, and no matter the solution that is eventually adopted. The depth of IT lies in its breadth: an IT graduate needs to be broad enough to recognize any computing need and know something about possible solutions. The IT graduate would be the one to select, create or assist to create, apply, integrate, and administer the solution within the application context. |
