Keeping the machinery in computing education

Incorporating intellectual and developmental frameworks into a Scottish school curriculum

Raising sector skills levels : how responsive is local training supply?

This UK study examines the extent and nature of any mismatches between the training requirements of employers and the local provision of vocational education and training (VET). Companies in selected sectors (maintenance and repair of motor vehicles; telecommunications services; mechanical engineering, vehicles and other engineering; and textiles, clothing and footwear manufacture) and regions were surveyed on their training requirements. Staff in colleges and training providers in the same regions were interviewed to discuss the survey findings and to investigate the extent to which these providers are already satisfying those requirements and the nature of any constraints which may be present

XinuPi3: Teaching Multicore Concepts Using Embedded Xinu

As computer platforms become more advanced, the need to teach advanced computing concepts grows accordingly. This paper addresses one such need by presenting XinuPi3, a port of the lightweight instructional operating system Embedded Xinu to the Raspberry Pi 3. The Raspberry Pi 3 improves upon previous generations of inexpensive, credit card-sized computers by including a quad-core, ARM-based processor, opening the door for educators to demonstrate essential aspects of modern computing like inter-core communication and genuine concurrency. Embedded Xinu has proven to be an effective teaching tool for demonstrating low-level concepts on single-core platforms, and it is currently used to teach a range of systems courses at multiple universities. As of this writing, no other bare metal educational operating system supports multicore computing. XinuPi3 provides a suitable learning environment for beginners on genuinely concurrent hardware. This paper provides an overview of the key features of the XinuPi3 system, as well as the novel embedded system education experiences it makes possible

Reinspection of curriculum areas 1995-96 : report from the Inspectorate

REINSPECTION OF CURRICULUM AREAS, FEBRUARY 1995 TO MAY 1996 The Council has agreed that colleges with curriculum areas judged by the inspectorate to have more weaknesses than strengths (grade 4 or 5) may have their funding agreement with the Council qualified to prevent them increasing the number of new students enrolled in those areas until the Council is satisfied that the weaknesses have been addressed satisfactorily. The Council requires that colleges are given the opportunity to have curriculum areas graded 4 or 5 reinspected within a year of their original reinspection. Colleges may request the Council to defer reinspection if they do not believe that sufficient improvements in provision have been achieved. This is a report on those curriculum areas, reinspected between February 1995 and May 1996. Inspectors visited 22 colleges to reinspect 28 curriculum areas which had been judged by the inspectorate to have more weaknesses than strengths. Significant improvements were found in all areas. The reinspection grades are shown in the table below, with information about those colleges with curriculum areas graded 4 or 5 which will be included in a future reinspection report

Developing Online Team Skills

This paper discusses the development and delivery of a new course at the UK Open University (OU). The course makes a virtue of the fact that OU students study in a predominantly distance learning environment, by providing a structure within which team working activities are carried out with no face-to-face contact whatsoever. Issues that were considered in designing this course and decisions about tutoring and assessing the students' team working experience are discussed. Preliminary results from the first delivery of the course, including analysis of archived team conferences, are presented. Directions for future development and enhancement are indicated

The Technological Bias in the Establishment of a Technological Regime: the adoption and enforcement of early information processing technologies in US manufacturing, 1870-1930

This paper presents a qualitative study on the adoption of early information technologies, such as typewriters, calculators or Hollerith machines in US manufacturing in the period between 1870 and 1930, which was by all means a true systemic innovation. Our empirical work is guided by a theoretical framework in which the theory of induced innovation is interpreted along "classical" lines in which an explicit link to the concept of technological regimes is established. We show how the presence of a distinct bias in technical change in US manufacturing led to the opening of a window of opportunity for early information technologies. We work out how the presence of this bias influenced the technological search and adoption process of firms and how this found its final reflection in the rules and heuristics of the regime, as well as the technological trajectories of the technologies. The reliance on established practices led organisation designers to cast the logic of large scale manufacturing into the administrative organisation of firms. This required the convergence of technical practices. The resulting technological trajectories and path dependencies were the outcome of the diffusion and the hardening of the early office work regime. Our analysis of US manufacturing data of the period suggests that even though electrification and "bureaucratisation" overlapped they cannot considered being the result of the same pattern of technology adoption, identified by the development of the capital-labour ratio.economics of technology ;