The impact on firms of ICT skill-supply strategies: an Anglo-German comparison

This paper compares the supply of specialist ICT skills in Britain and Germany from higher education and from apprenticeship and assesses the relative impact on companies in the two countries. In contrast to Britain, where numbers of ICT graduates have expanded rapidly, the supply of university graduates in Germany has not increased. Combined with the constraints of the German occupational model of work organization, it is concluded that this failure of supply may have contributed to slower growth of ICT employment in Germany. At the same time, German firms have turned to a newly developed model of apprenticeship to supply routine technical ICT skills. This strategy contrasts with British firms which recruit from a wide range of graduate specialisms and invest more heavily in graduate training. Probably in part as a consequence, apprenticeship in ICT occupations in Britain has failed to develop

Teaching and learning in virtual worlds: is it worth the effort?

Educators have been quick to spot the enormous potential afforded by virtual worlds for situated and authentic learning, practising tasks with potentially serious consequences in the real world and for bringing geographically dispersed faculty and students together in the same space (Gee, 2007; Johnson and Levine, 2008). Though this potential has largely been realised, it generally isn’t without cost in terms of lack of institutional buy-in, steep learning curves for all participants, and lack of a sound theoretical framework to support learning activities (Campbell, 2009; Cheal, 2007; Kluge & Riley, 2008). This symposium will explore the affordances and issues associated with teaching and learning in virtual worlds, all the time considering the question: is it worth the effort

Chapter Globally Optimised Energy-Efficient Data Centres

A great deal of energy in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) systems can be wasted by software, regardless of how energy-efficient the underlying hardware is. To avoid such waste, programmers need to understand the energy consumption of programs during the development process rather than waiting to measure energy after deployment. Such understanding is hindered by the large conceptual gap from hardware, where energy is consumed, to high-level languages and programming abstractions. The approaches described in this chapter involve two main topics: energy modelling and energy analysis. The purpose of modelling is to attribute energy values to programming constructs, whether at the level of machine instructions, intermediate code or source code. Energy analysis involves inferring the energy consumption of a program from the program semantics along with an energy model. Finally, the chapter discusses how energy analysis and modelling techniques can be incorporated in software engineering tools, including existing compilers, to assist the energy-aware programmer to optimise the energy consumption of code