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 The
many technologies, practices, organizations and developments
that fall under the superset, umbrella term of ICT have often
emerged and evolved:
- Separately, at different times, and in different
companies,
- interacting with different standards bodies, or none
at all,
- under different organizational departments,
- with different trade, descriptive and marketing names,
- in various marketplace battles, and
- with a bewildering array of corporate mergers,
acquisitions and renaming experiences.
It is no surprise that educational institutions have had a
hard time organizing and staying current and efficient with
ICT educational offerings. Most schools started flat-footed
and developed new departments to teach subjects under the ICT
umbrella. Those departments do their best to organize
themselves and their offerings and serve their communities,
but there is tremendous duplication of effort and important
differences in educational offerings across schools, like:
- ICT nomenclature (words are used differently in
different schools),
- ICT course, department, degree and certification names
and content, and
- Methods of teaching.
As a result, there is a lot of confusion in ICT fields, in the
ICT marketplace, and in ICT education, like:
- An employer gets a resume with an ICT degree or
academic certification and has no idea what that student
learned in that program without additional research.
- A student with an interest in ICT tries to figure out
where to go to college and what to study and has a hard
time even identifying the appropriate academic department
.
- A guidance counselor doesn’t understand any of it,
gets a deer in the headlights look when asked, and
unintentionally drives students away from the field.
MPICT can help by:
-
 Championing
the issue
- Working on ICT standards
- Providing collateral to assist guidance counselors
- Serving as a conduit for industry input into the
problem
- Providing ICT dictionaries and other resources to
better understand the field
- Providing a centralized, organized portal into ICT
programs at schools in the region
- Providing easily understood communications regarding
ICT pathways
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