I've had good success with doing "career-mentoring" to secondary and university students, especially early in their final year. I typically approach an IT department and say "Would you like someone with mumble-mumble years of experience to talk about the industry and how to differentiate yourself from the mass of other grads who'll be hitting the job market at the same time as you?" Always had a positive response, and it's at these talks that I advocate open source, public contribution and looking for adding to your skills portfolio with an emerging tech/platform/skill. I typically talk about the Ruby-verse as an example of where a student can spend part of their intellectual budget (what/where you choose to spend your limited thinking time on) to build that differentiation. The better students are the ones who pick up on this, if not already there, and will probably be the ones to turn up at the next Ruby event.
So that might be a more successful/achievable path than trying to attempt a course-ware change. Perhaps a road-trip to the major campuses (campi?) doing a series of tight presentations could be a fun event ? Cheers Leif On 26/04/2012, at 15:46, Warren Seen <[email protected]> wrote: > It's a great ideal, but trying to shift the languages used for instruction is > a big ask, as it would require the lecturers to actually rework the course > notes, rather than working on their research... > > The path of least resistance is probably for someone go to whichever uni > you're targeting and do an intro to Ruby type seminar/guest lecture, in > conjunction with either the faculty itself, or a Comp Sci students > society/club/whatever if one exists. > > Get students interested, get them using ruby and get them out to the user > groups... Sure, you'll expose less students to ruby than if they were all > forced to use it, but then where do you think the bad PHP programmers all > came from? :P > > > On 26/04/2012, at 2:58 PM, Daryl Manning wrote: > >> +1 on educational advocacy. Anyone have an idea what USyd, UTS et al are >> teaching in terms of web development and frameworks these days? >> >> (I know during my UK MSc, java and C++ were the *only* programming options >> and the whole curricula was very, very Microsoft focused. It was swimming >> upstream trying to use php for web projects and/or ruby - hell, even a mac >> for that matter.). >> >> D. >> >> On Thu, Apr 26, 2012 at 2:19 PM, Leonard <[email protected]> wrote: >> This is probably wildly off-topic.... >> >> Where do we raise issues or suggestions for Ruby Australia in meeting it's >> core aims? >> >> Today @dhh was tweeting that the "Rails job market still is [tight]". One >> aspect affecting this is the lack of new ruby developers coming in and >> learning Ruby. I feel that it should be the responsibility of Ruby Australia >> to encourage Universities and High Schools to teach Ruby as opposed to Java >> or PHP. I'm not sure about everyone else but my university taught PHP as a >> web language (and now teaches PHP/Java from what I can tell). I know that if >> I had been exposed to Ruby (or Python) at university I would have spent much >> less time faffing around making crappy PHP websites or alternatively being >> confused and overawed by those "enterprise" Java monstrosities. >> >> Has Ruby/Rails education advocacy been discussed as one of the goals of Ruby >> Australia? Should it be? >> >> -- Len >> >> -- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >> "Ruby or Rails Oceania" group. >> To view this discussion on the web visit >> https://groups.google.com/d/msg/rails-oceania/-/4zIirOMSUo0J. >> To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. >> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to >> [email protected]. >> For more options, visit this group at >> http://groups.google.com/group/rails-oceania?hl=en. >> >> >> -- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >> "Ruby or Rails Oceania" group. >> To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. >> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to >> [email protected]. >> For more options, visit this group at >> http://groups.google.com/group/rails-oceania?hl=en. > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Ruby or Rails Oceania" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected]. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/rails-oceania?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby or Rails Oceania" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rails-oceania?hl=en.
