IT Employment·20,064 discussions

Technology vs Tools

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What should we suggest our students to
learn first “technology” (whish give us a concepts or theory) or “tools” first (which were changing rapidly) ?

Topic

Who are we?

In reply to Technology vs Tools

Are we a university, vocational training instute, a high school, or what?

Quite general…

In reply to Technology vs Tools

Epepke beat me by a few minutes, the question is indeed a bit vague.

Still, I think in general technology should come first. What’s the point of using tools without knowing what you’re really doing? Imagine doing a trace of a network, looking in amazement at packages and their contents, without having a notion of what a protocol is…
Your answer lies in your own question, even. Technology develops and evolves, but does not really change, while toold do all the time. Access rights on a file do exactly the same in Novell NetWare 1.0 as they do in the latest 6.0, as they do in UNIX or NT or whatever they may come up with next year. If you don’t understand that concept, you won’t understand anything built on that.
And this same basic idea goes for developing (don’t understand the difference between public or private variables = don’t understand programming in any language), network management (what is routing?), project management, you name it.
The trick in building anything is having a solid basis. IT is not different from anything else.

Jim

How can you seperate them?

In reply to Technology vs Tools

Can you teach technology anywhere without tools?

I would postulate that the appropriate current tool and the technology with it should be taught simultaneously. Only in education circles does this seperation make any sense.

I mean, if you onlyunderstand how something works you’ll never be necessarily good at it. Look at all the US “Armchair Quarterbacks”… what use are they? Alternately, just having a good throwing arm isn’t enough either.

Learn in parallel

In reply to Technology vs Tools

You kind of have to learn it in parallel for effective teaching.

If things are done right, the student will learn concepts and see how different variations of a tool have similar functions.

Thus if you learn the ‘technology’ of word processing, you can easily pick up how to run almost ANY word processing ‘tool’. All you would need would be some sort of cross reference that tells you that a certain word processing ‘task’ can be found under one set of commands in Word, a slightly differentset in Word Perfect and a different set in StarOffice.

Unfortunately most groups tend to teach how to do things with a specific tool so many people are lost when they face a different tool that does the same work.

It reminds me of an Asimov story called ‘Profession’. One of the major characters was trained on a specific ‘tool’ and was lost when he had to work with a slightly different one.

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