Ciarán Bryce: Building the bridge between 20th century IT teaching and millenials

This year was a landmark year at the university because the first millennials arrived, so sitting where you are were students all born in the 21st century and standing here where teachers born and educated in the 20th century. Now, this century division between us and the millennials is actually quite symbolic because in it at least, we are not preparing the millennials yet for the challenges that await them. To understand why, we need to focus our moment on the teaching generation. The teaching generation is the I.T. generation. We studied and worked in the 1990s and 2000s. That was a period of incredible growth in I.T. It was a period of great optimism. We oversaw the development of the Internet from 15 million users in 1995 to over five billion users today. As a generation, we are very proud of that tool and we take great pride in believing that we have made a great gift to mankind. Without it, there would be no working from home during Covid. There would be no buying anything you could possibly buy without leaving your armchair. There would be no TEDx. So when we teach I.T., we make the students work very hard to understand the technical details. It's all about technology, technology first ahead of everything else. This is how we learned I.T. and given the success of I.T. age, we are convinced that this is the way that I.T. should be taught. The millennials are inheriting our Internet, we worked so hard to understand those details. It's because we need to reassure ourselves that they are will be able to take good care of it. But there is a problem with our Internet, the Internet did not develop at great speed. The Internet developed in great precipitation, spurred on by inflated economic incentives. The driving forces were first to market maximize visits on some Web page, commerce online. The result of this precipitated development is the emergence of a number of serious problems for which we currently do not have the answers to. Cyber crime, cyber warfare between nation states. Fake news. Tampering in election processes to the point where our confidence in our democratic institutions has been severely tested. I.T. services have a big carbon footprint. Yes, the millennials are inheriting the Internet, but they are inheriting one bucket load of problems that we helped to create and that they will have to solve because otherwise they risk some greater calamity later. You see, THE I.T. generation has a fundamental flaw in its thinking. We have an irrational confidence in the transformative possibilities of I.T. These problems I mentioned, we saw them coming, but they were swept under the carpet for a long time by the enthusiasm of the I.T. age. We chose technology innovation over everything else, even when we knew that many technologies would have a short lifetime and become quickly obsolete. We convinced ourselves that there could be a technology solution to any problem. We were wrong, and that is why our teaching generation needs to break. So how do we teach technology to millennials? Ultimately, we must never forget that our role at the university is to teach students to meet them, to help them learn to solve problems and they have problems. There are problems and millennials that can be called upon to solve problems that we don't even know exist yet. After all, who is talking about cyber warfare or climate change one or two generations ago? But are technology driven mono disciplinary teaching is not helping students learn to solve problems. We need to pivot to Multidisciplinary teaching and thinking when millennials learn I.T. When millennials build I.T. systems, they must be able to reason in advance about the impact of that system on ecology and security and finance. They must understand the big picture. They must take responsibility for the big picture over technology An I.T. generation taking responsibility. That could be a break. But for our teaching generation sitting opposite to millennials, how do we get them to change their teaching methods? Well, we can do that by changing the university. And how do we do that? How does a university that caters for millennials, that cares for millennials break with the current university? When we have big challenges, we need big breaks. So what made these big bricks look like? Well, here are three possibilities. Break one. No more professors. A professor is someone who is specialized in some field, but that's no help. Sure, we need people who understand technology, but we need those people to have an equal understanding, genetics or ecology. The creativity we need to solve today's problems can only be found by multidisciplinary by fusions of ideas in many domains. Break two, no more classes. Classes do not stimulate students. Classes stimulate professors. Because we like to explain, particularly when people show up to hear us. But classes do not stimulate students projects stimulate students learning by doing rather than listening stimulates students. A project is an exercise in problem solving. A project can be multidisciplinary. Projects must be the backbone of our university degrees. Break three. No more exams and no more corrected exams, but no more exams. An exams is an evaluation of some technical proficiency. After an exam is just an exercise in memorization. Neither of these qualities are particularly useful to Problem-Solving. And in the 21st century, humanity will informatic us. We already have this wonderfully developed Ekso cortex that has these two qualities. It's called the World Wide Web. We can evaluate students on projects, on problem solving. This is much fairer and more meaningful because we are evaluating them precisely on what they will be doing in life when they leave the university. The first university was founded in Bologna, Italy, in the 11th century. That is 1000 years ago. This year, the new millennials are joining an institution that itself is entering into its second millennium. Now, that sounds like a good point to step back and to rethink the university. For a thousand years, universities have prepared students for life. And we can do that for millennials. We can do that for millennials. But we need to take our 20th century teaching and break.