[LINK] goodbye to Australian IT education

[Andrew Thornton]

                       I was a product of fantastic, wonderful, 
marvelous early 90's computer education. I was taught that a computer 
had a spacebar. You only needed to know that. The spacebar was all. No 
need for a mouse. Or to know how to print out a document. As for 
computer science - leave that to the geeks who all had a VHS video of 
TRON at home. So I left school having been convinced by teachers and 
thee school system that pen and paper would dominate until the end of 
days, and as for that whizz bangy "computer science" 
thingy..well...leave it to nerds like that guy with the glasses in The 
Goodies.

                      So my state of computer education, or rather a 
lack of it, never changed year in and year out. That is, until I did a 
Diploma of graphics design and got into Adobe CS3 and learnt what a pdf 
was. I felt like a smart person at that point because I had by trial and 
error taught myself what this "download" thingy was and how to download 
something and know where it was downloaded to. I also threw Microsoft 
Outlook into the trashbin. I saw the truth. A voice from the sky said 
"thou shalt know that Microsoft outlook is $%#@ - USE THUNDERBIRD!" So I 
learnt from his and also stopped using that Internet Explorer rubbish. I 
had seen the light.

                    By this time I had begun to like[!] computers in 
about 2008. I even taught myself how to dual boot a computer and put in 
Linux alongside Windows. For someone who had been interviewed for 
"technophobia" at school I was getting somewhere! Life was looking up! 
Had I even taken steps...to geekdom?

                   So I set out to learn more about computers and 
programming and linux and everything else. For my hunger to know the 
subtleties of 0 and 1 was by this point unstoppable. I looked. I 
searched for a course. All I saw in TAFE and universities was mumbo 
jumbo vague statements of learning this outcome blather. So I looked at 
online education and found VTC, Pluralsight, digital tutors, lynda and 
many others. I added up the costs to subscribe. Travel, photocopying and 
who knows what else would be involved in any on campus IT education in 
Australia. And the lecturers? Um. I want to learn lightwave - choose 
between some Australian nobody person or get Dan Ablan who has been 
teaching Lightwave for 20 years? Um. No contest.

                  No. Sorry. There is no IT education in Australia that 
is worth doing. There just isn't. So I take my money right out of the 
country and subscribe to overseas IT sites to learn stuff. I mean, maybe 
QANTM College was worth a look once but even they have gone a bit weird. 
The dollar is still quite OK. A high dollar is great for people like me 
who buy a stackload of subscriptions and software licences. Other people 
want a lower dollar. Well they can just suck eggs. They can shove their 
lower dollar up their glutimus maximuses   [if that is the correct plural].

                I will subscribe. I can watch my lecture over and over 
and over again to my heart's content. What's the point doing on campus 
uni study anyway? The lecturer will always be distracted by research. 
You as student are a nuisance afterthought. After all that's why 
lecturers get 20 odd weeks a year away from students. It's not to give 
students a holiday. Well, I would rather have the full attention in a 
video from Dan Ablan, Mark Long or whoever else does a video. On Campus 
IT education can just go to hell. What would I learn? I'd probably learn 
some C++ and never learn how to do backups. How stupid is that. If I 
subscribe I have time for all the experiments that I want; last year I 
got an old, useless, data-free computer and DBANed it as an experiment.

               Oh and there is one more thing. The Australian IT culture 
doesn't give a damn about you unless you are the corporate market. Get 
dem corporate people. Charge megabucks for 5 days in a skyscraper and 
call the sessions "super dooper security pentesting" or some rubbish. 
That's how you make the dosh. Bring in the rupees. Ignore those people 
who are beginners at computers. Or the people who want to know somple 
things like how to do a back up. Those beginners. They are scum. No 
money to be made from 'em. You must go for the corporate market. Just 
like your business money man adviser from the U S of A told you to.

              Goodbye Australian IT education. Good riddance. I will 
subscribe to the global IT subscriber site market instead. If that makes 
Joe Hockey or anyone else narked off because my money goes offshore then 
that's just his bad luck and he can suck suck suck on it.

             Andrew