Vocational Education and the Evolution of the Computing Disciplines

Abstract

Throughout the relatively brief history of IT, undergraduate teaching programs in the IT disciplines have had to cope with the traditional antipathy of universities towards vocationally-based education. This resistance towards vocationally-oriented education has been a common feature of universities since their origins as educational institutions.The earliest universities followed the example of the ancient Greek academies, in favouring disciplines which focused on pure knowledge, independent of its application in practice. Consequently, throughout most of the history of the university, studies in the fields of engineering and technology were excluded on the grounds that they were too ‘utilitarian’, lacking in the theoretical foundations deemed appropriate to a university academic discipline.It was not until the late 19th and early 20th century that the disciplines associated with technology and the applied sciences began to earn widespread acceptance as suitable fields of study for universities.The overview of the history of IT education in the Victorian higher education sector, presented here, has highlighted a number of important features about the way in which has developed:•