Ken returned recently from his trip to the United States and Canada which included site visits to 16 schools and several corporate sites in Hawaii, British Columbia, Washington, Idaho, New York, Maryland, Virginia and Washington DC, where he investigated courses ranging from network cabling and web development to Help Desk operation and robotics.

Scroll down for more detailed background notes.

• Introducing Online Guest
• Are "competition" and "sharing of ideas" mutual enemies?
• A few thoughts following responses...
• More money through the school Gates
• A bit more on big business in school curriculums
• Online guest thank you

• Churchill report, 1998
  Ken's official report for his Churchill fellowship is downloadable from his homepage. MS WORD format (347 KB)
  
  
• Bellevue Community College http://www.bcc.ctc.edu/
  The College referred to by Ken in his More money through the school Gates posting as an example of a school including industry training in a creative and appropriate way.
  
  
• North West Centre for Emerging Technologies (part of Bellevue Community College) http://www.nwcet.bcc.ctc.edu/
  Check out their careers in IT section.
  
  
• Microsoft's IT 2000 Careers Aptitude test With predictable shades of key competency like questions, this series of questions invites students to rate themselves against various criteria and then returns an annotated list of suitable careers in the IT industry with links to more information about each career.
  
  
• CISCO Networking Academies http://www.cisco.com/edu/academies/index.html
  This site describes the training offered by CISCO in partnership with schools which results in a CISCO credential. In Australia ANTA accreditation is being sought for this course. Bendigo Senior Secondary College and a Queensland TAFE currently have trainees under this scheme.
  
  
• National ITAB for IT: InfoComp Training
  http://www.infocomp.net.au/default.htm
  InfoComp Training is the trading name for the Telecommunications, Postal Services, Information Technology and Printing Industry Training Advisory Body Ltd. It is the body responsible for the Training Package for the Information Technology Industry in Australia.
  
  
• VISITT Resource Centre Vocational Education and Training In Schools for Information Technology and Telecommunications.
  http://www.visitt.edu.au/
  This site is sponsored by InfoComp Training. It includes a resource collection of teaching materials that have been mapped to the competencies relevant for the entry level courses studied by students in Australian Secondary Schools.
  
  
• EdNA's list of industry training boards related to computing
  
  

While teaching at Claremont College, a senior secondary college which serves a challenging student community, he saw many students with skills in computing and computer support that were not readily able to be recognised by school accreditation systems. He applied for a fellowship with the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust to investigate the ways in which these types of students could gain skills to help them enter the computing profession, as part of their general education.

He was granted a Churchill Fellowship to perform this investigation in the United States and Canada (sponsored by the National Council for Vocational Education Research , a South Australia-based organisation which provides research, evaluation and statistical information to a wide range of stakeholders who have an interest in vocational education and training).

He returned recently from site visits to 16 schools and several corporate sites in Hawaii, British Columbia, Washington, Idaho, New York, Maryland, Virginia and Washington DC, where he investigated courses ranging from network cabling and web development to Help Desk operation and robotics.

Ken's interests outside of education include repairing things which no longer work (a task which never ends thanks to the efforts of his wife and two teenage daughters) and an ongoing PhD study in the developmental aspects of the sense of humour in school-age children.