Saturday, November 13, 2004

"Pakistan's IT challenges"

Thanks to Irfan Khan (S-Asia-IT) for following up on the positivity lead ;~) and sending the sequel to Anthony Mitchell's first article. The writer takes an indepth look at last mile and connectivity issues (such as our dependence on FLAG) in addition to offering a word of caution to American investors.

4 comments:

Rafay Bin Ali said...

Pakistan's IT industry needs to take a good look at how IT students are taught in Pakistan. I am a IT and business student at a local institute and I think I speak for the majority of students when I say that the curriculum is really out-of-sync. For example, we are still being taught C language as an introductory course; I think a course in Java or theoretical OOP would be a much better approach to prepare us for the future. Also, the curriculum remains oblivious of global IT trends such as data warehousing, offshoring projects, data mining, XML, e-commerce etc. etc. etc.

I am quite surprised when most of my teachers in IT courses are unaware of even the implications of ignoring such topics.

Zunaira said...

Any thoughts on what your final year project is likely to be?

Rafay Bin Ali said...

Zunaira: I have actually thought about doing a project that would seek to standardize the data exchange in the financial sector. I had gathered a lot of data such as yearly financial reports of major corporations to that end. However, considering the lack of awareness amongst the teachers, I decided to change it.

I have several other ideas but still undecided as to which one to pursue. Still have another 3 months before I have to hand in a draft, so lets see what turns out.

Rafay Bin Ali said...

Another problem with the IT curriculum is the way that a course - lets say a programming course- is taught. Instead of imparting theoretical concepts and letting the students implement those on their own, most teachers take the easy way out by handing out code and letting the students memorize that code. How absurd! As a result, most of the students are devoid of any analytical skills that go into making a flexible software application.

May be the teachers, themselves, are incompetent???