News and Events

Bournemouth University praised in the Guardian

11 January 2012

The Guardian reports how BU is praised by the digital industry.

Amongst concerns that Britain is facing a shortage of computer literate staff that possess the necessary skills in the computer science field, BU has been praised by the digital industry for working closely with them.

Mark Shufflebottom programme leader of Digital Media Design said: “Teaching on a University course that has a strong emphasis on creative code, I really welcome Michael Gove's decision to focus on scrapping ICT and teaching programming instead.

There are plenty of well paid jobs for our graduates, however we do not receive strong enough applications for the course because many students have simply never encountered code. There is also a perception that code is not creative. By teaching the principles of programming to school students, we can concentrate, at University level, on how to use code creatively and to continue to help our students to be award winning.”

Honorary Doctorate Ian Livingstone OBE, who was made a Doctor of Arts in November spoke to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme about the scrapping the ‘dull’ information and communications technology (ICT) that is taught in schools and its replacement by a more open curriculum in September.

“Children find it incredibly boring, they don’t need to spend a year learning PowerPoint. They are bored to death with it and turned off technology. The knock on effect is that they don’t go to University to study computer science so how are we going to build the next Google, Twitter Facebook or Zinger with a nation of digital illiterates. We teach our children to use applications, we don’t teach them how to make applications.”