March 09Volume : 1, Edition : 4

General population….novice—journey man——master …journey is definitely long, but how many of usaim to get there?

An eminent personality in the software engineering domain, Dr.Lynn Robert Carter has a fusion of industryand academic experience with him. He is known to MSITians as a professor who set the right tone for thesoftware engineering specialization and as a principal mentor guiding them. The recent talk on ‘Deliveringsoftware engineering skill’ at MSIT, has unleashed a new set of learning interventions that he emphasizedon.He started off exploring the various driving factors to arrive at a superior product in any walk of business.According to him, competition, complexity explosion, quality and performance serve as propellers to excelin producing an outstanding work in a business landscape. Why then there is only 28% success in softwareprojects, where 23% are cancelled delivering nothing, 49% are late, over budget and missing features…heput forth an intriguing question. Drawing an analogy with ‘Blue Angels’, an aviation company, Dr.Carteraccentuated the relevance and significance of personal mastery and team mastery which ensure pertinentcommunication skills, making them trustworthy, committed and developing a zeal to improve themselvescontinuously. The inclusion of such courses in curriculum is more relevant than ever in today’s world andMSIT has the right blend of both the skills, i.e., technical and soft skills he opined.A competency graph depicted by him, showed a few phases that a learner would go through before hegets to his mastery level: General population phase, where a learner is totally unpredictable, a novicestage, where he understands that he is a beginner and needs to travel a long way to reach the expertisetargeted, next comes the journey man, who has the ability to make and honor commitments and finallymaster phase. Masters, Dr.Carter said, are not just knowledgeable but should be given a title by othersand should not be called a master until a master piece is produced. Masters he emphasized should producework so compelling that novices are willing to apprentice, transforming majority of such apprentices into journey men, who then would proceed to become masters in their own right, thus ensuring knowledgeand skills they have learnt live on in others.Describing three types of learning styles according to Bloom’s taxonomy, he spoke out that at a freshmanlevel, a professional requires all the three skills: Cognitive(knowledge), affective(attitude) andpsychomotor(manual skills) but most courses tend to focus only on cognitive skills hence not contributingto development of an all rounded professional. When a course is designed to offer a real worlddemonstration of a problem, it should be supported by required knowledge and skills to offer a guidedpractice and experience to the learner, he stressed.

Dr.Carter emphasized that a learner should aim at phased learning, where he is initially introduced tothe concept, then enabled to develop the concept by showing several similar but different aspects thatcomplicate things as well as potential solutions with stories and finally fully explore the concept once allrelated aspects have been developed, compare and contrast the costs and benefits, again with stories. Heverily said that teaching has to follow an iterative approach thus helping the learners align their wheels onthe asphalt and not on the verges, strengthening their basic lessons. Teaching as the work is done andtaking demonstrations at every level of learning would help the learner to arrive at several viable solutions.He consummated, leaving a note on the measure of success of a graduate. According to him, it does notmatter what a student knows at the time of the final or when they graduate, all that matters is what theyare able to do when called upon to perform on the job, where most graduates struggle, because they arenot given time to research, think, plan, design, implement, and then transition…….they are only giventime to react! That sums up his talk in a nut shell, leaving us to deduce and use the concepts afore mentionedin our walks of life.