Education
It is stating the obvious that IT plays an increasingly important part in education, not only because of the resources that are available online, but also because the careers of school children and students today will involve at least minimal IT skills. Young people moving into so many sectors will be expected to have these skills; social media is now baked into our society.
At the same time, there is a serious shortage in digital skills. This article on the BBC news website titled “UK 'heading towards digital skills shortage disaster’” https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-56479304 is one of many such articles on this point.
This presents a challenge to governments worldwide, who are faced with providing children with access to laptops and pad devices at least at school, and increasingly at home as well. Covid 19 made this an even bigger problem. The Welsh government earned praise in a recent report by the Education Policy Institute for “repurposing existing laptops and wifi routers for distribution to disadvantaged users.” (see report linked from https://gov.wales/wales-led-way-providing-it-and-online-learning-pupils-home-throughout-pandemic)
The Scottish government has a very successful initiative delivering courses to schools online, a success that has transferred to Wales.
These are examples of IT projects delivering real value in Wales and Scotland, and which support Welsh and Gaelic respectively.
A high calibre IT infrastructure in Wales could ensure that digital learning is available everywhere, and will open up the possibility to reassess the viability of smaller rural schools when then a student could access ANY subject digitally – through the medium of either language [or other languages] and gain qualifications which would stand them well for progression to further education – and those further education establishments could benefit in the same way. An excellent example of this was publicised whilst this report is being written where radiographers use AI facilities to learn X-ray techniques in Wrexham.
Building an Educational Platform
Many young people who do well in sectors like software development do so because they are very interested and strongly motivated to find out about it. The internet is full of tutorials for advanced technologies that are available as a result of the open-source movement.
Data centres provide the infrastructure for cloud servers: virtual servers hosted on shared hardware. The whole point of cloud computing is that it makes servers available to users using shared infrastructure.
With this in mind, it would be possible to give Welsh students “hands-on” access to cloud servers on which they could learn server management, programming, web development and many more advanced IT skills. The technology easily supports this: the usual suspects such as Google (https://cloud.google.com) and Amazon (https://aws.amazon.com) already provide this kind of service, but usually hosted in the USA.
This in turn provides opportunities to support education of IT students who are looking to start a career in IT having had some exposure as a result of using Welsh network services. They would have a good start on that career. There would then be many opportunities for work experience and apprenticeship schemes within companies in Wales for students leaving college with this background, so encouraging the take-up of jobs here rather than at the other end of the M4 corridor.
The cost of giving a laptop to every school child in Wales is high, but the cost of giving access to server technology to those students interesting in studying IT is a fraction of this.
Coupled with a community of Welsh developers, online support and forums, this builds a good basis for encouraging skills in IT amongst young people in Wales. It is also very fertile ground for enterprise. Give young people in Wales a chance to try out their ideas and let creativity bloom!
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