Technology self-help: how to get up to speed on a particular technology environment

— Dr. Chris Hoadley

At Penn State in both the IST program and the Instructional Systems program, students will occasionally be worried about the particular technology skills they might need for a job or for their own work. The first reaction is usually "Why don't you guys prepare us for the real world by teaching courses in frobozonator 3.2?" Of course, within six months frobozonator 3.3 comes out, or the environment is replaced by whizbangify 1.0, or the like. Technology skills of this sort have a very short shelf-life. People are often surprised to hear that when I was at MIT, the computer science department didn't offer courses in any major programming languages used commercially. In fact, we rarely got language- or environment-specific training at all--you just picked it up yourself on the side, as needed, and most of our courses used some homegrown experimental language the professor had invented in their lab. I had to go to the civil engineering department to take a course in C programming, and I quickly discovered that with a few weekends, a good reference guide, and a knowledgable friend, I could have picked that stuff up myself.

Penn State has some great resources for students who want to pick up tech skills. They are not always easy to find. I've collected up some of my favorites here.

ITS training courses: ITS offers face to face training courses for faculty and students. They tend to be application-focused and oriented towards beginners, but can be especially helpful for things like multimedia development environments, e.g. Photoshop, Flash, etc.
Web-based training: These courses are online only and are useful if you want to get up to speed quickly on either a particular technology or more generically on soft-skills business stuff. Their catalog includes everything from router configuration to database administration to programming languages to how to interview somebody for a job. They are free, which is in my opinion amazing, even though they are a bit boring. They also have courses that prepare you for IT certifications. If you are hoping to land an entry level job, these certifications are like get-out-of-purgatory-free cards, and can often get your resume through the ridiculous filtering/keyword processes used by HR departments. Generally, if you are smart, getting these certifications is just a matter of time and memorization, plus some dough for the test. Update: Penn State is dropping these effective July 2007!
Sun online training: In addition to the other Web-based training courses, ITS has a license for Sun online training, most notably Java training, but also Perl and XML.
Technology reference books: Thanks to Josh Kirby for pointing me to this one. If you go to the LIAS e-resource list and choose "Safari" (no, it doesn't have anything to do with the Mac OS web browser), you will find an astounding number of excellent tech reference books free, in full text. They even have the O'Reilly books. Extremely helpful when you want something while coding at midnight. You can even search the books for code fragments, so if you want to see how somebody uses a particular command, you can search just for that. These books range from very introductory to hardcore programming references.

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