David Velleman made a good suggestion for a blogpost a week ago, and I’m only now getting around to posting it. This is partially an indication of how far behind I am on my email, and partially an indication of how inefficient I get when baseball season starts. With apologies for tardiness then…

The hackneyed story about technology is that the young are always faster to pick it up than us old folk. So you’d expect in an academic department the graduate students would be the ones leading the way, and the professoriate would be constantly learning tricks from them. And while that’s true sometimes (I had to recruit Paul Neufeld of “ephilosopher”:http://www.ephilosopher.com/ fame to get started on Movable Type) it certainly doesn’t seem to be the general run of things. And certainly there’s lots of things about grad students could learn about technology from computer specialists. This suggests a professional question. How much technical knowledge/ability should we _require_ our graduate students to have.

Here’s some suggestions for skills graduate students should have. (All it turns out from David. I tried to add more of my own, and realised they weren’t anywhere near as interesting.)

* How to use Powerpoint in lectures
* How to manage a large course website, including interactive features
* How to setup maintain a large database for administrative tasks

And by ‘skills’ here I don’t mean the basic ability to do these things without looking really stupid, but the ability to efficiently integrate them into your daily routine when they are needed. Future faculty who can do these things will be better academics. At the very least they will be better teachers and better at running things like job searches and graduate admissions, and of course they can do much more than that. If the academic job search market were efficient, these skills would be rewarded. Even in the real world, departments would be doing the profession a service by turning out colleagues-to-be with these technical skills.

On one of these points I think there is a clear economic benefit to the students from acquiring technical skills. I think a well-maintained webpage, with your best work prominently displayed, is very helpful in a job search. And a fully functioning course site looks very impressive to those looking to evaluate your teaching ability. This isn’t going to override the crucial things like being able to write and teach well, but it certainly helps distribute the evidence that you can write and teach well. I think all grad students, should have web pages and departments should do what they can to provide these pages for just this reason.

I wonder which of these skills (or similar skills) will be viewed as being as basic as typing in a decade or two? I don’t know how long ago it was that one wouldn’t have been surprised to find that the new academic you hired couldn’t type. But whichever skills they are, I’m sure that soon some skills that we now view as esoteric will be basically expected of new hires.

David points out that philosophers have a particular reason to be interested in these questions. Some of us write about artificial intelligence, and many others cover it in their teaching. And a good working knowledge of what computers can and can do, preferably gained ‘first-hand’ while hacking around with some code, will be helpful to either role. Many philosophy departments dropped their language requirements over the last decade or so – maybe it’s time to reinstate something similar.