Flex Builder free to Education ... what about ColdFusion
I just read, via Matt Woodward - who is talking at Scotch on the Rocks 2008 by the way - that Adobe are offering Flex Builder 2 at no cost to Students and Faculty at Educational institutions world wide.
Great news in my opinion.
Following on from this, I've often pondered how Adobe could inject ColdFusion into education. Here in the UK, there are a great deal of Universities and Colleges that are using ColdFusion in one way or another; hosting their website, offering hosted services to students, or even in the rare case actually teaching it.
I believe the University of Abertay, Dundee actually teach ColdFusion as part of their syllabus.
All this is great, but what more could be done to help ColdFusion penetrate the educational sector, and more importantly see graduating students come out looking for ColdFusion jobs rather than just whatever is currently being taught (which in my case was Java or Eiffel).
- Provide students on any Computer Science related course with a free copy of ColdFusion Standard?
- Offer each Computer Science (or related) department at every University or College a free copy of ColdFusion Enterprise?
What else could be done?
I'mjust trying to think of how we can capture students and actually hold onto them AFTER they graduate.
It's not just the free software angle I'm looking at, it's also how can we introduce ColdFusion into the official curriculum, and certainly giving free server licenses to the CS departments would be a good move.
I think we've talked about this before Andy but Adobe should be getting out there and organising awareness tours. Arrange to go round the Universities and present the selling points of ColdFusion to Students and Tutors. Microsoft are doing it (http://www.microsoft.com/uk/academia/inspirationto...) why not Adobe?
I don't know what the answer is to getting the CF word out there but it just annoys me that Adobe do come up with some good/cool/amazing ideas on how to promote all they other products. And yet we (I) just get excited seeing CF included on a cover disc.