A comparative assessment of ICF - 2000 / CC 2001 / Career Space

Various recognized international professional organizations have recently developed university curricula concepts and models for the broad field which is referred to as computing, informatics or I(C)T (= Information and Communication Technology). The outcomes show a significant diversity, a little maybe because of the difference in terminology but much more so because of a variety in views and approaches. If one would assume a strongly grown maturity of the field paralleled by paradigmatic convergence, after so many decades of development, this is a surprising result. In order to gain more insight in this matter this paper presents an assessment exercise for three of such curriculum schemes. They are compared on a series of characteristic features as well as judged against a set of general guiding principles. The assessed schemes are ICF-2000 (by IFIP in commission of UNESCO), CC2001 (by ACM and IEEE-CS) and Career Space (by a European consortium of ICT industry in partnership with the European Commission).