Towards Adjusting Informatics Education to Information Era

Since the very beginning of the modern computing era, the scientific and educational community in informatics has been in a continuous search for a proper philosophy, viewpoints, aims, contents, methods and tools. Advances in software, communication and h ardware have played by that search the most influencing role, with theory advances having only secondary and declining impacts — in spite of the remarkable success of theory, quite well recognized by the community at large. The recent developments and advances in computing, communication and informatization of the society point out strongly, that This paper is slightly extended version of the invited paper for IFIP TC3 WG3.2 Workshop “Informatics as a discipline and in other disciplines: What is in common?” to be held in August 1997 in Entschende, The Netherlands. Most of this work has been done during the first author’s stay at the University of Karlsruhe in 1996 and his affiliation with the Institut of Mathematics of Slovak Academy of Sciences. This work has been partly supported by the grant 1112/1994 of VEGA, Slovak Grant Foundation and partly by the grant GRK 209/2-96 of the German Science Foundation (DFG).