Integrating IT education and the world outside

An important, existing challenge of IT education that will surely remain in the 21(st) century is to integrate IT education and the world outside in an early stage of the curriculum in a sensible, real-life, and useful manner: Moreover we would like to reach that goal in such a durable way that we can easily account for the continuous changes and extensions in the underlying IT itself We explain our experiences to integrate IT education and the world outside, and we give several hints on how to design such an integrated curriculum module. We first explicate which educational "design questions" deserve attention in designing such a module. For each such design question we explain the solution we have chosen, our experiences over the years (gradually improving the organization of such a module), and alternative solutions there might be.