Commenting on a few of the points raised by Paul Chandler<br><br>On 10/19/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Dr Paul Chandler</b> <<a href="mailto:paul.chandler@yvg.vic.edu.au">paul.chandler@yvg.vic.edu.au</a>> wrote: <div>
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<div dir="ltr" align="left"><span><font color="#0000ff" face="Arial" size="2">My PhD considered "self-taught computer-using teachers",
and I'm not going to try to summarise it all here. There are some
observations which can be made. Firstly, there is remarkably little
research on such teachers, how they teach, what they value, how/what they teach
ICT etc etc. We can make links to studies (also relatively few in number)
which have considered teachers who teach outside of their speciality. Put
starkly: sometimes it works really well, and sometimes it doesn't. One
study I read of a non-legal studies teacher (from Qld) who took up teaching
Legal because there was no-one else to do it showed great success and
adapation. In general, the literature shows very little relationship
between capacity to teach in a particular discipline and formal academic
background in that area. So I would argue that the only ultimate thing
stopping our non-ICT colleagues from delivering good ICT is a desire to do
it.</font></span></div></div></blockquote><div><br>I think its generally accepted that some subject experts make good teachers and others are poor teachers<br><br>What make ICT different IMO is that the actually subject domain is poorly defined (unlike English, Science etc) and people who are described as experts are saying quite different things about what ICT is
<br><br>Alan Kay points out that real sciences like physics, chemistry etc. do not describe themselves as "sciences" (like "computer science" does) and that it it would be better if teachers of computing would tell their students that much of it still has to be worked out:
<br><br><div style="margin-left: 40px;">Perhaps the most disturbing "trend which became reality" over the last
25 years has been a recharacterization and professing of the various
computing fields as though Computer Science and Software Engineering
have actually been invented and can be taught in ways that parallel
fields such as physics and structural engineering. This is "science
& engineering envy" pure and simple!<br><br>
The result is that so much of what is taught in high schools and
universities looks backwards—not for historical interest, which is
almost absent, or even to great ideas of the past—but (a) to emphasize
what all too often have been workarounds for what we don't yet know how
to do, and (b) to substitute vocational training for real knowledge and
perspective.<br><br>
One of the most interesting characteristics of computing in the best
universities of the 1960s was that the professors told the students
that nothing much of importance was known, and it was the duty of all
to try to invent a real computing science and software engineering.
This was a very healthy attitude and led to many good starts towards
qualitatively better approaches to our exciting area of interest. Just
as "civilization" is not a place or state, but a process of people who
are trying to be more civilized, real computing is the process of
people trying to make a better notion of computing. The most progress
will be made by young people who have been encouraged to criticize old
conceptions and invent new ones with an elevated notion of what
constitutes a high threshold for a good idea.<br><br></div>
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I would also observe that a full discussion of the
parallels between language learning and learning ICT would be enormously
complicated. I'm not a teacher of English at all, but I know that in the
early years of schooling, immersion is a big part of language learning, but
so are approaches such phonemic awareness and spelling (and a language
teacher would be able to name quite a few other techniques). It is far
from simple to draw parallels between the two. Perhaps, to parallel
language learning closely, we would develop a range of interventionist
strategies to direct student learning about ICT (ie what might be the ICT
equivalent of 'phonemic awareness'?)</font></span></div></blockquote><div><br>I don't see much point in attempting to draw extensive systematic parallels b/w English and ICT. The reasons why we divide up knowledge into different subject domains is that they are different and have their own internal logic and ways of developing. I don't see much value in doing extensive comparisons b/w physics and chemistry, for example.
<br><br>The reason I raised the "English question" in the first place was to point out that this subject has a proud 400 year tradition and for ICT to compete as a standalone subject that we need to think about it in those terms. What are the fundamental achievements of ICT that ought to be passed onto all citizens? eg. should all citizens be taught to program or is that just for those who want to a career in programming?
<br></div><br>Having said that I nevertheless do see some benefit in comparing the two domains in a broad sense. <br>eg. the wide spread use of written English happened through the use of technology, the printing press - before that it was apparently confined to monks in Churches writing out the Bible by hand.
<br><br>Computers it has been argued represent a new "revolution" or a "revolution that hasn't happened properly yet" in that all text and all media can be represented digitally in a much more flexible and re programmable manner
<br><br>This is part of a broader, partly historical argument about media and the affordances they make available to "the masses" as they become cheaper and widespread. So I do see value in comparing English and ICT as a part of media studies - since media does have an enormous effect on schools in general.
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Language teachers in the early years use a nice phrase,
"barking at text" - kids who can apparently read the words on the page, but
don't understand a word of it. In our apparently ICT-savvy world, how do we know
that students aren't doing the ICT equivalent of barking at text? I once
knew a student who was writing some relatively detailed PERL in Year 7, and when
I met him in a programming class in year 9 I was amazed to find out that he had
absolutely no concept of a variable, and he struggled for some time to develop
one.</font></span></div></div></blockquote><div><br><br>To continue with the point above, I like the description "barking at
text" but would see the issue of the best way of teaching the concept of variable as
one pertaining to the maths or computing domain and that there is
limited value in pursuing the English comparison in any real depth.<br><br>ie. a good way to teach the concept of variable is to have a dynamic system running where you can change the value of the variable and observe the effects in real time. I've only discovered recently that computer systems have been around for 10 years that enable you to do this visually (etoys) but which remain undiscovered by most schools.
<br><br></div></div>-- <br>Bill Kerr<br><a href="http://billkerr2.blogspot.com/">http://billkerr2.blogspot.com/</a><br><br>