[Yr7-10it] VELS and IT

[Keith Richardson]

Paul and Tony,
Two questions I find useful here, when working with such levels of
concept development with students, is "What is the big picture?", or,
"Adopt helecopter vision - what do you now see?".
In both cases I am asking my students to stand back, take in all of the
fine detail and practicalities, and draw some generalised conclusions.
It is an act of synthesis on the part of the student who is constructing
their own reality into which they can plug-in much of the finer detail.
Abercrombie once described creating a mental conceptual structure or
architectural structure into which one can fit one's understandings of a
complex set of ideas or experiences.
Thus we are teaching a conceptualization technique to the students that
they will find useful whenever they come across something that seems
confusing.
Keith



On Sun, 11 Jun 2006 23:31:43 +1000, "Dr Paul Chandler"
<paul.chandler at yvg.vic.edu.au> said:
> In response to Tony's thoughtful comments:
> 
> (a) I'm not sure that the 'conceptual understandings' have to be constant
> over great lengths of time (as I have previously posted).  If the concept
> of filing system with folders and short file names (as was once the case)
> is relevant to the users _now_ and is not going to be gone in the blink
> of an eye, then it's important.
> (b) I'm not sure that "meta skills" are the same thing as "higher order
> skills".  By way of example, being metacognitive (ie thinking about one's
> thinking) is not the same as incorperating anaysis tasks into a lesson. 
> There may be overlap, but I'm not convinced that they're the same.
> (c) The notion of "persistence", "playfulness" and "flexibility" may be
> excellent "meta skills" which we need to foster
> (d) I would still maintain that there are conceptual understandings
> related to the here and now which we need to be in the business of
> fostering; but (relatively uniquely to computing) the context in which we
> do that is that there is the risk that any particular concept may be 'old
> hat' next week
> 
> Maybe part of the 'taxonomy' is the recognition that there are "meta
> skills", long-term concepts and short-term concepts.
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: yr7-10it-bounces at edulists.com.au on behalf of Tony Forster
> Sent: Sun 6/11/2006 10:23 AM
> To: Year 7 - 10 Information Technology Teachers' Mailing List
> Subject: Re: [Yr7-10it] VELS and IT
>  
> > Could it be that computers and AI research (Minsky, Brookes) will lead us to rethinking Blooms taxonomy? 
> 
> I think a taxonomy which incorporates computers is overdue, I bet Bloom
> didn't know much about spreadsheets or code. Read Bloom's Taxonomy, its
> obvious that he was a writer not a mathematician. It is so difficult to
> discuss higher order skills in computers without an appropriate taxonomy.
> See the discussion at http://pdchandler.wikispaces.com 
> 
> > on the other hand I can see that learning the messy idiosyncratic detail of the user interface of its day and 
> > becoming fluent in its operation is simply essential 
> 
> Yes, but remember this application based knowledge will at best last them
> till university. Hopefully it will allow them to bridge to the new
> systems just as we had to bridge from our understandings of DOS to
> Windows. They are going to have to do a lot of independant learning after
> they leave you so the way this is taught should provide the base for
> further learning.
> 
> I was wondering whether directory tree file systems is a piece of
> knowledge with a bit of longevity, but no. As a computer engineer, the
> first "word processor" I saw was the Vidikey in 1976. It had a 256 byte
> (yes byte) buffer and wrote to punched tape. The only editing function
> was backspace. The Omnitext with 4k of core memory had block start, block
> end, move, copy & delete but still wrote to punch tape. The first disk
> based word processor I saw was the Varicomposer with up to 32 files on 32
> tracks on its 8 inch floppy, it had a root directory but no
> subdirectories. It wasn't till the CPM machines came out that I saw my
> first directory tree. The volume of information we now have access to,
> both on our hard disk and external to it means we increasingly search for
> it rather than neatly file it in a tree structure. The file tree has not
> been an invariant of computers and is not likely to be. Though the tree
> has had a long life, I doubt it is a constant.
> 
> So what higher order computing "meta skills" could have I expected to
> have some longevity back in 1976?:
> 
> Persistence: don't give up too easily
> 
> Playfulness: don't know how a feature works, play with it
> 
> Flexibility: be prepared to continually readjust your mental model of a
> system in the light of new information
> 
> Data retrieval skills: (this started as read the Help. You don't read the
> help any more, you search it). Increasingly help lies on the web and
> merges with general Googling. You form a mental model of how a body of
> information is organised, you interrogate it. On the basis of your
> interrogation, you readjust your mental model and re-interrogate it.
> Maybe this is the most important new millenium skill. (stop me before I
> get on my filtering hobby horse!)
> 
> 
> 
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Keith Richardson