[Yr7-10it] Year 7-10 IT structures

[Bill Kerr]

Commenting on a few of the points raised by Paul Chandler

On 10/19/07, Dr Paul Chandler <paul.chandler at yvg.vic.edu.au> wrote:
>
> 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.
>

I think its generally accepted that some subject experts make good teachers
and others are poor teachers

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

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:

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!

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.

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.

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'?)
>

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.

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?

Having said that I nevertheless do see some benefit in comparing the two
domains in a broad sense.
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.

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

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.

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.
>


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.

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.

-- 
Bill Kerr
http://billkerr2.blogspot.com/
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