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

[Dr Paul Chandler]

I agree with Bill in just about all his comments.
 
The poorly defined subject area is a clearly an issue which we need to
embrace, and an extention of is to observe that this tends to cloud the
issue of integration.  For instance, if we had 2 hypothetical teachers,
one saying "we can integrate all our Year 7 ICT" and the other saying
that they could dream of it being sucessful - it is quite possible that
they are talking about 2 different sets of knowledge/skills which
students should master at that year level.
 
I also agree with Bill that the English analogy doesn't have much
milage.  Though it does get rolled out from time to time by those who
are proponents of immersion alone.  Though, by analogy, we might observe
that English/language teaching has developed a raft of quite
fine-grained techniques for teaching the various dimensions of language.
There is perhaps not (yet) the same breadth of pedagogical strategy in
ICT, and we could well do with investing some more brain power into
developing an increasingly rich resource for teaching ICT.
 
The issue of "teacher knowledge" (which can be represented in a range of
ways) as it impacts on pedagogy (ie broadening Bill's mention of
"subject matter knowledge") is a facinating one, and not an area which
teachers (or leaders of professional development) are often well versed
in; but it's not an area which lends itself to being "unpacked" on the
list.  Maybe at a seminar sometime ....
 

________________________________

From: yr7-10it-bounces at edulists.com.au
[mailto:yr7-10it-bounces at edulists.com.au] On Behalf Of Bill Kerr
Sent: Monday, October 22, 2007 11:41 AM
To: Year 7 - 10 Information Technology Teachers' Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Yr7-10it] Year 7-10 IT structures


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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