[Yr7-10it] VELS and IT

[Dr Paul Chandler]

Like Bill, I am torn.  Because I well know that the messy idiosyncratic detail of the user interface and its operations are essential.  But I believe that 'somewhere along the way' learners are 'putting it all together' and building some conceptual understandings of what they are working with.  What I am arguing for is that we need to have our eye on what conceptual understandings they really need to develop.  Now, at what point do you stop with the idiosyncratic detail and start teaching the concept explicitly - that's where I'm torn.

The business of higher order thinking in teaching computing is an interesting one (and it seems to be the source of Bill's quandry).  My thinking here is basically this: if you've got a concept (be it conservation of matter, how to score a goal in AFL, or what constitutes a paragraph in word, or the similarity between layers in PSP and the side master in PowerPoint) then it has the possibility of lending itself to some higher order thinking.  Conversely, one way to sharpen our thinking about whether we are dealing with a concept or just a whole bunch of skills is to ask 'what higher order thinking could apply to xxxxxx'.  If we can answer the question, it's possible that we are thinking conceptually about the topic.  So the _possibility_ of higher order thinking might be one tool to help us identify the important concepts.

That is not to deny the merit of introducing higher-order thinking into teaching about computers.  There may well be benefit in asking students to 'write a song to illustrate, to a beginning user, when to double-click and when to single-click'.  But, in a sense, that this secondary to identifying the concept in the first place.  Having said that, if we were to believe that the concept of the computer's filing system is so vital so as to be worth spending 10 lessons on it rather than 2 (I'm picking numbers out of the air), then it is pretty likely the time in those 10 lessons would need to dedicated to higher order thinking; otherwise our learners become bored and we actually need the higher-order thinking to reinforce and embed the central concept in the learner's thinking.

Regards



-----Original Message-----
From: yr7-10it-bounces at edulists.com.au on behalf of Bill Kerr
Sent: Sun 6/11/2006 1:25 AM
To: Year 7 - 10 Information Technology Teachers' Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Yr7-10it] VELS and IT
 
I am v. torn by this discussion

on the one hand I also would like to take the "high ground" of advocating
for higher order thinking, the importance of abstraction - I can see an
argument for that

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

Alan Kay once wrote, "user interface is worth 100 IQ points". It sounds like
a crude reductionism but Alan Kaye is not that sort of guy.

Could it be that computers and AI research (Minsky, Brookes) will lead us to
rethinking Blooms taxonomy? Computers can beat Kasparov at chess but they
can't yet do "simple" things like make a mud pie.

-- 
Bill Kerr
http://billkerr.blogspot.com/
http://beam.to/billkerr
skype: billkerr2006


On 6/10/06, Tony Forster <forster at ozonline.com.au> wrote:
>
> > I'm teaching "about IT", I find it _really_ hard to move beyond
> knowledge.
> > To do things such as summarize, describe, interpret, apply, demonstrate,
> > calculate, analyze, separate, order, explain, connect, classify,
> combine,
> > integrate, modify, rearrange, substitute, assess, decide, rank, grade,
> > test,
> > measure, or recommend ... All the "higher order" skills is just so hard.
> > I'd suggest that this is because we are too bothered with ensuring that
> > the
> > students have "the skills" rather than "the concepts".  If we were
> > orientated towards "concepts", then then higher order stuff would come
> > easier.
>
> Imagine that its 1986, you are learning Wordstar on DOS or CPM. With the
> wisdom of hindsight, what are the generalised, higher order skills which
> will  still be useful in 2006? More importantly, how would you have
> recognised them back in 1986? If you can answer that, then you are on the
> way to knowing what is important to teach now.
>
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