[Yr7-10it] girls, IT, computer literacy

[Costello, Rob R]

I sent something through yesterday re Kent's questions about girls in
IT. 

 

It hasn't appeared - maybe because I added a largish attachment 

 

Anyway, here's another link I found yesterday that might be of interest
- 

 

paper is sub titled :  "Using the Storytelling Alice programming
environment to create computer-animated movies inspires middle school
girls' interest in learning to program computers." 

www.thinkingcurriculum.com/alice.pdf

 

(having a student login at a uni opens up amazing journal resources over
the web - seems nearly all journals have been digitised - back issues
and all 

Be worth schools having an account)  

 

it talks about the overlap between animation and programming and the
appeal in this approach - appeals to me as well ! 

 

also a copy and paste of whats I sent yesterday : 

 

Sherry Turkle did some pioneering work on computer cultures, gender, etc


 

I think it would be fair to describe her as a feminist orientated
scholar; 

 

She has some powerful arguments in favour of programming; and critiques
of its general removal from school curriculum over the last 20 years

 

Here's an excerpt from the 20th anniversary edition of the "Second Self
: Computers and the human spirit"

 

(in other work with Papert, they looked at how gender interacted with
programming style and knowledge construction 

 

I worked in a girls school for quite a while and agree with Rachel's
observations about preferred activities

 

But seems pretty crucial to me that we offer programming in accessible
forms and styles as well

 

(while I'm on that - here's a review of introductory programming
languages  -

"Lowering the Barriers to Programming: A Taxonomy of Programming
Environments and Languages for Novice Programmers" 

 

looks at about 200 of them 

http://www.thinkingcurriculum.com/lowerbarrier.pdf  

 

Turkle : 

 

In The Second Self I report on my studies of children learning Logo.
Their

styles of programming were varied and revealing. The computer, as I have

said, served as a Rorschach, and programming was one of the most
powerful

manifestations of its projective power. Twenty years later, programming

is no longer taught much in standard classrooms, relegated for the

most part to special after-school computer clubs. These days, educators

most often think of computer literacy as the ability to use the computer

as an information appliance for such purposes as word processing,
running

simulations, accessing educational CD-ROMs, navigating the Internet, and

using presentation software such as PowerPoint. But the question remains

whether mastery of these skills should be the goal of computer
education.

Do they constitute computer literacy?

 

 

One unhappy seventh-grade teacher concurred,

"It's not my job to instruct children in the use of an appliance and
then

to leave it at that." These teachers were struggling toward an argument
for

a certain kind of "computational exceptionalism." It takes as a given
that

people once knew how their cars, televisions, or telephones worked and

don't know this any more, but that in the case of mechanical technology,

such losses are acceptable. It insists, however, that ignorance about
the fundamentals

of computation comes at too high a price. One teacher put it

this way: "Children know that the telephone is a mechanism and that they

control it. But it's not enough to have that kind of understanding about

the computer. You have to know how a simulation works. You have to

know what an algorithm is."

 

In the nearly ten years since I recorded these conversations,
educational

advocates for computational transparency have, in large measure, lost
their

battle. Educators who want to demystify the computer face a new
generation

of children that no longer finds enough mystery in the machine to

care what an algorithm is. It is a generation that has made a transition

from the transparency of algorithm to the opacity of simulation. This
generation

takes overland journeys along a simulated Oregon Trail and when

it plays The Sims or The Sims Online, it designs houses, personal
histories,

and social engagements for the virtual citizenry. In The Second Self,
when

I wrote of the "computer as Rorschach," it was programming that served

as the projective screen for personal and cultural differences. These
days,

computation offers far more immediate projective media: one can create

multiple avatars in online communities and play with relationships,
quite

literally using one's "second (or third, or fourth, of fifth) self."

 

I have suggested, in talking about Deborah, that on the level of the
individual

child, something interesting has been lost in the move away from

authorship of the programs that underlie one's own game. On a societal

level, there is an analogous loss. The aesthetic of transparency (common

to the Logo movement and the early generations of personal computer

hobbyists) carried with it a political aesthetic that was tied both to
authorship

and to knowing how things worked on a level of considerable detail.

This is a kind of understanding that is not communicated by playing

off-the-shelf simulations.

 

On one level, high school sophomores playing SimCity for two hours

may learn more about urban planning than they would from a textbook,

but on another level, they may not know how to think about what they

are doing. They "play" simulations but don't have a clear way to
discriminate

between the rules of the game and those that operate in a real city.

Most have never programmed a computer or constructed their own
simulations.

They do not have a language for talking about how one might

rewrite the rules of their games. So, for example, SimCity often gives
players

the impression that raising taxes will lead to riots. But, of course,
there is

a way to write the game so that increased taxes lead to an increase in
health

services, productivity, and social harmony. In my view, citizenship in a

culture of simulation requires that you know how to rewrite the rules.
You

need tools to measure, criticize, and judge every simulation. Today's

teenagers are comfortable as inhabitants of simulated worlds, but most

often, they are there as consumers rather than as citizens. To achieve
full

citizenship, our children need to work with simulations that teach about

the nature of simulation itself.

 

Tim, who did not know how to program, worked in a complex system built
by

others. Tim played his simulation software as though it were a video
game,

moment to moment, with no understanding of the rules. Deborah was

nurtured by transparency; Tim's skill set was centered on the artful
navigation

of opacity. His philosophy of play: "Don't let it bother you if you

don't understand. I just say to myself that I probably won't be able to

understand the whole game any time soon. So I just play it."6

Tim's method enabled him to accomplish a great deal in simulation

space. His comfort in his virtual world might serve him (not well, but
adequately)

in the many possible careers that lay before him, careers in
architecture,

law, business, medicine, or history. In all of these fields, dealing

with information increasingly entails the navigation of simulations of

other people's creation. However, as I meet professionals in all of
these

fields who move easily within their computational systems and yet feel

constrained by them, trapped by their systems' unseen limitations and

unknown assumptions, I feel continued concern. Are the new generations

of simulation consumers reminiscent of people who can pronounce the

words in a book but don't understand what they mean? We come to

written text with centuries-long habits of readership. At the very
least, we

have learned to begin with the journalist's traditional questions: Who,

what, when, where, why, and how? Who wrote these words, what is their

message, why were they written, and how are they situated in time and

place, politically and socially? The dramatic changes in computer
education

over the past decades leave us with serious questions about how we

can teach our children to interrogate simulations in much the same
spirit.

The specific questions may be different, but the intent needs to be the

same: to develop habits of readership appropriate to a culture of
simulation.

These habits of readership are central to computer literacy and social

responsibility in the twenty-first century.

 

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=10515&mode=
toc

 

(I've uploaded a few of these files sharing - illustrate the amazing
resources which are hidden from google- just a little sample sharing of
what's out there with journals and electronic access to a uni library -
but I guess I will take them pretty soon ) 

 

More Turkle / Papert 

http://www.thinkingcurriculum.com/turklePapert.pdf

 

(no copyright here I would think - there are various versions of this
paper online - in fact Paperts classic book MindStorms can be downloaded
for free here 

http://portal.acm.org/toc.cfm?id=SERIES11430&type=series&coll=ACM&dl=ACM

 

needs a free web registration but then gives you the whole book )  

 

I'm in the middle of researching stuff - this is the tip of the iceberg
of whats out there 

 

Cheers 

 

Rob 

 

 


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