Do we need to make learning about computers in schools harder again?
Written by: Jonathan Briggs
May 19, 2009 [2507 views]
This is the English text version of a presentation I gave today in Stockholm at the Future Learning conference
Today’s learners know how to Twitter but have little or no idea of the technologies behind the service or how to go about building such a service of their own. Computing just became too easy and as it did our abilities to understand what is happening behind the scenes has started to disappear. If we are not careful we will educate a generation of people who can only copy and paste.
Twenty five years ago becoming a computer scientist was like joining a priesthood. There were agreed books to follow, programming skills to acquire and hardware rituals to be performed. Many of us in computer education sought to smash down the barriers to entry, encouraged teachers and learners from all subjects to get involved and looked forward to the day when computing was simply ubiquitous; around us like water. We would then be able to focus on the learning rather than on the technology.
Rarely have a set of dreams come true so quickly; aided, of course, first by the development of cheap personal computers and then by the Internet and the web. Today everyone can blog, surf on their cellphones, post videos on YouTube, search with Google and edit pages of Wikipedia. But what are the impacts of these changes on learners and teachers? Have we moved so far from explaining (or understanding) the underlying technologies that we are creating a false sense of what is going on; a fake understanding that will stifle future opportunities?
Let us pose a few questions for our students to consider: How does Google work and how does it choose what to show first in answer to a query? Where is a YouTube video or Google document actually stored and processed? What sorts of transactions are happening between our computers and others when we comment on a blog or edit a page in Wikipedia? How does your mobile phone know where you are? How are services such as Google Maps constructed and what would be involved to build a competitor?
These might seem esoteric but for a large number of students coming to university, even those who are choosing to study computer science, these are questions for which they cannot construct reasoned answers. They simply assume that these services exist, that they were simple to design and build and that their functioning needs no explanation. Is it unreasonable to suggest that at some point during their school education a few of these questions might have been addressed or is it more serious than that? Have their teachers been lulled into the same complacency about the technology around them? Are we in danger of becoming technically illiterate?
In 1995 I was one of the founders of Hyper Island, a university level college based in Karskrona that would help train the future brains of the digital industries. We invented a new curriculum that broke down the traditional barriers between design, technology and business. Students where encouraged to take an holistic view of a project and to master skills in creating, selling, managing and programming CD-ROMS, kiosks, games and then websites.
Hyper Island has been very influential in stimulating others to create similar courses but we must not be too complacent. Over the past few years we have felt demands from our students to specialise; to allow them to ignore parts of the curriculum to focus on others (particularly design). While I believe the core philosophy of cross-discipline learning still remains, too few of our students seem keen to get involved with the hard technology aspects of this learning. Is this a symptom of the same educational problem as in the UK?
Perhaps it would not matter if the digital world would now stand still, but instead every sign points in the direction of increased technical complexity including the impacts of rich media, mobile, location, personalisation and mashups. A typical online site will now be a hub in a web of social and data relationships: combining news feeds, streaming media from video hosting sites, ecommerce affiliation, adverts from advertising networks and complex data manipulation services such as Google Maps.
The days of the hand crafted homepage have come and gone, to be replaced by the rich internet application probably built using AJAX and interacting with dynamic real-time information systems. It is highly possible to understand these systems and to design and build them but it requires that we first want to understand them, to take them apart and find out how they work. We will also need to learn the technical languages and protocols from which they are constructed and to keep pace with the myriad of developments that take place every day.
We teach our students HTML and if they are lucky some Javascript and CSS but for many the web is constructed using tools such as Dreamweaver that hide away all of the complexity replacing genuine coding and markup with drag and drop simplicity.
There are real social effects of this new computing illiteracy. Firstly it makes it hard for us to evaluate the countless opportunities offered by the technology; we can see the benefits but not the costs. For example, personalised search offers the prospect of individual results targeted to each of us based on a profile of our previous web activity but consider the privacy implications. It is easy to raise the privacy spectre but how real is the threat and what sorts of safeguards could be applied to mitigate it? Only by appreciating the behaviour tracking and algorithms that power such a search and discussing them openly will we be able to understand the trade-offs.
A second effect is our increasing inability to comprehend why things go wrong. If we have no model of what is happening behind the scenes then we are unlikely to feel in control or have ways to deal with these failures. Consider the similar lack of comprehension of the complexities of financial markets (themselves powered by information networks) and our powerlessness at their recent collapse. As the world becomes more connected the risks of systemic failure (in many areas) will rise. We must prepare our learners to appreciate the emergent properties of these social and technical networks as they become prevalent in politics, marketing, entertainment and commerce.
This then, is a call for more geeks and not just technical geeks. We need to train thousands to work in the information industries and all the other industries touched by digital. We need project managers who can talk technical and designers who can imagine how their ideas can be delivered. Above all we need people who feel confident that as new ideas are developed they can experiment and master them.
We need to set out a new vision of computer and networked literacy that encourages people to ask questions and to build mental pictures of what is going on. Our new computer literacy will borrow widely from traditional subjects like history, geography, mathematics and science. From history for example, we must draw out the lessons from other networked technologies such as the railways during the industrial revolution, from geography the impacts of location, place and the topologies of relationships, from mathematics the statistical models behind profiling and from science the similarities and differences between biological and information networks.
Let’s start by defining a core set of ideas that all learners should acquire through school and university. These might include exploration of the technologies that power search, reputation, location, personalisation, commerce, tracking, serving, publishing, collaboration and mobility. For each we need to engage our learners not only in the theoretical principles but in practical prototyping in which they build artifacts that can be tested, changed and evaluated.
We’ll need to find example software, data and mashable frameworks that allow learners to appreciate the components of each system and ways to relate them to the real needs of individuals, groups and organisations. We’ll need to debate their social and ethical impacts as well as how they will evolve in the future. The key will be for every learner to develop their own mental models of these systems, how they work and their effects on society.
This will require changes on behalf of our teachers and educators as well as collaboration from the information industries. Engaging learners in these ideas presents considerable challenges due to the pace of change and the complexity in the ways they interconnect. We will have to encourage educators to become co-learners themselves if they are to have the confidence to help their students not only learn the basics but climb what is often a steep learning curve. There will also be impacts on modes of assessment especially where students have collaborated and mashed-up ideas from a variety of sources.
At Hyper Island and Kingston University we have started to explore this new computer literacy. We are developing new modules and new courses and engaging students in a debate about what skills they need to make sense of modern computing. It is a debate that needs to be held much more widely.
What do you think?
