The Education Vector

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 11

The Education Vector¶

January 1995

Editor Ian Clark

This Education Vector has been reprinted from VECTOR Vol.11 No.3. VECTOR is the Quarterly Journal of the British APL Association. For more information about the British APL Association, please contact: Anthony Camacho, [address and telephone number omitted].

Contents¶

Ian Clark, IAC/Human Interfaces, [address, telephone number and e-mail addresses omitted]

Editorial¶

by Ian Clark

One thing about being an ease-of-use consultant, you get to see a wide range of jobs. Turning my hand to a spot of supply teaching at one of the better girls schools, the headmistress confided in me "We do tend to push the weaker girls towards IT".

So there it is. IT is the Domestic Science of the 90s, fit only for cotton-heads that ought to be barefoot and babbit by the time they're sixteen, and would be if their parents weren't so well-to-do. The sort of girl that's lucky to be leaving school with any sort of qualification. So push-em towards IT. As for the more academically-minded girls, well — who can blame them if they consider anything to do with computers to be beneath their dignity?

I read in a recent issue of CUE Newsletter (Computer-Using Educators, Inc., of Alameda, California): "The dilemma in 1990: we had the technology, we could create powerful, well-designed word-processed documents, charts and graphs, you name it. What power to unleash in a classroom! Unfortunately my students and I shared the same secret — all of these skills only counted in the computer classroom." The writer of the article, entitled "A Goal Without a Plan is a Dream", goes on to recount how things have changed. "The lab had moved from the place where students were learning skills that had little relevance to their real or academic lives to a studio where tools were made available and creatively used."

Assuming that Ms Schandler is not talking through her sweatband, then by comparison we in Great Britain in the Year of Grace 1994 are stuck in a 1980s timewarp. I didn't say 1990 because at that time we were ahead of the Californians in the constructive use of computers in the classroom. But the world moves on — and it seems Britain doesn't. Chris Abbott, writing in Educational Computing and Technology (November 1994), recounts his embarrassment at having to tell erstwhile overseas visitors, who had come to this country to see what had been achieved by the network of LEA centres, that most of them have closed. "The 1993 Education Act suggests that private sector centres will develop overnight, like so many mushrooms, where LEA centres close. No such magical events have taken place." He judges that "there are only two kinds of organisation which now have the funding, the resourcing and the legal right to develop new structures: the universities and the IT industry."

Both of course have their own agenda. Industry will argue, as its running-dogs have been doing in the correspondence column of "Computing", that children must be taught on "industry standard" software and hardware. "Who'd employ somebody trained on an Acorn?" seems to clinch the matter as far as they were concerned. For "Acorn" you might substitute "APL" in the present context.

Of course there were indignant replies pointing out that children being "trained" now won't be looking for jobs for another ten years — and what price now the industry standards of ten years ago? (8-bit computers, 5 inch floppies, 64kb of memory, CIS-COBOL seen as the only way to program a serious commercial application on a PC, if you're silly enough to sidestep the mainframe). Chris Abbott again: "The only definition of industry standard which has long-term credibility is something like 'fitness for purpose at lowest possible cost'".

If people really believed that when purchasing for the classroom, then they would not buy fashionable industry standard systems which "trained", but time-proved, time-proof ones which "taught". Out would go expensive packages which are supposed to exemplify, as closely as the budget will allow, what is out there in the Real World. In would come modelling media in which the mechanisms of a word-processor or a financial package (or genetic engineering or an atomic pile) could be modelled, in terms which the pupil (and even the teacher) could grasp. So it boils down to the choice of a good, cheap durable modelling medium.

Some people build models out of matchsticks. Especially prisoners, who have all the time in the world. Presumably they would use a low level programming language to build a software model. Those of us for whom time (and patience) is in short supply need to model with larger components and subassemblies we could in principle build ourselves — or at least take apart and understand. More like Lego than Lucifers.

Who can manufacture these goodies for us? Universities? When I worked in a university it was academic suicide to be caught making things easy for people with IQ<100. And as for industry — well! Who‡s paying? What are they buying?

I'm not being cynical. Both parties play the game by rules which are handed down to them. It's up to our rulers to make rules which are productive and beneficial, supposing they feel sufficiently motivated to do so. Education of the next generation — isn't that sufficiently motivating? Not if your mentality is straight out of "Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang".