A Creative Approach to Educational Computing - Key incidents in a typical life cycle

This auto-ethnographical narrative traces the history of an educational computing professional. Christina Preston describes her experience of computers began in the 1950s as her father was a computer professional. After graduating, she developed her skills as a journalist and short story writer for women’s magazines at the same time as teaching English, Drama and Media studies in London secondary school. Her late introduction to computers through her own children was typical of UK teachers in the early nineteen eighties who suddenly found that they were expected to train in Information Technology and to teach the subject as part of the curriculum although this had not been included in their teacher training. Christina Preston is now the chair of the international industrial and government funded MirandaNet Fellowship, which is a community of practice for teachers, advisors, teacher educators, software designers and ICT policy makers. In this ethnographical study she uses her women’s magazine writing skills to recreate her own experiences in a way that will help advisers and teacher educators to understand how the history of many teachers who are middle aged in 2006 has affected their attitude to computers and their willingness to use them in classrooms. Critical incidents include her introduction to mainframes as a child, her own children’s experiences, her first ICT training, the first lesson she give and her authorship of educational software. The unexpected death of her daughter opens her mind to the potential of computers in democratic participation and active citizenship between local, regional and national community. 1. Computers and Revolution I will introduce myself as the narrator of this story about an educational computing and world wide web (www) professional which now spans three decades and two centuries. As Ms. Average Classroom Teacher, I shall trace the pattern of computers in my life, experiences of teaching, thoughts about effective educational 78 Christina Preston software and some ideas about where computing might go in the future in the future. But most of all I want to warn you not to be complacent because computers have had so little effect on the average teacher’s practice in the last fifty years. Exponential advances in the nineties will take you by surprise. My story is about creative educational computing. Some academics still argue the case that computers, the Silicon Idols, encourage mechanistic thinking. This view is based on lack of knowledge about the best use of computers in learning and teaching today. “This potential of computers for interactivity or participation in a work of art or reference is giving writers what artists and musicians have enjoyed for some time a new creative medium.” In my opinion, those teachers who refuse to understand the potential, run the risk of disenfranchising their students from important liberties of expression. The exponential growth of educational computing and the internet in the twentieth century has to be acknowledged. In his preface to my book on computers and literacy, Professor Gunther Kress warns us that it is impossible to overstate the enormity of changes in literacy and literacy practices wrought by developments in electronic technologies. This revolution, he maintains is more far-reaching, and more fundamental than Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press. Gutenburg did not disturb what was understood about written language: its formality; its impersonality; its objectiveness and ‘timelessness’; its grammatical complexities; its hierarchical mode of organisation. But technology is now challenging these notions for instance, the geographic separation and temporal co-presence of two people interacting via electronic mail. This challenge of the new communications media also has a deeply subversive potential in relation to language. While Gutenberg’s revolution made language in its written form more central, the current revolution is taking us both backwards and forwards into a new era of iconic forms of communication, backwards and forwards into hieroglyphics. The emphasis is on the visual. In a new multi-modal, multimedia form of text, what is happening is a fundamental challenge to the hitherto unchallenged cultural centrality of written language. In some ways we are returning to a medieval manuscript, early print culture where books were rare, copying was current, authorship was not important, reading aloud, listening were the main forms of information distribution, and varied international orthography was acceptable. As the power of the book as an information authority is weakened our society is adding to these medieval conventions: the death of copyright, collaborative composition and changeable texts. Indeed this revolution is central to what we learn and teach in our schools. 1 Micheal Shallis The Silcon Idol. Oxford University Press ISBN 0-19-286032-1 (1984) 2 Jane Dorner Writing on Disk John Taylor publications 0707 265908 (1992) 3 C. Preston Apple to Zap Handbook of Literacy for Learners of all Ages (July 1994) Apple Publications 4 Chandler and Marcus Education and Computers, Harrap (1989) A Creative Approach to Educational Computing 79 Only the commitment of people like us will ensure that the computer is used as creative and empowering catalyst for the betterment of life not an excuse for the reduction of all human activity to the binary system: yes or no, black or white, male or female. Life is irreducible as we all sense, feel, intimate and the best computer practice can reflect these facts of life. 2. Computers and Ms Average So how did it all start? My first encounter with computers was in the fifties. I can see in this incident the excitement of a young learner. The imperious ringing of the telephone broke into my sleep at two in the morning. A throbbing taxi squatted in the road. Hanging from the window, I saw my father, his pin-striped pajamas replaced by his pin-striped suit, dashing out into the night like Dr. Findlay Black bowler firmly on. The patient was the bank computer. Down again! The mysterious deletion of a couple of million pounds was the staple diet of breakfast conversation computer fraud and security issues for our late, late, supper when he came home. The computer seemed a voracious night and day devourer and regurgitator of information requiring constant attention, devotion and coaxing to perform. My father’s bank was in Threadneedle Street in the City of London. Every Christmas the children of bank employees were invited to a spectacular party. Travelling through the grey and empty City streets on a Saturday was exciting in our new party dresses and our hair frizzled by curling tongs. The windowless buildings dwarfed us as we struggled up the marble steps. The Xmas party always lived up to expectations: the biggest tree, the most avuncular Father Xmas, the most sumptuous presents and the wobbliest jelly. But there was a greater excitement in store one year. My father took my sister and I up in one of the lifts; “To see the computers.” In an antechamber, we pulled white gauze hats over our hair like operatives in a food factory. White plastic overshoes and stiff overalls signalled that dust and dandruff were the enemy. Secret codes were punched into the door panel. Inside the room that was about 20 feet by 20 feet there were ten tin boxes the size of wardrobes. Through the window on their chests I could see giant brown tape reels whirling round.. These mainframe computers looked rather like the old reel-to-reel tape recorders that had eaten from the wrong side of the mushroom like Alice and grown. There was a hallowed silence. So this was the operations sanctum to which my father, the high priest, was called night and day. In the sixties and early seventies my adolescence and teacher training days were blissfully free of ‘computer awareness’. This has not changed much for student teachers today. I have been keeping the figures for some years. Although BT and 80 Christina Preston the Institute of Education can now assume that mature students will have some computing knowledge, the large majority of initial teacher training institutions only have time for one or two days on computers in the year. This absence of general information is not yet counterbalanced by a wider use in subject areas. As schools take over the full responsibility for teacher training it will be even harder to organise some degree of consistency in computer awareness. Let me remind you, nevertheless, that we remain world leaders in telematics in education in this country, with the possible exception of Holland. We also have the highest concentration of computers in the classroom with the exception of Iceland but that’s another story. The personal computer revolution found me in the early eighties when we bought a Spectrum 48K for our growing children, a girl and a boy. Games for children seemed to be the purpose of a home computer. I never actually touched the keyboard. On the first day of purchase, we took it with great pride to show my father who had recently retired from Citibank. Usually an obliging man, we were surprised when he refused, point-blank, to plug the little computer into his television. “How many K does it have?” he said, eyeing it warily, 48”? You remember the dust-proof data-processing centre I ran when you were still at school? You remember all those life sized boxes?” Of course I did. “Well in that entire room there was 30K of memory and you’re not putting 48K through my television set!” In the seventies we thought we were past all that. Computers were so much more reliable and user friendly. My children invested in a joystick so that they could kill little yellow people, the Green Berets or furry monsters with more efficiency. They jet-setted with Willy and skied with Horace. They went in for karate, kick boxing and diving with the Red Arrows. I began to wish they would return to the television. In the early eighties my son’s school held jumble sales and ‘bring and buys’ to purchase some ICL computers. My daughter’s school held a parents’ evening for us to admire and use the new ‘Pets’. The young enthusiastic female head of the maths department extolled the virtues of women in the computer world and we, parents, were impressed. My daughter brought home printouts of drawings and games programmed herself. She began to leave the house early so that she could join her computer teacher at 8.00 a.m. the only space for her year in the computer suite. This stopped suddenly the young and enthusiastic teacher had developed morning sickness the Pets were abandoned. Good computer teachers were thin on the ground in girls schools. 5 Mellar and JacksonIT and entrants to teacher training Journal of Computer Assisted Learning