ICT is the baby in the world of school subjects. Maths, Science, History, Geography, Literature and Languages have been taught in schools since the days of Plato. The teaching of these subjects is rooted in hundreds of years of experience and has arguably not changed a great deal in our lifetime. Like Michael Gove said in his speech at BETT “A Victorian schoolteacher could enter a 21st century classroom and feel completely at home”. ICT has only been taught in schools since the eighties and our subject matter is constantly changing and evolving. I have been teaching for 6 years and have had no two years where I’ve taught the same thing across the board as I taught the previous year.
A quote which I’ve seen attributed to various different people goes something along the lines of “we are preparing students for jobs which don’t yet exist to solve problems which we do not yet know are problems using technology which hasn’t been invented yet”. This being the case, why are we placing so much emphasis on teaching skills since by the time our students enter the world of work there is very little chance they will still be using the same hardware and software tools and skills that we use now.
We want students to be able to leave school with the ability to pick up a new IT tool having never used it before and be able to intuitively use it out of the box. I grew up around computers. My father was a programmer and software developer. In my house we always had the latest computer and unlike many children my age I grew up knowing how to use them and interested in finding out how they worked. As a result of that I can, given a couple of hours to ‘play’ figure out how to use pretty much any piece of software or hardware you care to give me. I think it is THAT that we need to teach students. But how to do it?
If I think about how I acquired this ability myself I attribute it to three things. The fact I grew up with computers as part of my daily life, a low-level knowledge of how computers work and my background in computer science and programming.
Digital Literacy in Daily Life
For almost all students today IT is a part of their daily lives. According to a recent UN report 78% of the world population now have a mobile phone subscription and 29% of the world population use the Internet. In the developed world, where most of us teach, there are more mobile phones than there are people. I recently did a survey of a year 9 class at my school. Every student in the class had a mobile phone and for all but two of them it was a smart phone on which they could and regularly did access the Internet. They have never been taught to use these smart phones. In fact students are banned from carrying them at every school I have ever taught at.
I am a big fan of web 2.0 and cloud computing. I frequently use web 2.0 tools in my teaching. One such website I use with students is Sumo Paint. I have never taught a single student how to use it. I have given them the website address and given them a specific outcome to achieve and left them to get on with it. They already know how to use it. How? Because like most programs we use today it uses common elements in its user interface. There is a toolbar containing a collection of icons. If you hover your mouse over the icons you get a tooltip popup telling you what it does. There is a menu at the top of the page. In short; it is what they are used to. They can use it because they have used so many other programs with a similar interface that they can intuitively adapt to using this one with little or no tuition.
Students do not need to be explicitly taught how to use new IT tools, they just need exposure to as wide a range as possible of different tools.
Software Engineering
Like teachers and all professional people, software engineers share best practise. If something works, use it. In today’s information society people are constantly sharing ideas and best practise. This is why all off the shelf software you buy will use common interface elements. It’s what works. It has evolved over a period of time. When computers were young this meant knowing that to install any new program you would go to the root directory for that program and type either ‘install’ or ‘setup’ into the command prompt. Developers used those names for their install programs because it was what the end-user expected. Today we use windows, icons, menus and pointers (WIMP) as an interface. Increasingly we are introducing gestures (such as ‘pinching’ to zoom in) into our computer interfaces. Common elements of user interfaces evolve over time and changes are generally introduced gradually and people get used to them as they evolve.
By studying principles of software engineering, by studying user interface design, by programming and creating user-interfaces and programs of my own I have learnt about common elements of IT tools. I have learnt to think like a programmer and so whenever I pick-up a new IT tool I can generally figure out how to use it because I know how I would have designed it if I’d made it and because I have similar experiences of using other tools to draw upon.
Students today have experience of using other tools. They will increasingly use a wide range of IT tools in every area of the curriculum. My argument is that what they need to get from us, as computer science teachers, is a deeper knowledge of how computers work and experience of designing and creating computer programs of their own. Not because we want to manufacture a new generation of computer programmers, but because we want them to be able to anticipate and adapt to new IT tools as they are created. All students, regardless of whether they will eventually work in IT or not, need to be able to use the IT tools of tomorrow, not of today. They will learn how to use tomorrow’s tools by learning how they are developed today. After all, it is today’s principles of software development that will create the IT tools of tomorrow.
A Stable and Enduring Subject
Unlike ICT and it’s many and evolving uses; the core, low level principles of computer science, have remained fairly static. Computers today have the same basic architecture as the first computers. Binary logic is the same today as it was 50 years ago. The first programming languages used similar structures then as they do now. There’s only so many ways to write an IF statement or a WHILE loop and when you can do it in one language you can recognise it in any. Individual languages come and go, syntax changes, but the basic constructs are the same. Common algorithms, such as a bubble sort, don’t change over time, even if the programs using them do.
I strongly believe that it is Computer Science, not ICT or digital literacy that has a long-term place as an enduring and valuable subject in schools. Digital literacy is important in the same way that reading, writing and arithmetic are important, but it is not a subject in itself. At least, not in secondary schools. We do not have ‘reading’ as a timetabled subject on the timetable. Students improve their reading ability through the study of literature.
English is a subject; reading and writing is a skillset, which students use across every subject they study. By the same token, Computer Science is a subject, digital literacy is a skillset. I think it is time for ICT to leave it’s infancy. Computer Science has a future as a mature, serious and academic subject; ICT doesn’t.











