ICT in high schools

Last Friday I went to the be bettr conference - and what a terrific day that turned out to be.

There were many presentations worth blogging about - Manga High for game-based maths looks terrific - but the two that really caught my eye were by Aral Balkan (@aral) and Anna Debenham (@anna_debenham). Largely because they were both talking about the same question:

What is wrong with ICT in schools?

Answer: Lots. But I think it can be boiled down to an even smaller question:

How do people learn how to code?

...and boiled down a little more, burned to the bottom of the pan but still kind of tasty:

How do people learn difficult skills?

Apéritif

I strongly recommend you all check out Anna's presentation on what's wrong with web design in the UK curriculum. Skip to slide 29 for the single most ghastly piece of design you'll ever see - one that would get you an 'A' in your GCSE.

(And for your unicorn chaser, check out her site at www.scrunchup.com - shame hats on, mature geeks, the lady who built that is about 20 years old. Which is why my poor blog is finally going to get a makeover. Because of the shame.)


Entrée

Now this is something I care about a lot. And I care for one, very selfish reason: I have tried to learn code. And I have not succeeded.

...but actually, that's a lie - I can write regular expressions. And I can navigate Unix from the bash prompt, and write (basic) MySQL queries. I can beat non-well-formed XML into submission, even if it's written in accordance with some heinous standard (I'm looking at you, QTI 1.2 for Common Cartridge). I can even -sometimes - diagnose problems with SCORM packages, about which the less said the better.

But put me near Perl, I've got nothing. Ditto writing (as opposed to wrangling) XML, or even (shame on me) CSS. I've got nothing.

Which is frankly ridiculous, because I've been trying to learn them - intermittently - for EVER.

Main

There's a basic divide between the skills I have and the skills I want: The skills I have are things I had to learn to do what I needed to do.

The conclusion I've come to is quite simple: I do not have the ability to learn technical skills unless I'm actually *using* them. I know I have the aptitude to learn CSS, but I haven't, because I haven't had cause to use it yet (yes, yes, hello terrible blog design, the irony is not lost on me.)

I saw my experience reflected by Aral, who learned code by beating the hell out of his computer as a child, and Anna, who learned code through neopets and myspace. They could both see something that they knew they wanted to do, and worked out how to do it. Having worked out a bit, the bit they knew lead them to new things they wanted to do, and so the spiral expands.

So I think we can break this down. Successful acquisition of technical skills (for the three folk mentioned here, at least) relies on three things:

1. Wanting to do something

2. Knowing enough to *start* doing it

3. Having a place to do it

...and I'm not seeing any of those in the ICT curriculum.

Dessert

Here's my proposal. All secondary schools in the UK get a special sandbox server. The server is accessible with a school-based logon (your standard Raven/Shibboleth/Athens, or whatever secondary schools use if they don't use that.)

And then we let the kids fill it up with the most awful nonsense they possibly, possibly can. Whatever they like, as long as they like it.

Malware-riddled free wordpress themes, animated gifs, awful, awful software dredged up from the very bowels of sourceforge. Anything.

If the school is a fan of permanent surveillance (most seem to be), they could pop a keylogger on. If they're freaked out by Scary Internet People, they could make *everything* password protected, nice and invisible and irrelevant.

(On that note... when I was a teacher, I used blogger blogs with my year 8 students, to teach English and a little bit of html (which I was terrible at, by the way - as it turns out, that totally didn't matter). They loved it. One kid loved his blog but didn't love the class rules, so he made an outlaw blog. It got a brief following by some not-from-the-school people who loved his stick-it-to-the-man/teacher style, which was especially good seeing as he thought he was rubbish at English. Amazingly, the world did not actually end because of this.)

And then, at the end of the school year, everyone who wants to download their work down can.

And then the server gets wiped. Completely. With MAGNETS*.

And then it's nice and tidy for the group next year to destroy it all over again.

Tiny delicious mint

...Actually, I think I might need one of these for myself. ;)

*Not actually with magnets.