Mr.J’s Blog!

So why aren’t students doing IT?  This is the question that has perplexed many of us as the current trend of declining enrolments at our respective schools continues. 

Certainly many of us have invested a great deal of energy in promoting our courses and introducing innovation and interesting programs like game design and animation into the junior and middle years.  Industry demand is high for IT graduates and job prospects are plentiful.  We have all tried to deliver the message – but it doesn’t seem to be working.  So what is the answer?

When I was elected to the position of VITTA President almost a year ago, I was determined to try and address this issue in a number of ways.  By developing stronger links with partners like the Australian Computer Society (ACS) and Multimedia Victoria, we were able to start producing materials to promote ICT careers.  The inaugural VITTA ICT Careers Expo was held at Xavier College and was attended by all the major stakeholders.  Student attendance was good – but below what we would have liked.  However, it was the first year of the event and as the flagship event of VITTA’s ICT Week, we are committed to building it up in 2008 and beyond.

There has been some criticism of the current VCE IT courses.  As one of the members of the writing team for the current course, I stand by its structure and content.  We were very aware of the falling IT enrolments and of the need to build in interesting and varied tasks.  We also built in tasks centered on career pathways. I feel strongly that the VCE IT courses need to have academic rigor and students expect this to be the case. But still VCE enrolments have continued to decline.  However, I would contend that this is not as a result of the content of the VCE IT study design, but rather one of a lack of student IT career pathways.

I feel strongly that clear student IT pathways will help address this issue.  For this to happen, the tertiary providers need to come on board.  At present, none of the tertiary providers list either of the VCE IT studies as a prerequisite.  Worse still, some stakeholders have suggested they prefer to have students enter their courses with no secondary IT experience, as they have to ‘unlearn’ students who have done a VCE IT study. At the same time, these very stakeholders have been beating down our doors to organise information sessions with our students to promote their courses, as their own enrolments have been declining in line with ours.

Imagine if the tertiary providers listed the VCE IT studies as prerequisites to their own courses?  Alternatively, perhaps undertaking a VCE IT course could earn a student course credits?  If the tertiary providers do not feel our VCE or middle school courses have vigour, why not get involved in writing teams and focus groups to produce resources and course materials?

The challenge has been made – a coordinated approach to this issue will help all of us in the long run and may well be a large part of the solution.

I recently bought a new tablet PC and had a revelation: ‘Writing is the new typing’!  Many of you are probably thinking that it I am not stating anything new – and I would be the first to agree with you.  I had previously dismissed handwriting recognition and had not thought it would play much of a role in our technological future.  Certainly early attempts at creating software that would work efficiently were a little hit and miss and many people were discouraged from sticking with them.  So it was with trepidation that I started ‘training’ my tablet to recognize my most hasty scribbles.  After writing a large number of random sentences on the screen while watching TV and making my way through a couple of mugs of coffee, my tablet and I came to an understanding.  I can now scrawl all over the screen and have my tablet recognize what I have written with ease. 

For years some of my best IT students have had the worst handwriting skills.  Over the last ten years, faculties across the entire school have gradually moved from accepting work in written form handed from the student directly to the teacher to accepting all manner of electronic forms delivered via many different electronic methods.  In our quest for innovation, have student writing skills been the main casualty?   

When I first began teaching (in 1991), amongst my teaching load were a Year 7 Typing class and a Year 8 Typing class.  Both were elective subjects, but they were well attended and considered important for a number of reasons.  The primary reason was related to secretarial skills and the central importance that typing has in this context.  The second reason was related to computer use.  Interestingly, both of these reasons were considered very separate pathways then but are now really one and the same. My typing classes soon evaporated with changes in the curriculum.  The standard of student’s keyboard skills were increasing exponentially as we began to be overcome to wave after wave of digital native.  It was no longer necessary to be able to type ‘correctly’ as long as you could do it quickly.   But is a new revolution coming?  Is there a not too distant future where the focus on handwriting starts to shift to the ways in which we interact with PCs?  Perhaps teachers will report on the legibility of student’s writing as determined by the handwriting recognition software of the day?  If your handwriting is poor, could it take longer to complete your work due to the number of corrections that need to be made?  Will writing speed replace typing speed?  Perhaps the next generation of computers will dispense with keyboards altogether? Predicting the technological future is a very tricky thing indeed – and this is merely food for thought.  Mind you, before the advent of the mouse / pointing device, who knew it would become such an integral part of the way user interfaces have been since then?

There are certainly a lot of challenges to teaching ICT. Not only does the technology itself continually evolve, so too does the landscape of our students’ knowledge. We are perpetually challenged to rise above the skills of the ‘digital natives’ that we face on a daily basis and be exemplars of the discipline. I don’t know about you, but this takes a great deal of my energy – and there are times when it is harder than others.
At the start of this year, I was determined to tackle this problem head on. I set up a wiki hosted at the wikispaces web-site and proceeded to create a structure that my Year 12 Software Development class could use and make their own. I was reminded of the mantra ‘if you build it, they will come’ from a best forgotten 80’s film about baseball. The danger in such a mantra is that it is tempting to put all the work into setting things up and then standing back.

I introduced the wiki to my class during the first week of term. It is fair to say that the class was indifferent about all the work that I had done in setting it up and my plans for the ways in which it was going to be used. Interestingly, they were not particularly vocal in their criticisms in class, but in true ‘digital native’ style, let loose in the forums on the wikispace. They asked ‘what is the point of all this?’, ‘do I have to used the wiki?’ and variations of these. All good questions, but ones which we were rapidly cutting through my enthusiasm. But I was determined to address their concerns and ‘sell’ the concept to them.
As teachers of ICT, the fact that we do not know everything, is an important admission to make to our students. I do this at the start of each year by giving students an idea of where my journey started, the types of computers and technology I have encountered and the languages or tools that I have used. Most of us have been using computers for a longer time that our students have been alive and this gives us a wealth of experience and perspective. This is the advantage that we have.
Our students, on the other hand, use the latest technologies and adapt quickly. Talk to them about technology and they will use terminology and refer to programs and devices that you have not heard of. It can be a scary experience, unless you open yourself up to the fact that it will always be this way.
This is where tools such as wikis really come into their own. In setting up the wiki, I challenged my students to shape the content of the site and build a resource that would be valuable to the class as a whole. When introducing theory topics to students, I have begun by giving them a solid grounding in the core concepts and given them examples of my own experiences. As I have always done, I have then opened the topic up by asking them what they know about it and what their experiences have been. However, this year, I had a tool at my disposal that has taken this to a new level. Instead of simply having a discussion in class, I asked students to create content, append links, images and media, start or contribute to discussions. In many ways, the content and structure of my class has become extremely dynamic.
I started this piece by discussing how hard it is to stay abreast of technology and compete with the knowledge of our students. It’s hard work, but tools such as wikis make the job a lot easier. I’ve always felt that the challenge of staying up to date is not so great if you are open to turning the problem on its head. Use the resources that you have in your classes – the students themselves. If you do this, you can create a learning environment in which the education and enrichment is not just flowing from teacher to student.

‘We are going to make history today..’ Steve Jobs said, looking straight at me (as well as 5,000 other people). An incredible buzz had filled the auditorium and when Steve Jobs walked onto the stage, everyone erupted in applause. Some had waited outside for several hours and everyone knew that a big new product was to be unveiled. 

As I write this I am sitting outside the main exhibition hall at MacWorld in San Francisco, having just listened to the keynote address by Apple CEO and IT visionary Steve Jobs. What brought me here you ask? Well, the beginning of my trip has been a break from a really busy year – a chance to ‘reset’ for the challenges ahead. My attendance at MacWorld is based on two main motivations. Firstly, it is a worldwide IT event in which many of the latest technologies are being demonstrated and discussed. The expo is a chance to network with many software and hardware vendors, find out about new products and hear from leading educators from across the globe. Secondly, the Mac platform is one which I have little experience with.  This is a great opportunity for me to expand my knowledge of this platform.

 For me, it all comes down to ‘tunnel-vision’ – and trying not to have it. Many of us have our favorite software packages, and in a broader sense, we often categorise each other with labels such as ‘open source people’ or ‘Mac people’. In this rapidly changing field, none of us can really afford to favour one technology to the exclusion of all others. Who knows what technology we will be using in 10 years time? As well as this, who knows what skills our students will need to move forward? Does this mean that each of us needs to be a ‘jack of all trades’? Well, I don’t believe so – even if it were possible. However, I believe that we should all try to be as open minded as possible – in the hope that our students will be the same. Being here has caused made me to reflect on the changing face of the IT industry and the challenges this presents for us as educators.  Not only do we have the task of implementing new curriculum initiatives, but we have the bigger challenge of attracting students to our study and promoting IT career pathways. Making this challenge even more daunting is the constantly changing landscape of technology, the needs of students and those of industry.