« Brendan Nelson: Liberal self-loathing? | Main | The Asus Eee PC ... and us »
November 30, 2007
Kids and Computers
Good to see Charles resuming writing on the blog after some quiet. I've read remarks from Flotoonie and other contributors as well and coincidentally just spent the day - 3 sessions - face to face with Year 8s in a school, showing them certain aspects of MS Word - they had just received their notebooks. Also, looking at my own Year 6 boy, I see heaps of lateral issues in getting achieving a good balance - issues other than sheer hardware and infrastructure ability. Here's an off-the-cuff list.
- Examinations and tests are still hand written. I have had recent feedback from a Uni Law lecturer and a Year 12 teacher - both of them are currently marking papers and they really grimace at a poorly scrawled paper - they are both conscientious teachers and both want their students to do well but a poorly scrawled paper is simply difficult to read - taking twice the time at least to decipher - adding to their rush workload to finish marking by datelines. And more and more students are suffering from poor handwriting because they type rather than write nowadays on their weekly projects. So computer literacy - will that erode their ability to write with their hand or should examinations ultimately be electronically based.
- Kids are not difficult to teach ICT - however, they are very different from adults. Their attention span is very different, their resistance to flipping the screen and playing runescape or reading their email / instant messenger is a lot weaker than adults, during class ICT training. They can smell the end of a weekday, and they also play roles at showing off smartness, affecting dumbness or acting wooden faced. I find procedures that are more 6 steps separate the interested adult from the disinterested one. From my very brief encounter with these kids, I find 3 steps to separate the interested kid from the disinterested kid.
- Kids pick up ideas very quickly but don't mistake that for the mythical super-hero ability to work the computer. After teaching some classes of mixed ages as well as pure adult classes and now, pure kid classes, kids still make the same mistakes as adults. If they haven't been told what Alt+F11 is, they will press the Alt key, the F key and search for the 11 key (there isn't one).
- Holding the attention of an adult isn't the same as for a kid. An obvious example is, that an adult wants to know how to auto-calculate GST in Excel. My Year 6 boy? Showing him how to code an IF...THEN statement in the Sheet_Change Event Procedure in Excel so that when he types 2 and Excel wipes that and replaces that with TWO as the word equivalent - he thinks that's really cool and his mates will do a one up as soon as they figure out how. And no one has taught them how to program VBA.
- Newbie Kids and Adults will trash their machines when they connect to the Web, because they WANT, WANT, WANT for free and they're not likely to sit in boring sessions where they're told in droning voices NOT, NOT, NOT. Now, if you're a retiree and you mess up your PC, you will sooner or later get it fixed. In a school or public use environment, academics and kids use publicly provided equipment from school - they wreck it, some poor IT chappie gets it fixed or Helpdesk gets an earful. "And oh, can you fix it like Yesterday, I mean, I've got a paper due, like in 5 mins". If you leave their OS untampered, they wreck it and you have endless sessions restoring or wiping their OS. If you employ draconian software lockdowns, you eliminate some genuinely useful software and stop them from learning, creating their stuff - you inhibit them. Linux vs Windows is not the issue - I am quite able to wreck Linux as well as I can wreck Windows if I go to town with Linux and operate it as I would Windows. Linux is a fortress because you do lock it down.
- Learning by osmosis complements but does not replace formal training of principles and approaches. One obviously vocal young chappie told me that they had been using Microsoft Word since primary school. Yes, this generation of kids have. But they had been learning by osmosis, they didn't know the difference between Tabs and Spaces, between pressing the Enter key lots of times to make an automatic page break and pressing Ctrl+Enter to force a manual page break and the significance of the two. They don't need, yet, to be taught how to make a Table of Contents or a Concordance Index (after all, they're only Year 8) but they do need to be taught the aspects of Word Outlining, how Outlining improves their approach to Structured Documents and their thinking. In fact, they should have been taught Outlining in Year 5 along with the de rigeur de Bono's Thinking Hats.
- They don't need really, to be formally walked through the Drawing Toolbar but they should be shown that it's there (many of them had discovered that already and it's soooo yesterday. But who makes up the syllabus? Well one of us boring adults.
"All Ahead, Mr. Sulu, Warp 6, Engage!"
Posted by Anandasim at November 30, 2007 10:13 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://bleedingedge.com.au/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1396