The mouseion was multidisciplinary; physicists had rooms alongside astronomers and poets, and so for the first time in history we see the divisions between academic disciplines being blurred. The major extant work of the poet Aratus is called the Phaenomena, in which he marries science with literature, combining an astronomical description of constellations with the mythology the Greeks ascribed to them. He applied his skills to turn a piece of dry, technical prose into a work of art. It was immensely popular in antiquity – translated into Latin and Arabic, and read by Cicero, Ovid and even St. Paul, who quotes a line in Acts 17:28. ^[1]

Not everyone thought the mouseion was a good thing, however. Timon of Phlius referred to the scholars within as “scribbling endlessly and waging a constant war of words with each other in the Muses’ birdcage.” ^[2] By contrast, academic disciplines in schools are pigeonholed. Isolated. Separated from all others so as to better understand them. There are many good reasons for this – teachers are better equipped to educate students in their specialist field than in any other, so in an ideal world students would enjoy the benefits of an education at the hands of many different teachers who can enthuse & educate in enough breadth & depth to spark a deeper interest in the subject.

There is an exception, though. I’ve argued (not always successfully) that the greatest strength of my subject is that from day to day, lesson to lesson, I can be teaching anything from history to ethics, from geography to physics. The very nature of ICT as an application subject means unless I’m applying it to something, I’m not doing it right. ICT gives us, more than any other subject taught in UK schools, the opportunity to blur the lines between subjects where the learning would ordinarily stop at the classroom door.

Whether it’s in dealing with the effect technology has on the way we live our lives, potentially getting into some pretty heady sociological study, in developing logical thinking by programming, or even in looking at the history of war as I’m going to demo at an SSAT conference, we’re floating on an ocean of material when it comes to content. It’s not all good news, though. More and more ICT teachers are coming to terms with the fact that the people who write programmes of study & exam board specs seem to remain blissfully unaware of this, and instead cling to the old ideas of “make the spreadsheet about a theme park – that’s applying it”. I’ve been discussing the extraordinarily disappointing Edexcel GCSE coursework brief on Twitter recently – the focus is on “upcycling” (a form of recycling). Over the course of the project students are expected to represent this issue through creation of the usual KS3 suspects – a logo, posters, etc – and put it all into an e-portfolio. Thrilling.

By contrast, my year 11s are currently writing essays in which they’re examining civil liberties abuses in China, the increasing difficulty in policing computer laws and computer addiction, among many, many more topics. Unfortunately, they’re completing unit 8 of the OCR Nationals course – almost universally disregarded by VI form colleges in my area, and decried & railed against on the TES forums. How, when the level of thinking involved is so much deeper than even the theory content of the better-respected GCSE, can it be so poorly thought of? It is absolutely true that schools have pounced upon vocational qualifications as a means to climb up the league tables, and I do believe that there is a shred of validity in the proposals put forth in the recent government white paper, the myriad other worries in which Donna Hay discussed extremely well earlier today.

I’m not suggesting that everything that falls under the OCR Nationals umbrella is at the same heady heights as unit 8 (the overwhelming majority isn’t anywhere near – it was never intended to be), but the idea that the only two choices we as ICT teachers have are open-ended, vocational qualifications that carry with them the taint of trying to cheat the system, or patently unengaging, uninspired academic qualifications like the GCSEs, recently repackaged and rebranded as shiny and new for 2010. The major difference between the model exam paper provided for the 2010 Edexcel course and the AQA one I sat back in 2000 seems to be the change of font from Times New Roman to Myriad. As one of many people who believes in the potential power & substance of ICT as a subject, I’m not happy with the idea of these being our only choices.

Nick Jackson & the rest of the #ictcurric band have been making progress in developing exciting, deep, broad projects that students can really sink their teeth in to at Key Stage 3. I was recently asked by one of my year 9s who is now entering his third month of Key Stage 4 why ICT isn’t like it was last year, and my only response was “I’m doing the best I can with what the exam board let me teach.” Poor answer, but it’s all I’d got.

Earlier this evening, a group of teachers was gathered together by Drew Buddie to talk about the problems with girls’ involvement in ICT & computing courses – in itself a fascinating topic, but we ended up straying on to this issue of engagement across the board. Dr Sue Black of UCL agreed that in part due to adversity to change on the part of the curriculum-makers we’re switching too many kids off ICT & computing as subjects. Facing increasing competition from technologically-literate students from countries like China & India, we risk falling behind the times unless we shift the focus of ICT from “doing stuff” to providing students with the thinking skills they need to work through problems independently.

If we’re to avoid the death of the information industry in the UK as we’ve seen with manufacturing & industry, we need to encourage thinking skills & creativity as the cornerstones of ICT education. We do need a change in perceptions from the top, and for current ICT qualifications to be current, but the change also has to come from the classroom up – it’s all too easy to bullshit when there’s a computer in front of you… all too often it can feel like your students are achieving something when they’re really only passing the time with WordArt & Google Image Search.

In order for the subject to be seen as rigorous and important, it has to be taught as such. In order for it to become the modern day mouseion, it also needs to include the scope to encourage learners to bring with them what they learned in Science, French or English – and we as ICT teachers need to be ready for it. No mean feat.

Bibliography

Overduin, F. (2010), Review of Aratus: Phaenomena. Bryn Mawr Classical Review.

Staikos, K. (2004). The History of the Library in Western Civilization, p166. Newcastle, Delaware: Oak Knoll Press.

This is an event – the first resource to be posted borne of collaboration! Debbie Jones – @teach_ict – of Teach-ICT fame very kindly put together two of the handouts in this set covering the moral issues in ICT.

The social & moral implications of ICT are something we both have a passion for, yet I remember being taught about them when I was a student in a desperately dry, detached way. These handouts are designed to generate discussion – I’ll be using them with my OCR Unit 8 groups, splitting in to groups of 3 for discussion, then opening the floor up to the class after they describe their scenario. Subjects covered:

• File sharing
• Plagiarism
• Snooping
• Web addiction
• Censorship
• Web medicine

I hope they’re useful – we had fun making them!

Download handouts (PDF – 3mb)

I’m very fortunate to work in a school where new technologies are embraced, and that we have a core group of people from different backgrounds, teaching different subjects, eager to share ideas. Compared to many schools, we have regular informal meetings where we would try to collaborate on some activity or other.

Working on things like this – a project, a club, a link between departments – offers the opportunity to expand your field of vision beyond the limitations of your subject as well as giving the opportunity to reflect on your own teaching, but as with so many things in teaching the biggest obstacle is time.

Inter-departmental projects are often rewarding, but finding the time to put one together can be far more difficult than it would seem at first glance. Recently, our leaders of learning (lol) and senior leadership team (sadly there’s no way to turn that into rofl) decided there should be themed homework projects across departments for next year’s year 7 cohort. Topics included “who am I?”, plots and protests, the world about us, etc – nothing too restrictive, yet some kind of over arcing theme.

I took on plots and protests, deciding to make a project based on cryptography. I started with some historical information about the Babington plot to oust Elizabeth I by using coded messages shuttled back and forth between Anthony Babington & the prison where Mary, Queen of Scots was being held in the cork of a beer barrel for some good historical background. I then moved on to introduce simple substitution (Caesar) cyphers using the excellent Cryptoclub website, and ended with a choice of research questions:

• Describe how important encryption of information is on the Internet, or
• Describe how complex the maths behind cryptography can get once you apply the power of computers.

Lovely. I sat back and marveled at what had turned out to be four hours of (thoroughly interesting) work to put together one-and-a-quarter-A4-pages-that-I-knew-I’d-be-told-to-cut-down-to-one-page-but-didn’t-have-a-clue-how.

Then I remembered… it was for year 7s. Alright, I wasn’t asking for them to crack 128-bit encryption, I was asking for an explanation of why the process was difficult, but yeah… kind of silly, really.

Back to the point of this post, taking me out of my comfort zone of spreadsheets, databases and Photoshoppery, I put on a history teacher’s deerstalker for an afternoon and learnt a hell of a lot. Several web-based resources made that process much easier; the excellent resources section of the Bletchley Park website, the Cryptoclub website mentioned earlier, Simon Singh’s Cracking Code Book, and – most importantly – a handful of people on Twitter, including the head of Humanities at my own school.

Good advice, and a couple of hours later, I had my homework project complete, ready for the little cherubs come January. The point I’m trying (a little too hard, maybe) to make is that the biggest part of CPD is reflection. Through something as simple as planning a homework activity a little outside my comfort zone, with the help of other teachers, I spent an afternoon doing little else.

While I’m not sure exactly whether, or how, I’d integrate Twitter into my classroom in a major way, the potential for sharing good practice and getting help from a large and still growing community of professionals worldwide is huge. If you haven’t taken advantage of it yet, do.

“So why aren’t you saying this there, you wordy bastard?” you ask… well, I’m on 653 words so far. Try get that into 140 characters, I dare you.