Michael Gove has correctly lambasted the current curriculum for information and communication technology (ICT): his proposed solution is as wrong as the current curriculum, as findings from the Penceil Research Project on how to engage non-users of ICTs demonstrate. Penceil, a joint project run by NIACE and the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), explored how the basic IT skills curriculum needs to be transformed and the lessons from that also tell us much about how young people can best learn about ICTs. The dominant mode of teaching computing, both in schools and to adults, is as part of training students to survive in an office (and dominantly an MS Office) environment. students will be enticed away from productive engineering, including software engineering. Vocational qualifications The second problem is constructed from incoherent attempts to measure school performance through GCSE results. Gove’s more recent dictum removing most vocational qualifications, including engineering qualifications, from credit for school’s GCSE performance tables compounds the situation. The problem lies, at base, in the singular measure of school performance through measuring good GCSEs (in the prescribed combination) with drastic penalties for imputed under-performance. The nostrum administered will deter schools from providing courses that
A curriculum Michael Gove is right to criticise the way in which information and communication technologies are taught, but his response will do nothing to create the sort of curriculum we will need if we are to produce a generation of thoughtful users and co-creators of ICTs, argues MIKE CUSHMAN Learning how to use a word processor and a spreadsheet is a useful low-level enabling skill but it has little to do with learning to engage creatively with information and communication technologies. Gove’s response is a disastrous elision of two separate problems. The first and most refractory issue is the British low regard for engineering skills. This is a looming catastrophe for all engineering-based industries: automotive, aerospace, civil and software engineering are all fearing critical skills shortages. The solution to this is not to make either civil engineering or software engineering part of a core curriculum. The answers lie in the far more entangled realms of cultural and financial valuing of engineering skills. As long as financial engineering is rewarded 10 times more favourably than any other kind, then bright meet the needs and wishes of students who want to develop much needed, but further derided, technical knowledge. Software engineering, computer science and programming must be available options, but options not core. The core skills lie, unsurprisingly, in the words information, communication and technology. The above are devices for managing information and enabling communication, and students need to be given the chance to develop the skills to do this well. Locating and critically analysing information on the web is a more complex task than entering a phrase on a search engine. Constructing search terms that will put the items you want at the top of the list is a complex task that is infrequently taught and only slightly less infrequently learned (leaving aside the strange world of the advanced search link). Evaluating
32 ADULTS LEARNING SPRING 2012
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