Computing is...

Andrew McGettrick,
originally uploaded by DavidDMuir.

Over a week ago (grief... I have been trying to write this for over a week now!) I attended a very interesting conference on Computing in schools and in Higher Education. I've been aware that the numbers taking Computing in schools has been falling over the last couple of years but I didn't realise that there was a similar problem in universities. I was also surprised to discover that there was an international problem with recruitment to Computing Science courses.

A few months ago, Prof Andrew McGettrick from the Department of Computer and Information Sciences came to see some of us in the Computer Education section of the Faculty of Education with the suggestion that we held a conference to discuss the issues. Andrew put together a workshop on Schools Computing: The Future and invited school teachers, university lecturers and admissions officers, HMIe, the Scottish Qualifications Authority, the British Computer Society and industry representatives. We also invited people from a variety of other countries (including the USA, England and Northern Ireland) to give an international perspective.

There was a load of good stuff came out of these two days and (if I get time) I'll write a good bit more about it over the next wee while. Thankfully, others have been quicker off the mark and more diligent. Mark Tennant has written a bundle of posts on his blog (currently on part 8!) and Ewan gave a brief report of what he saw when he was with us on Friday.

Throughout the couple of days of the conference, there were a few recurring themes that I'll refer to now before (hopefully) returning to report on the individual sessions in future posts:

1. The need to distinguish between ICT and Computing. {I'm using ICT here to describe skills based courses, typically focussing on applications such as word processing and spreadsheets, but possibly including information literacy ideas too - the sort of course designed to equip every student with the basic ICT skills that they will then use in context elsewhere.}
2. The need to define more clearly what we mean by Computing. {Why is Computing a valuable subject to study in schools? We need to have broad agreement among Computing teachers about what is core to our subject, what defines it and what unique contribution it can bring to the school curriculum. We also need to be able to explain this succinctly and in non-geek-speak to other people.}
3. An association Of Computing Teachers in Scotland may (among other things) help address the first two issues.

To briefly pick up on the first point, the need to make a distinction between ICT and Computing, has already come out through reaction to Ewan's post. I think this is one we have to work through carefully as Computing teachers first before we try to articulate the difference to other people. I've had a couple of discussions with a head teacher who thinks he will be able to dismantle his Computing department in a few years time because all pupils will know everything they need to know and will be using Computers throughout the curriculum. I try to point out that he was/is an English teacher but he doesn't argue that now we have literacy across the curriculum (pretty much every child can read, write and talk after all) we don't need an English department. Is that a fair comparison? ICT literacy against English literacy -- Computing as a subject against English as a subject?

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