Re: Are teachers really so unwilling to learn?

[bickiia@earlham.edu]

I've neglected this thread after starting it...

Doug Loss <dloss@csrlink.net> wrote:
>> But there are a lot of important ideas in computers that aren't just

>> little details.  If a teacher wants to *understand* what they are 
>> doing, they need to know these things.  

>I'm sure there are books out there that intend to teach such concepts
>as these.  It's just that they're aimed as Computer Science majors 
>rather than at the general public (which teachers count as in this
>discussion).
>
>It's well within the purview of seul-edu, and probably SEUL in general,

>to develop conversational guides to the concepts behind current
>computer use.  We'd better use Linux in any examples we use, of course,

>but such guides would apply beyond the Linux comunity alone.

I'm not sure how well documentation can solve this problem.  The people
who describe teachers -- or the semi-interested novice in general -- as
not wanting to know anything aren't completely wrong.  These are people
who probably don't want to sit down and read documentation.  There's
already a ton of documentation for Linux -- for all it's criticized, I
think Linux documentation is at a point that is much more complete than
any other system.  There's just so much more public beta software for
Linux...

Anyway, I don't think teachers are going to want to sit down and learn
this stuff by reading a guide.  They might be willing to take some sort
of workshop -- those are always popular among the educational set.  But
that's not really something that we in SEUL can participate in.

I think the real potential is in a system that teaches as you go.  Not
necessarily some form of the Paperclip popping up and giving helpful
information ("You are trying to upload a document: do you want to learn
about the networking infrastructure of the Internet?").  Just a system
where the concepts are clear, as simple and minimal as possible (but no
simpler, and certainly no dumbing down), and there's a nicely shaped
learning curve.

Hmmm... I don't know if I'm explaining what I'm thinking about very
well.  I wasn't thinking about a big project, or anything concrete at
all.  It was just a perspective, a thought about what we're trying to do
if we try to get a computer-literate teaching population.  And I think
making teachers computer-literate is really important.

I think this goal fits well with Linux.  Linux is completely
transparent.  So much so that it's almost harmful to understanding --
without intending to do so, you can find yourself looking much more
deeply into the system than you have the background or experience to
understand.  But there's a philosophy of learning, and a notion of the
Right Way to do things, which usually is based on an underlying logic. 
Underlying logics make the potential for understanding much greater. 
Maybe we just need to start making those underlying logics more
explicit.

  -- Ian