Common Misconceptions about ICT
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Common Misconceptions about ICT
David Longman ( ) has been collecting some common misconceptions about ICT, some of a deep and serious pedagogical nature, some of a rather more amusing and possibly apocryphal nature. Like the one about the new RM machine weighing more than the old one, even though it looked smaller (the reference is of course to the redoubtable RM480z which replaced the 380z, but was often referred to as the 38 oz machine. MirandaNet fellow Ray Barker swears that at least one variant of this story is true ...)
Anyhow, have a look at this collection which has been round another email list already, and see if you can add anything, serious or jokey. If you can, please email David directly ().
ITT Document 4/98 Section A "Knowledge and Understanding" says that Primary and Secondary trainees should know "pupils' most common misconceptions and mistakes" in subjects.
Can anyone suggest common misconceptions and mistakes in IT?
When saving information students (of all ages) have problems appreciating the difference between, and implications of, saving on 'A' (sorry Mac users) on the machine's hard disk and if a network is present on temporary or permanent network storage. This is both conceptual and a skill issue.
IT ought to generate both concept and skill misconceptions - but on discussion here we feel that there may be less conceptual issues than in, say, mathematics.
There's a fairly obvious set of simple word processing 'errors'; my students come across whole classes of one-handed typists who have been taught to put the Caps Lock on when they want a capital letter, and there are plenty of examples of children deleting all the way back to a spelling mistake or insisting on hitting <Return> at the end of each line, or centring titles by inserting loads of spaces then wondering why it goes wrong when they change the font size. These are errors of technique, but also, I suppose, misconceptions.
With very young children, there is sometimes confusion between L and 1, and between o and 0 (zero). Most of the other errors I can think of are software- or platform-specific.
There are always some students/children/staff who have difficulties in conceptualising/modelling (what's the correct term?) the ways in which the computer is organising and retrieving information in database packages. Despite lots of 'concrete' preparatory work or use of metaphors, some have difficulty in understanding the purposes of designing records - they think that they are word processing. Searching and sorting is also a cracker. Binary trees are also an eye-opener. A PGCE student this term was overcome with awe and wonder - 'how did it KNOW it was a toad?'
We've found it useful to address this explicitly in courses and discuss the students' mental images of what is going on and how they might represent that in different ways for children ...... very revealing!!!
Firstly, I actually have stopped believing in the validity or utility of the concepts "conception" and "misconception" in terms of providing explanation or understanding of human/children's thinking.
The use of ICT can be viewed as part of what Engestrom and Coles describe as a cultural - historic activity system whose components include the subject, the object of their actions, the mediation system they use, the rules in which the system operates , the community and the division of labour (See Distributed Cognition ed G Soloman, CUP). If a child has a difficulty in using the "spreadsheet" to assign the difficulty to the "child's misconception" seems to be missing major chunks of the story. The "misconception", if I may borrow the term, may be with the designers of the software, the designers of the hardware, the teacher who sets the task, the community which suggests the teacher sets the task rather than seeing it as a problem that resides "within" the learner.
However to satisfy the powers: The potential for misconception is huge largely because there is no "unifying conception" to be had in the first place. Whereas there has been there is a long history of research in conceptualisation in language, mathematics and science and to a lessor extent other identifiable school subjects, there is a paucity of well known research in the domain of ICT for education.
It might be fair to look at the literature of HCI whose purpose is to identify human interaction with computers, however much of this is superficial ( screen design, navigability, response times etc.), and there is a small move to go beyond the wrong "cog sci" approaches taken in much HCI research to look at more ethnographic methods which may reveal cultural- historic impediments to computer use.
There was a minor flowering of research in the domain in the late 70's and early 80's. I can recall papers from Jean Underwood (sometimes co-authored with Judy Spavold) on children's conceptualisation in the use of information retrieval problems. I can recall interesting papers from the OU, Edinburgh Uni, Sussex Cog-Sci and the MRC inApplied Psych lab in Cambridge (loosely the UK AI community at the time) . These included comparative understanding of "procedural", "declarative", "functional" and "object oriented" approaches to instructing computers ( there was a book edited by Jim Alty published By Academic Press) .
Recent work of this community has a great deal of relevance to the topic , for instance: http://www.hcrc.ed.ac.uk/Site/bibliographyrecent.html
My up-to-date reading of literature is mainly on research into collaboration so I am not quite as au fait as to what seems to be a much under-researched area.
There are clear grounds for suspecting "misconceptions" on the part of the QCA in this area.
They suggest in their Yr 5 exemplification material that children use spreadsheets to investigate graphs of y = 2 x + 3 or y = x^2 for instance. This is a clear misconception on the use of IT.
LOGO and control frequently reveal misconceptions which are scientific / mathematical - eg triangles which turn out to be three sides of a trapezium . But also: the concept of the computer as switch rather than energy source what setpower does in energy terms in a procedure orientation differences between bearings (seth) and right and left turns for turtles.
There are always some students/children/staff who have difficulties in conceptualising/modelling (what's the correct term?) the ways in which the computer is organising and retrieving information in database packages. Despite lots of 'concrete' preparatory work or use of metaphors, some have difficulty in understanding the purposes of designing records - they think that they are word processing. Searching and sorting is also a cracker. Binary trees are also an eye-opener. A PGCE student this term was overcome with awe and wonder - 'how did it KNOW it was a toad?'
We've found it useful to address this explicitly in courses and discuss the students' mental images of what is going on and how they might represent that in different ways for children ...... very revealing!!!
There is lovely stuff from Sherry Turkle in all of her writing about "conceptualising the machine" and assigning powers to it, whilst remaining firmly in a the social domain. The chapter on young learners in "The Second Self" is a good source of this kind of stuff.
Further to Andrew Hamill's response, Mike Rumble had a nice story about the teacher who was teaching compass points, so put stickers on her Roamer marked N, S, E & W..........
1. That a graphics file is a different kind of thing or entity from a text file, or a word processor file. More, that an application file, e.g. Winword.exe, is a different kind of entity from the document files that it produces.
2. That a file currently being edited is merely a copy of the file in hard storage (and important too to note the exception for database files).
There really was a secretary in Croydon MEP Centre who put a floppy into the photocopier when copying a disc.....
1. People (pupils) think that a data file for a picture is as different from a data file for text as a photograph is from a printed page. But this is of course not true.
2. People (pupils) think that if they edit their document in a word processor then they are changing the data file. But this is not true (until it is re-saved). The exception is a database in which any edits immediately change the data file.
Thought I ought to make a serious contribution to the debate - to make up for my earlier embarrassments.
The original question reminded me of some work I once did looking at the relationship between students' mental models of computer systems and their IT competence. The (tentative) outcome was that there is no relationship between student's IT competence and the level of technical sophistication of their mental models of computer systems but that there is a link between IT competence and the level of abstraction of their mental models.
I recently came across a misunderstanding that I thought amusing but has a logical basis.
A first-time purchaser of a computer contacted the supplier's 'help- line' to say that after switching on the computer they could not access any programs because the 'foot-peddle' did not work.
They had, presumably, mistaken the mouse for the type of foot-switch provided with sewing machines, resistance soldering irons, etc.
Sorry if this is an 'old chestnut' - I had not heard it before.
While we're in funny story mode -
A barrister (husband of colleague) sent the new office junior to send a fax to another law firm. Half an hour later the firm phoned to say that they agreed it was often a good idea to send a fax twice, but thirty-two times?....
A distraught lad was found by the fax machine, saying, "I keep trying to send it, but it keeps coming back to me..."
And again, one of my students who has just reported on her work with some infants tells me that the mouse was not working properly, so the teacher swapped it for a tracker ball, and the kids were having difficulty trying to push it about...
I remember working in a nursery class some years ago where the children had all been taught to use the mouse back-to-front. They seemed to have no difficulty with the idea that moving the mouse left moved the pointer right, and they were quite resistant to my attempts to change what they did.
From a school secretary: Where is the Internet?
From a school secretary on the telephone: We don't use email yet because we're
not connected to the Internet.
From a teacher: We use the Internet in school through AoL but I don't have
it at home. I use BTInternet at home.
There are some assumptions behind the idea of "misconceptions" which need to be considered. My theorising is that "Cog Sci" based and, on reflection, naive and limited. But I don't accept the implication of the original message that this approach is "wrong". I think that the validity and utility of a theory is relative to the context of application. Cog Sci and Piagetian perspectives are indeed useful in the present culture of curriculum, teaching and teacher education in the UK. (Perhaps it is this culture which is wrong?)
Thus I feel that it is valid for teachers to consider conceptual and procedural knowledge as being carried around in a learner's mind. This is only part of the model, however, and the application of knowledge during activity is highly dependent on the context in which the activity is situated and the affordances it offers - it is not helpful to view knowledge as something which a learner either does or does not possess.
Returning to the original question, I think it highlights the point that Section A of the ICT NC for ITT is actually a good research agenda. Unfortunately the TTA has presented it instead as though it is an established body of knowledge - perhaps this is the greatest misconception of the lot!
Returning to the original question, I think it highlights the point that Section A of the ICT NC for ITT is actually a good research agenda. Unfortunately the TTA has presented it instead as though it is an established body of knowledge - perhaps this is the greatest misconception of the lot!
My theorising in that paper is "Cog Sci" based and, on reflection, naive and limited. But I don't accept the implication of the original message that this approach is "wrong". I think that the validity and utility of a theory is relative to the context of application. Cog Sci and Piagetian perspectives are indeed useful in the present culture of curriculum, teaching and teacher education in the UK. (Perhaps it is this culture which is wrong, Martin?)
I have found Piaget-ism and Cog Sci very useful sets of constructs on which we can hang hats (both now and in the past)... and any theory can be useful as a starting point for debates (heck, I use Bloom's taxonomy to look at assessment). Its just that the more I look into and read about socio-cultural approaches to looking at human activity the more pennies drop into place for me. Maybe its being an old Marxist at heart that 1920's Soviet ideas have some resonance.
We do live in a culture where "individualism" in both popular and academic psychology has deep roots. Current culture is pleased to blame failures on individuals (teachers and pupils) rather than tools and systems. This is short sighted and is not the ways things are viewed in the best corporate environments. You do not have to be a poor workman to blame your tools.
I think the culture is wrong. Teaching is one of the most disconnected and un-collaborative professions. We do not operate on evidence based practice because we supply/create no evidence nor have the time to read it, let alone construct frameworks of understanding out of it.
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