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Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information from Alfred Thompson

Alfred Thompson's blog about teaching computer science at the K-12 level. Alfred was a high school computer science teacher for 8 years. He has also taught grades K-8 as a computer specialist. He has written several textbooks and project books for teaching Visual Basic in high school and middle school. Alfred is the K-12 Computer Science Academic Relations Manager for Microsoft and is trying to be the Microsoft Education Blogger.

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Department of Learning Prevention

Earlier I reported on a teacher who was seeing some interesting and positive results by letting students use tools (computer software tools) that are often blocked or banned in schools. Today we learn the other side of this coin.

Ben Chun reports in his blog how his attempt to demonstrate how DNS works to translate domain names to IP addresses was foiled by the fact that his students are locked out of the command prompt. This is a pretty typical lock down I have found. Anyone know "a DNS/reverse-DNS lookup utility that is free, doesn’t require administrative privileges to install (and preferably doesn’t need to be installed), and can do both forward and reverse DNS lookups." If so drop by his blog and leave him a comment.

On a related note a friend of mine told me about a school local to him where they are using very old software to teach C++ programming. The tech people are afraid that if they allow students to learn how to program on the modern computers that are attached to the network students will "hack into the OS core and do evil things." Yeah, sure, ok. Can I get their resumes? Thanks!

What has happened that we are so afraid to teach students things that are useful and powerful? Are schools dropping machine shop out of fear that students will make knives and zip guns? Are we dropping baseball out of fear that students will use the bats to beat each other senseless? Are we dropping chemistry for fear that kids will open their own Meth labs?

And yet somehow schools feel the need to place a governor on the learning of technology. I have to wonder - who is the problem? Is it the students who want to learn or is it adults who don't want to learn?

Published Monday, September 10, 2007 8:05 PM by Alfred Thompson

Comments

# re: Department of Learning Prevention @ Monday, September 10, 2007 10:06 PM

In a machine shop, the instructor could pretty easily tell which kids were making knives or otherwise getting up to trouble.  And in chemistry class, the instructors tend to be paranoid about following safety procedures.  We always need to be cautious when we put powerful tools in the hands of students -- it's never responsible to just let them loose.  However, as I've been experiencing, this often means that computers get crippled in the silliest of ways.

I think the problem with academic computing in the secondary environment is that the right investments in infrastructure haven't been made.  That's probably because the students educational needs, standards, and curriculum haven't been identified very clearly.  There's also the problem that we haven't made this stuff understandable to a general audience, at least not in the same way that a chemistry teacher can say, "I need a fume hood," and everyone knows what that means.  So administrators and other decision-makers can't evaluate Windows versus Macintosh versus Linux (and all the custom work that has to be done with each of these) in the context of supporting academic computing because they don't understand what it requires.  Do we?

Ben Chun

# re: Department of Learning Prevention @ Monday, September 10, 2007 11:28 PM

Alfred – for the first time, I’m feeling a bit insulted by your comments.  (I’ll assume that insulting hard-working tech people was not your intent.)

I am a teacher, but I also work in the school’s Technology Office, and I have to deal with various bad things that students and teachers do to computers.  Some of those things are intentional, and some are accidental.

We could unlock everything on every computer, so any student could work on it to learn anything she wants about how the OS works, and how the network settings interact.  But the next student would not be able to work on his research paper, because the OS will be wrecked and I will have to re-install the OS before the computer is ready to use again.

We could have a small number of unprotected computers in a protected play-pen for students to dive head-first into the OS settings.  But doing that means that those 6-year-old computers in a classroom are going to be 7-year-old computers before they are replaced.  Which is more important?  Which is the better choice?

Perhaps a very large, multi-national software company could develop an operating system simulator that allows students to learn how to modify OS settings (and see the effects) without then requiring a complete re-installation when something goes wrong.  Perhaps that company could give it away to schools.  Perhaps that company could build an OS that has only 2 or three ways to change the desktop wallpaper (instead of twenty or thirty), or at least has one well-documented setting that turns them all on or off reliably.  Instead of choosing to do those things, those companies all seem to have decided to do something else instead.

I don’t wake up in the morning thinking about how to prevent students from learning.  I do think about what I have to do to make sure that the computers will work the same way today that they did yesterday.  And I do think about what our users will not be able to do as a result of the decisions we make.  

Sometimes we have to trade greater access (and deeper learning opportunities for a few students) for greater reliability (and broader learning opportunities for all students).  I don’t like having to make those decisions, but I have to play the hand I’m dealt.

The more time I spend fixing computers, the less time I have to help students and teachers learn to use technology effectively.  I have to make decisions that maximize my availability, but that sometimes reduces what students can do on a computer (and what they can learn about them).

Choices have consequences, and sometimes we are forced to choose the lesser of two evils.  We don’t want to, but we have to do it anyway.  Just like large, multi-national software companies have to choose to develop a commercial product instead of free OS simulators for education.  

We’re not evil.  We just have to make decisions that some people within our schools don’t like and don’t understand, because they don't see it from our perspective.

Brian Gray

# re: Department of Learning Prevention @ Monday, September 10, 2007 11:54 PM

No my intent was not to insult hard-working and underappreciated school tech support people. I have been the sole tech support person for several schools. I have been the tech coordinator for another school. I know what the trade-offs are and how hard those people all work.

But one of my overriding philosophies as a technology person was that the job of tech support was not to prevent teachers from teaching but to make what teachers wanted to do possible as much as possible. Sometimes that made my job harder but it was the right thing to do.

I ran my labs pretty much unlocked. I tried serious lockdown software one year – several of them in fact – and found that it made my life much more difficult so I dropped it. I decided to trust my students and make clear consequences for when they broke that trust and my life got easier.

Now there are a couple of options that can make things easier. You may want to check out Windows SteadyState  which is a free software tool from Microsoft that lets you protect your computer’s C drive so that changes can be “undone.” There are commercial products that people sell and a lot of schools buy as well. I used to have removable hard drives on my computers that let me replace a corrupted drive with a working image in less time than it took to change classes. So there are options.

There are also ways to unlock some things for some accounts and not others. When each student has their own login and you can check logs for who was using a computer at what time accountability is much easier. Most things that teachers want to do can be allowed safely. It takes some extra research (which I know a lot of tech support people don’t have a lot of time for) and maybe it takes some extra setup but most things can be done.

BTW Windows Vista has a lot more control (finer granularity) than earlier versions of Windows. And it has some great collaboration tools that I think would be wonderful in schools. Hopefully more schools will look into that.

Alfred Thompson

# re: Department of Learning Prevention @ Tuesday, September 11, 2007 12:48 PM

Virtualization can resolve some of the concerns about disruption due to wrecked OS installation. Checkout -

http://www.vmware.com/

and

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/virtualpc/default.mspx

Ash

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