Telling Digital Tales
Telling Digital Tales - Two Perspectives
Before 1994: A Western European perspective
The birth of Miranda
“I cannot let her go,’ said Magde Yacube, the famous heart surgeon with tears in his eyes. “I’ll try a second transplant’.
But the Lupus virus attacked the main heart muscle again and our daughter, Corinna, died on 14th February, 1989 – Valentine’s day. The proliferation of celebratory hearts on that day are a constant reminder of what we have lost.
Corinna was what is called an all-rounder: fluent in French, talented in art especially craft, performed well on the stage and loved playing her French horn in the Croydon Youth Orchestra, even though it was almost as big as her. She was also becoming interested in computers as the 8-bit Acorns were delivered to her school. Indeed, she drew some cartoons that we published to illustrate the educational computing game that I was writing for schools at the time at Kings University, London.
At sixteen had just won a scholarship for King’s School, Canterbury to sing madrigals in the cathedral and after her death the school orchestra played one of her compositions in a concert to raise money to buy a machine that might save others from the same death.
Like my husband, Corinna was always enthusiastic and engaging about history, especially politics. We first realised this when she announced the news about Franco’s death in 1975 when she was 3 years old. Later she became very steamed up about the exploits of Pol Pot. Her history teacher observed that her grasp of history and her ability to see below the surface facts was unusual. She was advised to try for Oxford or Cambridge University in the future.
The pain of her death was excruciating: I hope you cannot imagine it. But you may like to consider the role of the computer in my life in those first two years. When I could not sleep, when the pain was too much I would put my head into the computer. I could write or develop ideas with a total concentration that gave some relief from the suffering. There is a danger, of course, that people who feel inadequate, ostracised by society or rejected by their family may find their sense of control in a computer game preferable to the life they lead. Why should they ever leave the friendly shores of the screen where they are in control? We may need to answer that question.
But this kind of concentration can be used for good as well as ill. Yes, the pornographic possibilities of virtual reality worrying, but what about the terminally ill patient who can go to the theatre or walk through a sunny wood without leaving their bed? And what about the trainee surgeon who can practise on virtual patients instead of killing a few real ones on the way to perfection? We have to be alive to the potential of virtual reality and seize the chance....or else?
Another of our mechanisms for surviving the first year of her death: watching wall-to-wall television was one of our mechanisms. In the November of 1989 we were glued to the fall of the Berlin wall and missed so much Corinna’s perspective on the fall of communism.
People who have suffered great personal tragedies often try to find some positives to create in the aftermath. And so did we.
So Corinna’s death was the reason that myself and my colleagues were motivated to create our international online community of practice, the MirandaNet Fellowship. As a Shakespeare specialist in my first degree, English, Dramatic and Telecommunication Arts, (now called Media Studies) it was natural to me to turn to William for inspiration. Miranda is not an acronym but the living and breathing daughter of Prospero in the Tempest who says, ‘O brave new world that hath such people in it.’ (I am glad that Miranda’s enthusiasm for people has never been quite extinguished by Aldous Huxley with his dystopia novel ‘Brave New World’).
Miranda also means 'admiring' in Latin that underlies the positive attitude to digital technologies that we aim to encourage – findings ways to improve the human lot through collaboration, both online and off. So the MirandaNet Fellowship in celebration of our daughter who was preparing to be a woman of the new Renaissance in digital collaboration across the world.
As I write the MirandaNet Fellowship boosts more than 1,500 members in 80 countries. But I am not a natural computer expert. It never seems to take colleagues very long after meeting me before they ask rather belligerently, “How on earth did you get into computing?” It is clear to me that I fall short in some way from the stereotype of what people in computing ought to be like. I’m not sure if it’s because I write poetry, because I talk a lot or because I do not own an anorak. Whatever the reason, I am, it seems, the antithesis of a proper computer person.
This was borne out by the problems I had in 1990 with filling in the forms to be a Fellow of the British Computer Society (BCS). The form asked about my responsibilities in data processing and my training in systems analysis amongst other things. The BCS required a potted history of my competence in programming languages as well.
At this time all the BCS Fellows were IT specialists and almost entirely men. All credit to them that they wanted to change this situation. I was a member of the education committee who meet once a year to develop publications for teachers – the dictionary of terms is still produced by this committee. However, none of us were eligible as Fellows so they asked me to be a test case because I had been involved in the publications for more than six years.
I meet with some hostility with the male panel in my interview because I did not pretend to be able to code and because my career path had been blighted by pauses to have children – how careless. Nevertheless, when they found I had authored six BCS publications the mood thawed. So although I was could not code I was made a Fellow also because of my experience as an author of two education software titles, Scoop and Newsnet – both adventure games for IT students in secondary schools. These titles, funded by BT, were international best sellers. I had developed the stories with a group of cross-curricula teachers and managed the programmer who worked in Assembler as well as the team of systems analysts and illustrators. My Fellowship was a recognition that educational IT products and services required a broad team of experts to be successful. The award persuaded most members that people who cannot converse in Basic, ‘C++’ and FORTRAN still have a role to play in a computing team.
Attitudes were changing all round at the time and another first in 1990 was my election as to the Society of Authors, the first to achieve this partly on the evidence of my authorship of those two educational software titles.
In addition, I became a 'certified' as an OFSTED schools inspector on the Institute of Education, University of London team. This was an important role because Information Technology stood as a core subject to be assessed with Literacy and Numeracy.
In those days I was the founder and director of the industrially and government funded professional organisation, The MirandaNet Fellowship, based at the Institute of Education London University. My role included advice on education software design, research into education products and services, teacher education, the training of teacher trainers, the inspection of information technology in schools and support in developing and evaluating education innovation projects in schools for developing countries. After several iterations I am now Professor of Education Innovation at De Montfort University with special responsibility for research into the role of digital technologies in classrooms and teacher education.
So how did my involvement with computers and innovation begin?
From mainframes to laptops
I was born in 1948, just after the Second World War. The future looked hopeful: the English were sure that there would never be another World War with Europe after the two they had endured in the twentieth century. We joined the Common Market on this basis. So I am one of the Baby Boomer generation who have lived through some of the best times socially and financially. And until 2010 the status of digital innovators and experts in education also remained high.
My first encounter with computers was in the fifties. The imperious ringing of the telephone broke into my sleep at two in the morning. A throbbing taxi squatted in the road. Hanging from the window, I saw my father, his pin striped pyjamas replaced by his pin striped suit, dashing out into the night like Dr Findlay of the famous radio programme to tend a patient: black bowler firmly on. The patient was the Citibank computer. Down again!
The mysterious deletion of a couple of million pounds was the staple diet of our breakfast conversation: computer fraud and security issues were served for our late, late, supper when Daddy came home. The computer seemed a voracious night and day devourer and regurgitator of information requiring constant attention, devotion and coaxing to perform.
My father's bank was The National City Bank of New York in Threadneedle Street in the City of London, now called Citibank. Every Christmas the children of bank employees were invited to a spectacular party. Travelling through the grey and empty City streets on a Saturday was exciting. My sister and I had a new party dress every year and our hair was frizzled by curling tongs heated in the gas cooker flames. When the heat was too high the other mother used to tell us to ignore the smell of burning hair, and the smoke rising.
The windowless bank building dwarfed us as we struggled up the marble steps. The Xmas party always lived up to expectations: the biggest tree, the most avuncular Father Xmas, the most sumptuous presents and the wobbliest jelly.
But there was an even more exciting opportunity in store one year. My father took my sister and I up in one of the lifts; “to see the computers.” In an antechamber, we pulled white gauze hats over our hair like operatives in a food factory. White plastic overshoes and stiff overalls signalled that dust and dandruff were the enemy. Secret codes were punched into the door panel. Inside the room that was about twenty feet by twenty feet there were ten tin boxes the size of wardrobes. Through the window on their chests I could see giant brown tape reels whirling round. These mainframe computers resembled old reel to reel tape recorders that had eaten from the wrong side of the mushroom like Alice - and grown. There was a hallowed silence. So this was the operations sanctum to which my father, the high priest, was called night and day
In the sixties and early seventies my adolescence and teacher training days were blissfully free of 'computer awareness'. I had chosen English, Dramatic and Telecommunication Arts in which we learnt about television and film and read the latest books about the potential of the media like Marshal McCluhan’s The Global Village. In fact, later, when everyone was mystified about how someone from my arts background had managed to led a team developing an adventure game I put it down to my training in theatre and film direction, managing multi-layered action in telling a story. Indeed, many believed that the success of Scoop and Newsnet was also down to the credible stories that underpinned them – from my study of literature.
The personal computer revolution found me in the early eighties when we bought a Spectrum 48K for our growing children, a girl and a boy. Games for children seemed to be the purpose of a home computer. I never actually touched the keyboard. On the first day of purchase we took it with great pride to show my father who had recently retired from Citibank. Usually an obliging man, we were surprised when he refused, point-blank, to plug the little computer into his television.
"How many K does it have?" he said, eyeing it warily, "48? You remember the dust-proof data-processing centre I ran when you were still at school? You remember all those life sized boxes?" Of course I did. “Well in that entire room there was 30K of memory - and you're not putting 48K through my television set!"
It was a graphic example of computer advance. Nor was it just memory size. My father reminded me of the lift I had travelled in to see the computers. There were two lifts apparently and, on the odd occasion when they both left the ground floor simultaneously, the computer tapes stopped - some thing to do with the wiring. The tapes stopped on hot days, as well. And bugs? Well the story goes that the term 'program bug' derived from the day when it was discovered that a cable-chewing cockroach had been disrupting the operations of Wall Street mainframe. Bugs in coding are one thing, bugs in hardware quite another.
In the seventies we thought we were past all that. Computers were so much more reliable and user friendly. My children invested in a joystick so that they could kill little yellow people, the Green Berets or furry monsters with more efficiency. They jet-setted with Willy and skied with Horace. They went in for karate, kick-boxing and diving with the Red Arrows. I began to wish they would return to the television.
In the early eighties my son's school held jumble sales and 'bring and buys' to purchase some ICL computers. My daughter's school held a parents' evening for us to admire and use the new 'PETS'. The young enthusiastic female head of the maths department extolled the virtues of women in the computer world and we, parents, were impressed. My daughter brought home printouts of drawings and games programmed herself. She began to leave the house early so that she could join her computer teacher at 8.00 a.m. - the only space for her year in the computer suite. This stopped suddenly - the young and enthusiastic teacher had developed morning sickness - the PETS were abandoned. Good computer teachers were thin on the ground in a girls’ school.
By this time, at the large south London comprehensive where I taught English and Drama, there were computers only in the maths department. So I was surprised to receive an invitation to a 2-day computer course at Kingston in May 1985 run by a body called The Microelectronics Programme (MEP). I was curious - how could computers have anything to do with English or Drama?
Jean Beck, now a director at the National Council of Education Technology, was in those days a down-to-earth advisor with MEP. Librarians have been a great, unsung influence on the development of computer use in schools. According to my research, Software in Schools (NFER ?), librarians have led the way in CD-ROM and communications services. On this first morning Jean Beck gave us a brief run-down on computer devices in the High Street. She even told me that I would soon be getting my money from a hole in the wall. “Well,” I thought, “a pleasant woman, but deluded”.
The English heads of department on the MEP course were not very impressed by the couple of spelling programs, a multi-choice questionnaire on Hamlet and a rather explicit version of Hangman selected by a programming advisor. These titles were typical of educational programs written by teachers learning how to code in Basic. The content of these programs was just a useful vehicle for justifying the programming exercise. These programs did have a place in establishing educational aspects of software but I would only recommend professional development today. Not that this debars teachers from the consultation process.
The next day on the course Jean Beck introduced us to Bob Moy, the designer of 'Developing Tray' and an ILEA advisor/teacher. Bob was a teacher and a half. He introduced us to his program as if we were his class. There were thirty of us. One computer used as an electronic blackboard. We immediately saw that this program was based on credible learning theory. The computer was adding to the learning process in a way that could not be replicated by conventional methods.
We were faced with a blank screen. We knew that there was a passage of writing to be discovered but we had no idea what it was. We could buy or predict letters and punctuation. The computer would enter our predictions and tell us the score. Bob kept us in suspense. He pretended absolute ignorance of what the passage really said. And we believed him. We couldn't leave the puzzle alone; the text was perplexing and obscure: some poetry? It was worth investigation. We refused to cheat. We were learning about language structure and styles from the bottom up. At lunchtime we all refused to leave for the pub. Sandwiches were ordered and we continued on our quest for meaning throughout the afternoon.
Devtray has remained an important program for English teachers for a decade. I have seen it used badly and well over the years. I have seen children merely guessing and I have seen them actively devising reading strategies. It is typical of the kind of teaching tool that depends on the teachers’ ability to use resources well.
Computers in the Curriculum
It was something of a surprise the next September to find 'IT' in four slots on my timetable.
“What is IT?” I asked the curriculum deputy.
“Information technology” he said patiently. “You are teaching IT to two first year classes this year."
“Why me?”
“Because English teachers communicate well and because you had a two day MEP course on computers in May.”
“Two days!” I squealed.
“Well it's two days more than anyone else teaching information technology this term.”
Remember at this point in time I had still never touched a keyboard. I’m surprised I did not make more fuss but I was too ignorant to know what I was agreeing to.
Actually the first term was easy, as the computers had not arrived. We taught the bemused classes from earnest, newly-minted Croydon information technology books. We looked at traditional and modern methods of storing information and tried to see how much information was important to our lives. We interpreted road signs, maps and timetables and learnt about using the computer for information retrieval, creating quizzes and learning to word process. It all seemed very relevant and I just wished I had more training than the experience of life in this field.
When the £75,000 grant from the Manpower Services Commission finally was secured for a computer suite it was a difficult pill to swallow. I didn't resent the money spent on computers - I thought it essential. But the roof of my classroom leaked and I had no lights or curtains in the drama studio. So I did hope if the cake was small, the arts would not starve altogether.
When the Research machines network of 186 computers was installed, I was promised training. We would be kept a week ahead of the students, we were assured. But, oh dear, the week we were to start turned out to be the first week of industrial action on the matter of directed time. No training for me after all.
Never mind. The director of computing studies had stuffed a word processing manual in my overloaded pigeonhole with a note pinned to it that said, “Teach this for the first six weeks.” He had also left instructions for turning the network on as well as a password. Luckily one of the boys in my class seemed competent in operating the system. I let him get on with it. For me, every plunge into the computer room felt like driving a different car out of the staff car park each night. I had no opportunity to use a computer between the sessions with the pupils and they were not at all keen to let me have a whole keyboard to myself.
The night before the first class, I sat up late copying commands from the manual onto flashcards. The package was Word: tiny white letters on a black screen - remember- and a menu at the bottom that had impenetrable American commands like 'transfer'. We diligently typed, saved and printed.
“I'm bored, Miss,” said one of my charges after about two weeks of word processing procedures.
“So am I,” I confessed. “What do you suggest?”
They huddled together in conference.
“Why don't we use these computers to do some proper English?” one ventured.
“Yes, let’s get back to writing about Chernobyl,” said another. “That matters.”
“We could use these machines to publish a sort of newspaper about the tragedy.”
“Or a magazine... We could write letters about nuclear accident.”
“Yes, they won’t know the letters are from children if we use these computers. They might listen to us.”
This suited me as I had journalist training so felt at least that my first degree was valuable. So we did learn the niceties of word-processing as we needed them, compelled by the need to communicate in the most professional way possible. We were learning at our own pace. Experts were emerging who were able to move the others on - new techniques spread like wild fire - soon we could all change fonts and sizes - check spelling - centre and justify. Jane Dorner (title) has made a study of authors which indicates that word-processing has changed their style and approach to writing though this has been an incidental benefit of the professional pressure to use technology.
This early experience of computers in the classroom was formative. I have never since been persuaded to 'teach' word processing skills. In contrast I have found that a publication purpose is a great spur to learning in context. In this context, I do object to education researchers who march children into a computer room for a limited amount of time and then conclude that word-processing makes no difference to them. Imagine if we tried to draw the same conclusions after limiting their access to pencils for one afternoon.
Gradually our equipment became more sophisticated. Poor publishing results on noisy dot matrix printers made way for laser printers. The texts of authors and children looked equally authoritative. Authors invented an acronym to describe the joys of laser production: Lovely Authors’ Script Evades Rejection. In schools, rather like school uniform, laser printers became a great leveller allowing every child's work to be compared fairly with the rest.
In that computing laboratory with the pupils my teaching style changed forever as well. I was used to commanding a class from the front like a keynote speaker - I could tell a good tale to keep them in their seats. But the cables had been laid round the edge of the room. Computer installation teams knew no better. As a random consequence, the children had their backs to me and they were totally absorbed, on task, committed - they did not need me. It was a tough moment of truth.
We allowed the technicians to dictate the room layout until Deryn Watson (reference), pointed out that teaching methodology should take priority over technical convenience in the general scheme of things. Gradually network managers learnt to take far more care over computer groupings. Some schools designed computer rooms with mushroom workstations, cabling coming through the centre of the mushroom. Laptops were also introduced that did not dominate a small classroom and were portable enough for field trips.
But faced by the pupils’ backs in that south London computer lab, I reoriented myself and became facilitator and a learner. It was an exciting opportunity to explore the mechanics of good writing. After I had overcome the initial terror at teaching a subject I was not trained in, I discovered students empowered and enthused by working at their own pace. Each student was engaged in purposeful activity and I was free to sort out the real intellectual obstacles. The machine reinforcement freed me to give more individual attention to pupils who were self-motivated. Reorganising text and correction were easier on the screen. Publication opportunities made pupils more concerned about accuracy: a group of girls nearly come to blows over a full stop. This was the kind of commitment in the classroom we were all searching for in the run up to the new GCSE courses.
Two adventures
Just after Christmas that year an invitation from BT arrived asking me to join a team of teachers to design educational software at King’s College, London University. This was to involve me in the eighteen-month project I have mentioned in which we published an adventure game, SCOOP, and a newsroom simulation, NEWSNET, teaching information technology in the classroom by practical methods. But when the invitation first arrived I simply saw it as an opportunity to keep ahead of students who were, at the time, teaching me.
My one-day secondment to Computers in the Curriculum at King’s College, led by the indefatigable Professor Margaret Cox, was a whirlwind of activity on top of four days teaching without a free period. But I began, at last, to learn in depth about educational computing. My full-time associateship, sponsored by Croydon LEA the next year, was a welcome opportunity to use my co-ordination of the ‘SCOOP' and 'NEWSNET' design group as a reflective experience.
This major collaboration between industry and education began in 1985. The Computers in the Curriculum project, based at the Centre for Educational Studies, King’s College, London University, worked with the BT Education Service on a software project that was planned to coincide with the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) three year £3.5 million scheme to encourage schools to buy software. This project, intended to widen the choice for schools, cost £200,000 and resulted in six titles in science, technology, information technology and English.
Teachers from Croydon and Leeds were invited to propose ideas for software that were relevant to classroom needs and teaching demands. These groups were to work with telematics specialists in designing, specifying and developing the software. Group co-ordinators were seconded from their schools for one day a week. Other teachers would be bought in to trial the material in the classrooms. Co-ordinating the players was no small feat. The team numbered 46 people: programming teams, industrialist and educators
Leeds LEA had identified the need for telecommunications software for use in physics. The teachers who joined this group were, by chance, all male science teachers. Their shared subject gave them a united purpose and a clear understanding of what their subject required: signal transmission , pulse code modulation and picture manipulation for sixth forms.
Croydon LEA already had a track record in developing materials to teach the new subject information technology. The project, therefore, attracted teachers across a range of subject specialisms and included both men and women. As information technology was such a new subject and no-one in the group had the security of a formal training, it took us much longer to identify the subject matter that was appropriate.
What we were sure about was that we wanted to harness the motivation and concentration we had seen in children in computer games. Eventually, using the theme of investigative journalism, we created the adventure game and the international newsroom simulation that transformed my career trajectory.
We honed the stories carefully. In SCOOP the student took the role of a journalist using on line information retrieval, fax, radio pagers to investigate a recluse millionaire and tell his story. Yes, not millionairess - I realise we missed a trick but Croydon teachers were unversed in equal opportunities in the days when Croydon was a Tory flagship.
The theme of our second program, NEWSNET, daughter of Scoop, indicates how much our own understanding of international journalism and IT had improved. Each terminal represented a different country. The simulation was based on headlines for a simulated week. The more the journalists collaborated on electronic mail and the more detail they uncovered in the databases, the nearer the truth they moved.
Remember we did not have experience of Googling in those days and all the data was internal to the package. I wrote an investigative novel into these three databases. Slick Cut, an international jet setting criminal, oiled through the data under a range of pseudonyms, putting his relatives in positions of power all over the world. As the student journalists uncovered information about his nefarious dealing the extent of his criminal operation became clearer. Eventually the pupil journalists would realise that the man who had rigged all kinds of activities internationally, was the same man who had bought the paper mills in Sweden that supplied the paper to the International Gazette group and the factory in South America that supplied the computer chips. Just a little more digging and delving and they would discover that, yesterday, Slick Cut bought the International Gazette Group. So what could they say about their owner?
To be able to give students the experience of the pressures of ownership on writing was for me the highest level of learning that NEWSNET could achieve. But the computing skills they were learning were also not inconsiderable. NEWSNET was the first educational integrated package. The user worked in an environment that linked three databases, desktop publishing, electronic mail, word processing and a networked wire service like Reuters. It was also the first educational program to use the communications facilities of a network as well. As a result of the NEWSNET design I had been invited to Chile where they were developing a system of collaborative rural newspapers based on our concepts (reference).
Thanks to the Kings College team SCOOP was also technically innovative. The design emulated Microsoft windows on the BBC microcomputer and was the biggest program ever designed for the BBC with twenty five black and white picture locations.
This innovative style owes most to the programmer, Phil Wood. He had decided to use Assembler because Scoop promised to be so big. Assembler is a low level language closest to the binary code which involved him in coding long series of numbers. There was no prototyping or subroutines in educational computing back in the day. If the teacher designers did not like the interface he had taken a month to write he would have to start all over again. One number in the new sequence wrong and the program would not function.
One day we arrived to find that Phil had programmed a story line left lying around from our meeting the month before. He showed me that he had nearly reached the page turn. "Why do you do this section, Phil?" I asked. "Because it was there," came the reply. I turned the page and showed him the other side. "But Phil, this story line has no ending! We've rewritten the whole thing now!" He had to start again.
I found the mind of an effective coder quite different from mine. This incident reminded me of a friend, a great mathematician, who used to crack radio codes at Cheltenham during the Cold War. She was very successful at cracking these codes. “How exciting, Anne, what did the messages say?” I asked. She looked at me blankly. “Oh I never read them. I handed them on to someone else to do that!"
The coding for SCOOP took Phil eighteen months to complete. Using a HyperCard prototyping shell or and equivalent it would take about a fortnight today. The teachers donated nine months 'spare' time to the project. Political views have changed and teachers would no longer be prepared to give this commitment unpaid. In Miranda now we adopt practice based research by teachers in their classrooms in order to to make the best of teachers' relevant experience without overloading their time. Professional development rewards are now the key.
After two years SCOOP had sold ten times more than any comparable educational package. This commercial success was because BT supported a marketing and dissemination programme which allowed me to train teachers in information technology all over the country using Scoop as an illustration and a tool. SCOOP was also adapted by the Dutch government POCO project to use with a series of television programmes and national training workshops.
Commercial success in educational software is difficult because the school base in this country is so small. Much of the commercial material has American roots and displays the technical virtuosity of programming teams rather than interesting content. In the commercial world programmers intent on displaying their programming pyrotechnics will grab any little furry animal and any kind of Holy Grail to use as pegs. I put out an SOS: "Where are Shakespeares Of Software?" to my colleagues in the Society of Authors and the Guild of Writers do not insist on getting involved. Authors were beginning to respond. In fact, the help of a few Jane Austens might be more appropriate. We had on our side the anxiety of the giant games companies who were still not attracting half the population, girls, to buy their products. Sega were threatening to animate comic-strip love stories to attract women. If software in the eighties needed an injection of authorship then virtual reality in the nineties will be an even more voracious devourer of talent. Millions of pounds were wasted on compelling trivia because real authors did not come forward in the 1980s.
There was some hope, however. The authors of Comic Osmo produced a commercial adventure on CD ROM called Myst that had mystery and adventure. It was both intelligent and beautiful. But it was not the beginning of quality resources that challenged the book.
I believed that quality would be the result of competition because we had this new resource for story telling. New authoring packages like HyperStudio were also important because they encourage pupils to make their own multimedia adventures and explore other kinds of multi-level communication.
Authors and artists still needed more confidence in their collaborative role. When Phil, Wood the SCOOP programmer, landed a programming job in industry at three times the salary, he took me out to lunch. We had had some really heated discussions at times about what SCOOP and NEWSNET ought to do, so I was particularly pleased that there seemed to be no hard feelings. "Far from it," he said. "Your group insisted on achieving the educational aims and objectives of the programs in complete disregard of what I thought the computer would do. You made me stretch and bend the rules. In fact, I was given this job because I had taken the BBC B further than anyone thought it could go - so thanks for the push!"
This priority given to educational good practice above technical expediency was the most important philosophy I learnt from the Educational Computing Unit at King's College, London University. But we did not have the funding to adapt this philosophy for changing times. Old software continued to sold because it was designed and sometimes programmed by teachers with education in mind. This software along with non-industrial standard software is gave newcomers a poor impression of what educational computing is all about. Devtray, SCOOP and NEWSNET had had their day. So had 8-bit hardware. We observed the IT co-ordinator who send the BBCs or 186s down to the junior department when he took delivery of PCs or Apple with a Windows style operating system. Yes, I know, it seemed to make seductive financial sense but....
Computers challenged the very notion of progression in the national curriculum. Yet there were still schools where IT co-ordinators saved the delights of Windows to Key Stage four so that pupils could progress to the best at the end of their school career. This was a nonsensical approach to progression. In my study for NFER and NCET we found that in areas where primary and secondary schools were using Archimedes, Apples or PC Compatibles with Windows the quality and range of the work done at all levels was at the sharp end of computing. Infants and juniors were making multimedia books, for example. Because of the ease of the Windows style environment they were publishing their work on integrated packages with the same panache as secondary pupils down the road.
Nevertheless most teachers' progression was rather behind that of their students. In the Computers in the Curriculum department at King’s College, I was seen as the below average teacher test-bed. "If Christina can manage the software it so can a chimpanzee with a sock over its head" was the general view of my computer competence. Richard Millward of Small Talk fame was especially patient with me. I called him in one day in the conviction that my computer had taken leave of its senses. I had been shouting at it for half an hour already because, since I had changed the position of the keyboard, the screen filled with gibberish every time I typed. Richard summed up the problem as delicately as he could. "If women of your ample build" he explained, "lean too far over the keyboard, gobbledy-gook will result!"
The main purpose of the software development collaboration between BT and the Computers in the Curriculum project at King’s had been to train teachers to understand the implications of information technology. My own study showed that these wider objectives had been achieved. Ninety per cent of the teachers who had been designing and trialling the programs had gone on to use education technology extensively in the classroom. Half the group had become Information Technology co-ordinators and advisory teachers.
My dream at that time that we would have the foresight of the French who exchanged the cost of telephone books for a Minitel terminal in every home. This raised the general understanding of the potential of technology very quickly in the French population.
So what impetus heralded a quantum leap in my own computer competence and confidence? Two years seconded to King's College was a major factor, but the single event that had the most influence was the decision to part with two and a half thousand pounds of our family budget to buy a 20K Apple computer. The Apple SE was the thinking woman's computer - well designed, an intelligent interface, compact, it looked attractive in my Charles Rennie Mackintosh sitting room. I have never regretted the decision: it was love at first sight.
After my work with BT at Kings College, going back to Croydon as an advisor was a shock. Although I had designed for 8-bit machines, at Kings College I had not used them. I couldn't believe that primary school teachers were expected to get the hang of these illogical beasts. A blinking cursor on a black screen is a threat I will never forget. And when someone whispered that the code for formatting a disc on a 186 was a: b:/s I suffered the same sense of incredulity as when a boy in the playground told me about the mechanics of sex. "Why bother?," I thought," I mean did you ever hear such an unlikely and inelegant waste of time?
The Open University did begin to offer Apple Computers with modems to all its Post Graduate teachers. But still we did not offer tax advantages to teachers buying computers.
Industry and education partnership
From the moment I accepted that invitation to design software in 1987, BT had been the most stable element of my life in teacher training. They understood that teachers need effective professional development and time to think in order to change their thinking and their practice. From the secondment to King’s I returned to Croydon as an advisory teacher, moved on to the Inner London Educational Computing Centre (ILECC) for two years and finally became the director of MirandaNet based at the Institute of Education where I worked with over twenty-five companies. In all these roles, BT and I continued in partnership. In fact, industry had been having a positive influence on the information Technology curriculum in schools for some years. My survey for NCET and NFER (?) indicated that in schools where challenging information technology practice was evident across the curriculum, industrial partnership had made a significant contribution to their success. BT was one of those companies.
The BT Education Service (BTES) and I built up a range of successful teacher training strategies over those last ten years. BT encouraged experiment. For example, we ran a series of national role-play residential workshops. I landed teachers on planets where pencils exploded. Teachers with little experience of digital technologies had to set up a community, publishing their laws, producing their guidebook and attracting settlers from earth. Email colleagues from all over the world were in role messaging the planet newcomers. The pressure of deadlines gave the teachers an impetus to learn. They found that the computer was a valuable tool. Other longer term training projects include the training of teachers in the 129 schools in Schoolink partnership with BT. These schools use Campus 2000 as a means of communication. One use was to transmit raw journalists’ data for students to use in national newspaper days. The BT Education Service also made use of the Understanding British Industry (UBI) teacher placement scheme as a training model. In 1994 this UBI team evaluated the BTES secondary school and post sixteen services and developed the use of teacher placement itself.
In education we were still keen to adopt digital teaching and learning tools. Audio telephony and data transmission networks were not yet widely used in teaching. Although fax had had some curriculum mileage Integrated Services Digital Networks (ISDN), on the other hand, were expected to provide extended opportunities for learning and teaching at a distance when the lines were more widely installed. More informal and accessible video conferencing and the transmission of multimedia materials, simultaneous exchange of text, graphics and speech was beginning to make lecturing and collaborative work across any distance more effective. JANET, the joint academic network, was being developed by BT to embrace the advantages of wider bandwidths in SuperJANET.
At the same time we were beginning to realise that the computer was an indispensable tool for the most disadvantaged. Stephen Hawking, the great physicist, could not write or speak without his system nor operate his 'smart house'. Chris Nolan, who won the Whitbread book of the year award in 1988 for his autobiographical novel Under the Eye of the Clock, nearly died at birth from asphyxiation but survived with severe cerebral palsy. He would write using a "unicorn" on his forehead to punch a keyboard, with his mother holding his head: not a prize for fiction written by the severely disabled, but an international prize in which his word-processed novel won on its own merits.
My greatest insight into the enabling power of the computer was when I was running the Computer Assisted Reading project in Croydon Local Education Authority. One reluctant reader maintained that there was a conspiracy by other pupils and teachers to pretend that the black squiggles on book pages meant something. But she wanted to tell us a story and realised the computer was a communication tool. She started ‘There was ….’. A classmate showed her how to key in the first word - THERE.
She stared at it on the screen.
“Print it out please,” she said.
I was busy.
"Shouldn't you write some more before we print?” I suggested.
“Print it out please,” she insisted.
The girl went to her exercise book and pointed to an unintelligible squiggle. The girl said, “That ‘There’ printed is the same word as my written 'there’, isn't it?” Her teacher described the look of revelation on the girl’s face as the kind of expression that keeps a teacher going for another half term. In fact, the sort of expression that blesses a teacher’s vocation.
The explanation for the girl’s joy was her new understanding. Her handwriting was so uncontrolled that she had never been able to make the connection between printed book and exercise book before. Interacting with the keyboard made all the difference to her perception of words. She became a normal reader.
There are many good moments like this in using computers. I saw Gujerati children in Tower Hamlets burst into tears of pride when they saw their own writing on the screen for the first time using ILECC's Allwrite9; other children with special needs clamouring to have their work put on the wall because it looked as good as all the other children's work.
I also had the pleasure of working with colleagues in other countries. For example, the Mapuche Indians in Chile had never had a written language. Translating their culture onto a multimedia network was not only preserving it: their self esteem had risen and they were using their language in school which had embarrassed them before. They began to record old traditions on the network hardisk and created new words for a new world in the oral and pictorial networked dictionary.
In England I was working on understand how widely 'functional illiteracy' spreads. At that time Apple Computer were funding educational projects and with their support I was researching the best software tools to support post 'A' level computing and business studies students who had not been allowed to start a degree course because their English skills were so poor. The selected students worked intensively using word processors and writers’ tools to improve their literacy skills. One student had already left university with a 2.1 in Computing.
A global village in cyberspace
And what about the Internet - the much hyped Superhighway? The Internet had become an element of popular culture since 1989 when the metaphor, the World Wide Web, was first adopted. My background in English Literature meant that I found my understanding often came from the current science fiction. For example, spatial constructs were utilized to make the Internet appear as a tangible entity placed within a familiar geographical context. A popular metaphor adopted around the same time was cyberspace coined by William Gibson in his novel Neuromancer (1984) to describe the world of computers and the society that gathers around them (Dodge 2004).
In the early 1990s we were just becoming aware of Douglas Adams, the inventive writer of science fiction and radio plays on the same topic. In fact, because of his skill in imagining how technology could be, he was employed by Apple to imagine the future. The actual object in his famous title, the Hitch Hikers’ Guide was, in fact, a laptop before they were invented, connected to the internet that did not yet fully exist. How Douglas foresaw the future we will never know but he was one of the first creative writer to prophesy the power of digital communication for good and ill.
How could we imagine in the 1990s that books would disappear, replaced by that plastic device he described in The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy. A green screen with white writing linked up to 3 skyscrapers full of information personifying something called the ‘Internet’!
I realised it would be quite a coup if I asked Douglas to lead in a MirandaNet debate, The demise of the book is imminent, at Sussex University. In his mews office in Kensington I discussed the topic with him putting forward the arguments I had rehearsed about the death of the book. “The trouble is”, he said, “my publishers are not allowing me to write at all for anyone because my book is so overdue. But I would like to do the debate and I like your arguments. Can I use yours?”
“OK”, I replied, knowing how popular he would be, even back then. “You take my speech and I’ll write another one”. It was a deal! He put my speech in his hip pocket of his jeans.
A month before the conference Douglas Adams minders rang to say that they had kidnapped him in a French chateau with a moat in order to get the book written. But they would let him give the speech through a TV link from his mews office on the day.
So there I was on the Sussex University stage in front of an audience of 400. The two women publishers were in place who were debating the motion in praise of books. My chair was ready and, in the place where Douglas’s enormous bulk should have been, there was a screen focusing on an empty chair in his empty mews office. Clearly there was someone behind the camera - but no Douglas in front of it.
I began to panic. Douglas had a reputation for being very late – or even not turning up at all!
The hall fell silent. We all watched the screen – five minutes passed. Then there was a judder as the camera operator trained the camera on the front door – which we could just see down the narrow mews staircase that led straight into the office; the door was flung open. Douglas was silhouetted against the sunlight. He then blocked out the sun as he ran up the stairs and flung himself into the chair – so energetically that three buttons popped off his shirt!
“OK Douglas, very glad to see you”, I said hardly disguising my relief, “we are ready to start. Please propose the motion, Chair!”
Douglas pulled my notes, very crumpled, out of his jean’s pocket, where he had put them three months before, and glanced over them before he began. Of course, his speech was masterly but nothing to do with all the careful arguments I had so generously plied him with. My speech was overshadowed by his brilliance.
The lady publishers went jointly for our jugulars – remember this was still the early 1990s – thirty years ago. The women were lyrical about the weight of a book in your hand – the smell of an old book redolent of an earlier age. They talked of curling up in front of a fire with an exciting volume of fiction – and reading bedtime stories to wide-eyed attentive children
Douglas and I lost the debate by a significant margin.
“Thank goodness for that!” he boomed, “I’m just about to publish another book.” And the tv screen went blank.
What a loss Douglas was when he died so young!
I was not just reading science fiction but also reading the factual books that had been predicting the future since the 1960s. The most famous was Marshall McCluhan who invented the concept of the global village in 1964.
Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned.
Howard Rheingold, an Internet enthusiast of the 1990s, propagated the metaphor of virtual communities. I was very influenced by his vivid description of the Internet as "...a place for conversation or publication, like a giant coffee-house with a thousand rooms; it is also a world-wide digital version of the Speaker's Corner in London's Hyde Park, an unedited collection of letters to the editor, a floating flea market, a huge vanity publisher, and a collection of every odd-special interest group in the world" (Rheingold 1993, p. 130).
But we still had very few facts in 1994 when I gave a keynote to the Women in Computing conference at Manchester University keynote. Being an academic audience, I pointed out that opportunities for research through the internet were increasing. I was boasting the fact that there were at least 38,000 databases on the Internet at that time - how little did I know about the future. I suggested that the internet represented learning at its most anarchic and individual. On the other hand, I pointed out that it appeared that ninety percent of users were actually male, white and middle class. Any doubt was because some female users sign on as men to avoid sexual harassment. But Internet users were, despite uncertain gender, growing by at least five per cent a month, and a new learning methodology was emerging in my view.
I saw the World wide Web as just the beginning of the chance to share information under the radar of sleepy totalitarian governments. We were seeing that on the Internet everyone could communicate as equals.
The academic community never reveal sources. But we had spread amongst us eye-witness accounts of the Beijing massacre and messages like this cry from Vukovar in Yugoslavia under siege.
APEL ZA VUKOVAR IZ VUKOVARA!!!!!!!!!
How can I start a story of death and desire to live?
How can I describe millions of feelings in plain words?
How can I concentrate when a packet of death explodes nearby every few minutes?
How can I ask for help from someone whose face I cannot even imagine?
How can I ask in the name of thousands of people, and whom can I ask, when all the appeals and cries for help to stop this insane bloodshed have been unanswered?
Some of the twenty million users world-wide answered and passed this poem on. This lack of editorial control on the Internet was, for most users, its most important feature. We saw only good emanating from this.
What I said in my keynote was that electronic communications products were raising international issues. That amorphous, unedited service available at that time on BT networks represented a challenge to government, education and industry. The Internet was a challenge to some company cultures which are hierarchical and authoritarian. There were already strong demands in America and in Britain for more control of the services, especially government rights to read messages in order to intercept the activities of international crime and doubtful entertainment industries. But only rich nations can be corrupted: the developing world was disenfranchised from this information service by poverty, gender and poor telecommunications infrastructure.
Where did education stand in the debate? Some academics welcomed the opportunity to ‘surf the net’ unhindered. Some teachers preferred to have some control over the interface used by the students in their charge. A ‘Walled Garden’ was offered by BT in which children could be confined only to search for the digital information that the educators had deemed suitable – just like the databases I have written for Newsnet that was on an internal network. Would this work when the World Wide Web was live?
“Probably not”, I said. The evidence was that the Berlin Wall had fallen in one night in 1989 because bricks and mortar could no longer hold back the digital images of life in the West from the citizens in the East. Totalitarian Governments had lost the fight to keep their people ignorant – and at that time they did not have the technology to fight back. Tanks would not work anymore.
And in the audience of women in computing was Bozena Mannova who had triumphed over the tanks in Prague.
References
To add
Dodge, M. (2008). Understanding Cyberspace Cartographies: A Critical Analysis of Internet Infrastructure Mapping. (Doctoral Dissertation). Retrieved from http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/m.dodge/thesis/chap_4.pdf
Gibson, William. Neuromancer. ACE, July 1984. p. 243-244
Jamet, Denis L. (2010). "What Do Internet Metaphors Reveal about Perception of the Internet?" (PDF). Metaphorik. Retrieved June 23, 2014.
Mccluhan Understnading Media 1964
Before 1994: An Eastern European perspective
Before 1994: An Eastern European perspective 1
Red Army tanks invade
I woke up to a low, rumbling sound. The windows of our bedroom were vibrating. I pulled back the curtains on that hot summer night and saw a queue of military tanks passing by our window. “Where are they coming from?” I thought in a panic. I had never seen so many tanks before, and these were unmarked tanks, rumbling from the airport direct towards the centre of our city.
I lived in an apartment in Prague with my husband and two children on the main road that led from the airport to the centre of town. In those days the road was called Lenin Street, built under our ‘socialist’ government as a showcase for global politicians coming to Prague. It had only been opened just few weeks before. I was confused. Were the first visitors to see the beauty of our new road coming in tanks? Why?
About thirty minutes later our neighbour rang on our door and said, “`Listen to your radio! We are threatened with Occupation!” It was the 21st August 1968. Planes were disgorging tanks every two minutes at Prague’s Ruzyne airport.
Occupation. I knew about this concept from Second World War but I had never heard this word used in the context of my own country, Czechoslavkia. But occupation was a word that I heard repeatedly after that morning. But who was occupying my country? Who were my enemies?
Normally the radio closed down at two o'clock in the morning, but this time it was different. Shortly after half past one the radio announcer said: "Dear Listeners, keep your receivers on.” At five to two we heard words that, for many Czechs, were forever etched in their memory, "The troops of the Soviet Union, the Polish People’s Republic, the German Democratic Republic, Hungarian People's Republic and Bulgarian People’s Republic have crossed our state border. ”
After the first few sentences the announcer’s voice was closed down on the major broadcasting channel because the director of the Czech radio commanded the operators to switch off the microwave transmitters. The entire statement was heard only on radios that were on cable. The rest was silence. Twenty Czechs were killed around the radio station, the greatest carnage of that night, but this we did not know until much later.
I remember every minute of the first day of the Occupation. Everything was strange, weird, incredible... changes were happening that we neither understood, nor believed we had sanctioned. The young Russian soldiers, who were told that they were coming to liberate us again like 1945, were met with a barrage of anger and resistance from the crowds. The Czechs they laid down before the 2,000 invading tanks and stood on the running boards trying to persuade the soldiers to leave, but to no avail. Collaborators had invited the Communists in.
The shock was even greater because the atmosphere of the sixties that preceded this event had been vibrant in Czechoslovakia as it had in the rest of Europe. After shaking off the aftermath of the Second World War the Czechoslovakian New Wave emerged triumphantly in culture - so many mind provoking films, theatres and books. I was a young adult feeling that I had so much to live for. Indeed, we still endured shortages of the more exotic foods like bananas, quality clothes were hard to find, and fashion goods were limited. Long queues for essentials were still normal but I was happy every Thursday in the queue for new books.
Books were our intellectual food in the sixties. We were buying books, searching for books, borrowing books and reading, reading, reading anything and everything we could lay our hands on. There had never before been such an exciting time in my life. We believed freedom from Communism was coming. It was Dubcek’s Spring.The tight hold of our puppet government was being loosened. Soon we would soon be living a normal life in a Czechoslovakian democracy.
Of course, you only realize the value of things at the moment when you lose them. Only after that fateful day in 1968, did we look back and realize just how precious the sixties had been for Czechoslovakia. But from the time of the Occupation we lost our intellectual freedom again. The Russians were in town – and, most ironically for me, they arrived on my birthday.
Let me tell you how I have coped through a series of political upheavals that I did not necessarily agree with. People in democracies like Britain will find it difficult to understand how frequently some Europeans have had to assimilate the impact of political upheaval. Often these can be traced in the renaming of familiar places. Much has happened politically since 1968, for example, and today Lenin Street is called European Street.
But these political changes had dogged my country even before 1968. For example, I appear to have lived in nine countries. First I lived in Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia: then, I lived in Czechoslovakia, Czechoslovak People’s Democratic Republic, Czechoslovak Socialistic Republic, Czech and Slovak Federal Republic, Czechoslovakia again, and finally in Czech Republic or Czechia. But, in fact, all this time I have been in the same house in Prague 6. This obsessive naming and renaming of our state is the most visible impact on ordinary people as political extremists fight for supremacy.
But momentous events have an impact on ordinary people. Often they decide as a result to do some good in their lives. I have tried to be one of those ordinary warriors undermining oppression of thought in whatever form I found it.[1]
A ‘mere’ woman
My story will help to illustrate the rate of political change in mainland Europe in my lifetime. I was born during Second World War into the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia during Hitler’s occupation of Czechoslovakia. Our educational system was badly affected by the Nazi ideology: Czech universities were closed and Czech children were offered a very limited education, sometimes going to school only once a week. Such is war.
By the time my education started under the communist regime, our country was called the Czechoslovakia Peoples’ Democratic Republic. I was the oldest daughter of a father who was a teacher of mathematics and physics. But I was a girl: my father wanted a son. He would have liked this son to have an engineering education which he never achieved himself as he was from very poor family. At the time I felt pressured to imitate the boys, in the way I approached technology, at least. But today, I am grateful to him because he insisted on a ‘boy’s’ education for me. So from the very beginning I took part in the technical and mathematical competitions at schools where I was successful. I do not ever remember my father saying: “You cannot do these competitions, you’re just a girl.” He taught me that I was entitled to do anything I want to do. All the time he said to me,” Do not say this or that is impossible: just say that you do not know how to do it, yet”.
We were poor but from the age of ten, my father impressed upon me that I should study at the best university for engineering in Prague, the Czech Technical University. He even specified the Faculty of Radio Technology. Indeed, it was the best fit for my future profession in computer science. Of course I had no idea what he was talking about when I was ten but I was influenced by his belief in me. I am grateful to him as well since all the literature tells us that family and society have a great influence on creating and maintaining positive attitudes.
Our country’s name had already changed again when I started at university to the Czechoslovak Socialistic Republic. The influence of the communist regime on the curriculum was very pronounced overall, but this did not greatly impact on mathematics and technical education because these subjects largely involved incontrovertible facts. I was admitted into the Technical Faculty without problem. There were one hundred and fifty boys and only five girls in my year. I tried hard to be equal to the boys and, honestly, this was not too difficult.
The subjects I studied at school turned out to be very useful later on during my study of computer science. I graduated in 1967 with a radio engineering degree. After university I started to work in a company called Aritma in their Czechoslovak plant producing Czech computers that used punch cards. At that time Czechoslovakia computer design was beginning to be recognized. My country was not only buying our first main frames computers from the West, but designing our own as well.
After the 1968 Occupation we had to take step backwards because the Russian prevented us from buying the best from the West to learn from. Believe me, working in computer science without decent computers was somewhat difficult: Russian copies of Western computers were poor. We were happy if we could just keep them running a day at a time.
Our Austrio Hungarian Heritage
After we had suffered the Russian occupation, a ‘normalization’ process was evident in Czechoslovakia. Instead of being a socialist republic we were now under the Soviet Communists. Many Czechs felt deeply that, during the normalization process, the character of the Czechs was sublimated. Amongst all the questionable changes that were taking place in the country the worse were the changes to the Czech education system. Again, all this was under strong ideological supervision of Czech Communist puppet government who were already running the country, aided and abetted by the Soviet Union.
Before 1968 we had an excellent system - our heritage from the Austrian Hungarian Empire. This exceptionally effective system had its roots in the eighteenth century. Before 1774 there was virtually no organized school system in Bohemia. Private education was designed exclusively for the rich, indigenous class of society. But the majority of the population was illiterate. Bohemia was, at that time, part of the Austrian Empire. Empress Maria Theresa introduced compulsory school attendance for children from 6 to 12 years of age.
In addition to compulsory schooling, the Empress introduced so-called Upper School Patronage, transferring responsibility for the construction of schools and the selection of teachers to rich burghers. These larger schools were better equipped. The first school libraries were founded; and, the status of teachers was improved. After 1848, financial patronage was taken over by the municipalities.
The School Act of 1869 that introduced compulsory eight-year schooling also set up teacher training for four-year as well as maximum teaching time of thirty hours per week. These conditions were possible because of the weakening of the church's authority and oversight. School directors appointed a city council or rural council although the ultimate authority was the emperor himself.
After the establishment of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1918, directors began to be appointed on the basis of selection. During the selection process, not only the qualifications of the applicant, the length of their practice were considered, but also scientific activity were evaluated[2] [3] ????. For one hundred years, all Czechoslovak and then Czech children had some kind of state education enjoying very good teaching.
But the state education deteriorated. 1938, 1948, 1968 and 1989 each bought in new kinds of political restrictions on our freedom and our schools. The first three dates are not very happy ones for the Czechoslovaks, because they bought in totally different governmental and educational systems. Firstly the 1938 occupation was by Hitler. Then we were liberated by the Red Army in 1945 followed by a short period of democracy the Communist party was voted into government by the Czechs in 1948. The full Russian occupation I have described came in 1968. Modernization at all levels of Czechoslovak education by the Communists occurred in the beginning of eighties. In fact, a new school law, adopted in 1984, was valid with amendments up to 2004. According to this law the school system was absolutely centralized: all children were taught the same curricula using the same textbooks. This suited our totalitarian overlords whatever the new systems were actually called: communism, socialism, Soviet or Russian.
People like me, who wanted Czechoslovak to be ruled by the native Czechs, could not influence the fundamental changes were made in Czechoslovak education in 1948. All legislative standards on education had been abolished and the schools were governed by regional national committees of Communist party in the pedagogical, personnel and administrative spheres. School directors were no longer appointed on the basis of selection procedures, but on the basis of the decision of the relevant National Committee, which was decided by the Communist party. At this time, school principals had virtually no competence in school management, administration, education, or personnel issues. All of these areas were governed by government, the ministry and national committee regulations. In 1977, the duties of the head teachers, responsible for the ideological, pedagogical and vocational aspects of the work of the school, were defined by law.
The state of education in Czechoslovakia after the Russian occupation in 1968 was a particular cause for concern. Swathes of gifted Czechs emigrated, many of whom were computer scientists and teachers. In fact, many experts had seen the writing on the Wall, literally, and had emigrated for the USA before 1968 - well-known people like the Czech, Antonin Svoboda who was member of team designing computers in US during the Second World War. Svoboda returned after the war to Czechoslovakia and started the development and design of Czech computers. He created a team of experts in Prague and they worked at the most sophisticated level. But it was impossible for them to do top-level research, not just because of lack of Western technology, but mainly because of crushing supervision from communists who did not value or understand innovation. The last members of that group emigrated after 1968.
But not everybody can emigrate. Somebody has to stay at home to prepare the population for a post-communist era, even if you have the awful sense that this regime will last forever.
In terms of computer science, at the beginning of seventies, a group of people emerged from those who were advising schools with the idea of creating master classes focusing on different subjects. Technical disciplines were at the center of this move and algorithms and coding were key topics. Westerners may not realise that the reason why technical disciplines were promoted by the Soviet totalitarians was because these were not a danger to communistic ideology in the ways that cultural, historical and literary studies would be. The arts would promote critical thinking whereas peering into the engine of computer was not the stuff of revolution.
So it is not surprising that the Russians, in fact, supported these master classes. In 1971, the first classes were started with a four-year curriculum of coding and other computer science topics that started in six gymnasiums (grammar schools) in Czechoslovakia. Of course they needed computing teachers and went to the universities to find them. This is when I had my lucky break.
Sometimes life chances turn up by accident – and this is exactly what happened to me.
Teaching as a vocation
Dr. Vorlickova, headmistress of Arabska, one of the best gymnasiums in Prague 6, decided that she would like to institute a class focused on programming. She started with her own teachers of mathematics, but they did not have enough knowledge and experience. Also she needed some computers on which students could test their programs. Her old classmate from The Faculty of Mathematics, Professor Konicek, was also the head of Department of Computer Science, Czech Technical University in Prague which is considered to be an equal to Imperial in London. In fact, it was the first department of computer science in Europe and celebrated 50 years of work in 2014. The headmistress asked Professor Konicek if he could find somebody at the Department to help her to teach computers. I was asked to do it.
I was little afraid. I had no experience of teaching adults, never mind school children. But I was a member of Computer Centre at the department and I had a degree in Computer Science from University of Waterloo in Canada. Most importantly, I wanted to teach, but because of my lack of support for the Russian invasion in 1968 I was not allowed to teach at University. So teaching part-time at the high school in Arabska looked like an attractive substitute.
In September 1973, my first class was first year students. I was at that time, if I may say so, an attractive, young woman with fashionable long hair[4] . But do not imagine that communism breeds equality between men and women. I had my first real taste of inequality when I entered the secondary school classroom for the first time. A boy in first row said with a sneer to his neighbour:
“What, that WOMAN will teach us programming!”
“Yes I will,” I answered politely.
And I did.
After three lectures they realised that I knew what I was talking about. They began to respect the fact that I was a member of world-class university, where we were not only teaching, but where we were creating compilers for our students. We could do this because in our Computer Centre even though we only had a mainframe Russian computer Minsk without an operating system and compilers of FORTRAN and Algol programming languages[5] . Later on, we got into Computer Centre Czech made copy of French computer Tesla and we had to write those compilers again for it, because it had different computer architecture.
For first year coding we taught Algol as a first language, later on Pascal. We were also teaching COBOL and FORTRAN. But we were not only teaching programming languages, we also taught algorithms, mathematical methods, numerical mathematic, data processing and the grammars of programming languages. So computational thinking and problem solving were an important element in the curriculum. In the last year students undertook projects where they used the computer to solve problems and this exercise played an important part in their final exam.
The school hired another teacher from Faculty of Mathematics, Charles University which was the best place in the country for teacher education. This co-operation between teachers was good for all the institutions. So the Gymnasium had the best teachers from the universities and the universities had the pick of the best students. Meanwhile the students had access to good mainframe computers which were not yet in their schools at that time.
The developments in the curriculum at Arabska Gymnasium were being mirrored across the country because the teaching of computers in education has always followed the development of technology in the wider world. For example, at the end of the 1960s, electronic data processing was growing in popularity. Students, mainly those at university, were acquainted with the principles of computers. During the 1970s, the emphasis was on algorithms and the active use of programming languages. The main motto of this era was ‘Every Czech should be a programmer’.
In the 1980s access to computers exploded. Computer literacy for everyone was the main aim of the computer professionals. In this decade 8-bit black and white computers started to appear in Czech schools accompanied by strong emotions[6] , great expectations and mixed results. This proved to be an advantage, as the government of that time equipped nearly every school with an 8-bit computer laboratory. The computer rooms were the focus of complex after school activities. Computers and Informatics was easily established as an obligatory, separate subject in secondary schools because of central control of the curriculum.[7]
But, centralized management also had some disadvantages. The best ways of introducing technology into schools were not considered. Some decisions were made which later worked against the integration of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) into the curriculum. The issue was that all Czech teachers had to pass the elements of a programming course without understanding the reasons why. They were not told how this skill would improve their ability to teach such subjects as geography or English. A negative attitude emerged within the profession as well as a tendency to understate the importance of educational software in teaching and learning. Indeed, we had not developed compelling arguments to persuade the average teacher to take on the teaching of Computing.
By the second half of the 1980s, the Communist regime had begun to understand the importance of computing and computer science. In the Party’s view one of the fundamental conditions for successful development of a society was the use of scientific and technological development. The resort has been given the task of preparing, not only qualified experts for the electronization of individual sectors of the national economy, but also to prepare the younger generation for the daily use of electronics. They also understood that teachers had to be prepared first.
So a wide spread campaign started to put computers into schools. The Ministry of Education set up a special commission mostly made up of high school teachers who had had experience with using computers in education and with the teaching of such courses. The commission was working on a complex project that included curriculum development, textbook preparation, and training for teachers. The government provided the financial support for those activities. At first glance the programme was very sophisticated which was not popular with very conservative teachers. Another challenge was that at that time education in Czechoslovakia was in 4 different languages. Schools not only worked in the Czech language, but also in Slovak: also Polish and Hungarian were used in some areas. Translation was not a problem, but there had to be consensus amongst four different educational committees and two ministries of education: Czech and Slovak. But we overcame all these problems because we all really believed in Computer Science education in schools.
The Czechoslovak Government approved the Long-term Comprehensive, [8] an electronization program for schools on 19th December 1985. Full-scale implementation was complete in1995. This implementation program was based on approved principles and aimed to cover all levels and categories o.
By 1986, Informatics was established as a compulsory subject in the first year of secondary school. The curriculum of Informatics was approved in March 1990. The subject was delivered in two lessons a week in the first year of secondary schools. The curriculum was designed to embrace the features of the Czech computers IQ 151 and IBM PCs.
Also in 1986 we had introduced a new course at Arabska, with a less than catchy title, Algorithms and Programming. This was included in the curriculum to implement digital technologies into education. The title implied that all children should become programmers. However, the course materials made it clear that pupils could learn to use computers without being programmers. “ What we need to do is to teach students how to communicate with a computer” was the mantra.
In 1989, textbooks were prepared for the subject. There were basic simple algorithms and as a programming language Basic or Pascal were used, depending on the school. It was not difficult to teach the course, but what was really difficult was to experiment with programming on unreliable and badly designed computers. We had to input source code of programs from the keyboard and output was on a monitor. In fact, we used black and white TV sets as the monitor and programs were stored on a standard tape recorder. In these primitive conditions it was time consuming to get a program work. But at least we were in the game. And soon computers designed in the West started to come into schools solving many of these problems. Once the schools had reliable computers we could train a relatively high number of teachers.
To be honest, the implementation programme has never been fully completed because there have never been enough efficient computers. This is legacy from before 1989, when Czechoslovakian computer production was inadequate. Indeed, the Czechoslovakian industry lagged significantly behind the quality and reliability of computers from the West. And there was also embargo on computers from west.
Nevertheless Czechoslovakian ingenuity meant that we were keeping up as best we could.
The three authentic reports that follow from schools in the project provide you with a picture of what was going on the ground from 1986 when new subject, Information Technology (IT) was introduced. I was member of a team that designed the syllabus and the teacher training so I knew about situation in the schools. We were offering textbooks for the classroom and teacher training programmes supported by specially prepared methodical materials.
The first and second report from that era, written by the teachers in charge of the IT programme, tow the party line. The third one is critical of what was happening to our curriculum - a brave move in a Communist state.[9]
Report one: Gymnasium Hlucin
In the school year 1986/87, we focused on further improving the efficiency of our pedagogical work, including the introduction of electronization into teaching through the new teaching subject Informatics and Computing. For this purpose the school has received from Comenius, a Czech company, four microcomputers: IQ 151. We are also running a project focusing on the design of a specialized classroom of computer technology that will be built in school in 1988.
In fact, computer-based programming and programming began at our school in the early 1980s under the vocational education module with optional courses for 3rd and 4th year of study. The content of this subject focused on algorithms, programming and different forms of computer technology. The lack of computing technology equipment at school has been a drawback because students have had to test their programs on the computers belonging to local businesses.
Improvements in our computing teaching were already underway in the mid-eighties. The obligatory subject of Informatics and Computer Technology was introduced to the first years in our grammar schools and the school started to equip itself with the first personal computers and other computer equipment. The quality of the students' access to the computer technology continues to be improved, a number of independent works are processed within secondary education and our project solutions are being presented at the national level. Specialized classrooms for computer science and programming are being built. One classroom features ten IQ150 computers, a printer, and a floppy disk drive.
Report Two: Gymnasium Hlucin
In the school year 1986/87, we focused on further improving the efficiency of our pedagogical work, including the introduction of electronization into teaching through the new teaching subject Informatics and Computing. For this purpose the school has received from Comenius, a Czech company, four microcomputers: IQ 151. We are also running a project focusing on the design of a specialized classroom of computer technology which will be built in school in 1988.
In fact, computer-based programming and programming began at our school in the early 1980s under the vocational education module with optional courses for 3rd and 4th year of study. The content of this subject focused on algorithms, programming and different forms of computer technology. The lack of computing technology equipment at school has been a drawback because students have had to test their programs on the computers of local businesses.
Improvements in our teaching were already underway in the mid-eighties. The obligatory subject of Informatics and Computer Technology was introduced to the first years in our grammar schools and the school started to equip itself with the first personal computers and other computer equipment. The quality of the students' access to the computer technology continues to be improved, a number of independent works are processed within secondary education and our project solutions are being presented at the national level. Specialized classrooms for computer science and programming are being built. One classroom features ten IQ150 computers, a printer, and a floppy disk drive.
Report two: Gymnasium Vimperk
1984/85 marked the beginning of the Extended Programme of School Development in the Czechoslovakian Educational System. We are reporting on secondary education where we are now undertaking great changes in the content of the curriculum and the content of subjects.
We are pleased that a new subject - vocational education – has been introduced in the interests of developing practical polytechnic education. Within this course, these grammar school students can choose between the following modules: agriculture, economics, construction, electrical engineering and informatics. These newly introduced courses are now an obligatory part of the final exams.
Now our students compete in the Czech language quiz, the Pushkin Memorial event and sports and defence (military?) competitions. Students also engage in helping in agricultural co-operatives during harvest. Our students are participating in a large number of competitions, such as Mental Olympics tests in Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry, Russian.
In the context of curriculum change we have had to accept that musical and arts education will disappear from our high school curriculum and that these subjects are now offered through cultural performances that visit all schools periodically. We observe that old textbooks have been changed to new ones although they are not always such good quality. We note also that the textbooks on literature, foreign languages, history, and civic education are now influenced by communist ideology. Our students also now participate in a course called About our Country, where tomorrow means yesterday.
At this time Czechoslovak Television started to produce educational programmes. So the government decided that a special educational computing course would be broadcast over three years on Czech TV. The Ministry of Education recommended me as the professional series adviser. So in this roundabout way I became a government adviser too.
Each of the half hour programmes covered the lessons from the new syllabus. In the first year personalities from a wide range of areas were asked to explain what role the computer had had in their lives in order to make the programme attractive to the average teacher. We taught aspects of the course on the screen as well and featured real secondary school students, not only Gymnaziums which are our equivalent of grammar schools in the UK. The programme, Logically Speaking, was well received by students as well as teachers. Many of them still remember today when this television programme about computers came to their attention.
In the following years the team prepared more comprehensive programs. The name of show changed to Practically Speaking and we avoided lectures about algorithms and programming. This second series was about the application of computers in different areas like medicine, architecture, mining, handicapped people and so on. We started each programme with an e-mail message to people who had been primed, and by the end of the programme we had some answers. In fact, the e-mail process was not authentic, because in 1991 email was only just emerging, because the Internet was still in its infancy. But the simulation certainly fired the viewers’ imagination about what they would be able to do when the Internet became widely available.
By the end of that two years series I was not only the TV adviser and teacher, I had also become the moderator of show, the technical adviser and co-author of the scripts. But I was not alone. Every week I could rely on valuable advice from my colleagues at the Czech Technical University and my students from Arabska Gymnasium.
All this was an exciting experience for me. I am very happy that I had that opportunity to move Informatics forward for our students. The 40 years I have spent at the Arabska Gymnasium gave me valuable experience in teaching just when computing sciences were entering Czech classrooms. I have prepared many students for their profession by opening up to them the world of computers and, after the changes in 1989, opening the doors to the world. I am grateful for that.
The Velvet Revolution
I do not remember the invasions in 1938 and 1948. But I do remember 1968 and 1989. Two quite different events. In 1968, as I have explained earlier, we lost the hope that the Czech communists who were in league with the Russians would be defeated and that we would be free to enjoy democracy again.
But in 1989 Czechoslovakia was liberated - and not just in Czechoslovakia. In the Russian block many countries threw off totalitarianism and adopted democratic systems of government. Freedom came at last. Those were memorable days, memorable stories, which we have to remember: at least those of us in Central Europe and in Czechoslovakia.
Evidence of political shifts in attitudes in the populace were already evident in the first half of 1980s as the political structure of the Soviet Union was forced by circumstances to change. The power of the Communist Party was diminishing. Multi-candidate elections took place when Mikhail Gorbachev became first secretary of Soviet Communist party. With him came a new openness of approach called Glasnost. Criticism of government officials was permitted and the media was allowed freer dissemination of news and information. By the second half of the 1980s, the political atmosphere in the Soviet Union and its satellite states was more relaxed than it had ever been before.
Another event that, in fact, started the full Velvet Revolution was fall of the Berlin Wall. This Wall had been built during the early years of the Cold War between Eastern totalitarian systems and Western democracies. West Berlin was a geographical loophole through which thousands of East Germans fled to the democratic West. In response, the Communist East German authorities built a wall that totally encircled West Berlin. It was thrown up overnight, on 13 August 1961, and met no resistance. This Wall was particularly cruel as it suddenly separated not only the city but its families for decades.
Just as suddenly, the Wall was pulled down on 9th November, 1989 by ordinary people. This demolition was as surprising as its construction. The first glimmer of hope was an announcement on Eastern German TV in the early evening of the 9th that the demolition of the Berlin Wall was imminent. However, the announcement did not say when this would happen. Disregarding this small fact, a massive upsurge gathered at the Berlin border crossings: people from the East were simply crossing into the West. The guards did not shoot: soon they too began to join the insurrection.
By ten o'clock in the evening, tens of thousands of East Germans flowed across all the transition points into West Berlin. At the same time, people from the West were coming with hammers to help demolish Berlin Wall. My 17 years old son also went to Berlin immediately, and I still have fragments of Berlin Wall at home to remind me of this popular uprising.
But nothing was changing in Czechoslovakia.
The Communist government put in place strict control over its citizens to prevent any sniff of Glasnost in Czechoslovakia's. The national Communist Party prevented Gorbachev's reforms from being enacted at home. Dissidents and their families were even more severely punished in the second half of the 1980s. Vaclav Havel, a key dissenter, was in prison[10] .
In the midst of these restrictions Mikhail Gorbachev arrived in Prague on 6th April 1989 and walked among thousands of cheering Czechoslovaks who thronged streets. The people remembered, of course, that in 1968 these same streets were thronged by invading Soviet tanks. But Gorbachev wanted to show that things were different now. He crossed the streets of Prague to Vaclavske Namesti, a famous place ofl
Beside Gorbachev walked, the 77-year-old Czechoslovak leader Gustav Husak, who had ruled for the last 17 years. Gustav, the traditionalist, had been pushing for a profound social and cultural control and wanted more political and economic changes in the old Communist mould. It was a rather an absurd situation. Here were two representatives of communism side by side and yet they had totally different approaches. Husak was a confirmed totalitarian who wanted total control of the people: Gorbachev, who had tuned into the date? Glasnost Zeitgeist, had realized that the Communists were failing to deliver and needed to adjust in order to continue to please the majority of citizens in the Soviet Block.
So in April 1989 in Prague, the streets were full of people who had arrived without being forced to support the visit. People were very curious about the author of Glasnost, but were hiding the excitement and the expectation connected with his arrival in case they were identified by the police.
There had been no official announcement: people were simply reporting Gorbachev's arrival to each other by word of mouth. They gathered in those streets and squares where they thought he might go.
I was on Lenin Street, which leads from the Ruzyne airport to Prague, just as I had been all those years ago when tanks rumbled through. I arrived there with my colleagues and students from university. We stayed at the end of this street, watching.
‘Things are changing,’ said a man of my vintage, who remembered the columns of tanks in 1968 as I did. ‘Even a year ago, I could not have imagined welcoming a representative of the Soviet government so warmly. Nor could I have foreseen that so many other Czechs would be curious about the leader from Moscow.’
I had also a great deal of hope for that day, but after the experiences of the sixties I was being somewhat cautious. Even after the war public response to Gorbachev’s visit to Prague in April, the Czechoslovak Communist Party continued to carry out their totalitarian policies, disregarding the public mood in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent democratic transition of other Soviet-bloc countries such as Poland and Hungary. In the end these politically repressive conditions in Czechoslovakia, combined with the collapse of the Soviet Union, inspired the Czechoslovaks to demand change from their government.
In the last six weeks of 1989, after the Wall was demolished in Berlin, Czechoslovak opposition activists staged what became known as the Velvet Revolution, to overthrow the Communist government. This revolution was started by a Czech students demonstration on 17th November 1989: this was Student’s Day commemorate closing Universities in Czechoslovakia by Hitler in 1939. I went to demonstration Friday afternoon with candle and rose and, of course, with my students from university.
Government used the police to dismantle this student demonstration at the National Street. Next day students declare strike and on Monday, Vaclavske Namesti, our famous place for protest, began to fill up every afternoon. At first it was 60,000 students; the next day, there were 100,000 inhabitants of Prague; the day after a quarter of a million Czechs were boosted by our workmen; finally, on the last day, 350,000 people were supported by more people from the countryside. Dissidents appeared in the Tribune with Vaclav Havel, who was released from prison, in leading position; people were clinking their keys loudly together, and the demonstrations ended with a national anthem. There were great emotions and expectations among people. The people had not triumphed in 1965: but in 1989 my children’s generation won the day, and the future.
After this momentous week of protests, the Communist Party abdicated its leadership role. A civic forum (OF), won the first democratic elections for many years. In December 1989, the new communist parliament elected Vaclav Havel as president of Czechoslovakia. Prague Castle courtyard was full of students greeting Czechoslovakia’s new president.
We remember this as the Velvet Revolution. In this strange epithet name one idea seems to conflict with the other: why is this? Indeed, this was Revolution of the people: but a Velvet Revolution because no-one was killed. We still remember this event between each other with the gift of a single flower whenever we met after a break, especially at our airports and train stations.
Reaching out to the West
The new curriculum of Informatics was approved in March 1990. The subject was delivered through two lessons in the first year of secondary schools. The curriculum was formulated to fit the Czech computers IQ 151 and IBM PCs. In 1989, textbooks were prepared for Informatics. As a programming language Basic or Pascal were used, depending on the school.
At that time Czechoslovak Television produced educational programs. Government decided that a special educational course would be prepared and it was broadcast for the three years in CST.
The situation changed dramatically during the 1990s. Some favoured schools were now better equipped with some specially trained teachers: privileged secondary schools through the Czech Republic had quality computers and connections to the Internet. However, the majority of the schools in Czech Republic did not yet have this opportunity for two reasons: firstly, there were still not enough teachers for Informatics; and secondly, there was not enough financial support from the government. The Eastern Block continued to lag behind the West in information technology because we were limited in the imports of computer technology we were allowed to make. This limitation led to the creation of a joint project of the Unified System of Electronic Computers (JSEP) in 1968 but this movement was not a great success.
By the second half of the 1980s, microcomputers and personal computers (PCs) had began to appear in Czechoslovakia. But imports were limited and the words domestic substitute meant that the computer was substandard. The great hope that began to take place in these isolated Eastern Block countries was that the Internet would instigate the exchange of knowledge overcoming international barriers of status, class, politics and continents. We could see that achieving this vision would require a partnership between the developers of new technologies, the sellers, the politicians and educators. But how, we speculated, would this level of understanding between the partners be established?
We endured another major political upheaval in 1993, when the Czech Republic split from Slovakia heralding many changes: some very positive, some not so good[11] . In the first place it was not good that mathematics was no longer considered part of basic education as it was 100 years ago. As a result there was no compulsory final exam in mathematics at the end of high schools. Maths had also been removed from the information technology and engineering curricula. But we hoped that this change would be reversed and our country would value Maths education again.
However, we were confident that the world would need educated people who want to learn, people who are able to work in teams and co-operate on all levels, and people who will come up with new ideas and innovations. But most of all people who are empathic and kind to each other no matter their nationality or their station in life. We envisaged teams of people who can think critically and creativity, communicate effectively and cooperate on a global scale. We also wanted to reach out to people who were curious, persistent in their learning and adaptable: people too who had social and cultural awareness. We wanted find such people to share in the creation of educational systems that developed democratic citizens first and foremost.
On this quest to find partners from the West I went to The Women in Computing conference at Manchester University in 1994 where Christina Preston was giving a keynote about her experience as a woman in the world of computing. What I heard about her work and the founding of the MirandaNet Fellowship made me realise I had identified a community we could trust.
Our Anglo-Czech alliance began here.
Notes
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