Revolution or flight from reality? The IoP Education Group Conference 1999

Details Revolution or flight from reality? The IoP Education Group Conference 1999 Revolution or flight from reality? The IoP Education Group Conference 1999

Sep 1999

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1999phyed..34..258d&link_type=abstract

Physics Education, Volume 34, Issue 5, pp. 258-260 (1999).

Physics

Physics Education

Scientific paper

The 1999 Education Group Conference attracted some 60 teachers and educationalists to the salubrious outskirts of the city of Leicester on 2 3 July. The title of the conference was The ICT revolution: just how will ICT change my physics teaching? For those not au courant with current jargon ICT stands for Information and Communications Technology, or, in short, computers.
ICT was certainly to the fore from the presenters, who practised what they preached. Every talk was delivered using Microsoft PowerPoint, obsolescent overhead projectors serving only as laptop stands. Animated slides, computer generated and controlled, were projected on to a screen and supplemented as required by (fairly) instant live excerpts from relevant computer programs.
The theme of the conference was set by the opening discussion led by the trio PowerPoint, Ian Lawrence (chairman of the Institute of Physics Education Group) and Philip Britton (vice-chair). They gave us the slogan Physics first! with technology, however brilliant or politically correct, only significant and valuable insofar as it helped students learn physics. And learning is a social activity: any system that places one child in front of a computer screen for hours on end should be suspect. Much the same could be said of a voltmeter, of course, and the minimal situation must include a pair of students and a teacher as well as the apparatus. Another message: think of the computer system as just another piece of equipment whose use is determined by the learning task, not as an item that determines the task.
Figure 1. Jason Wye, Secretary of the Education Group, opening the Conference.
It may not be surprising that the level-headed delegates agreed whole-heartedly with these sentiments, but they were also supported and reinforced by all the speakers as the conference went on. The first speaker was Jerry Wellington, ex-physics teacher, now at the University of Sheffield. In his presentation `Multimedia in science teaching: friend or foe?', he gave us a useful overview (with `live' excerpts) of a number of multimedia CD-ROMs - the good, the bad and the ugly. The organizers arranged the programme so that each presentation was followed by group discussion about the points raised (or skated over) by the presenter, and Jerry, with customary efficiency, had listed these. In brief:

• Multimedia can be misleading, making science too clean and `easy' compared with messy experiments that don't always work.
• Many good CD-ROMs are American, with different spelling etc. Is this a problem?
• The best-selling CD-ROMs are revision aids: knowledge-rich, skill-poor, packaged as a commodity. They are used at home, with little or no teacher involvement. Good or bad?
• How `authentic' is learning via multimedia? A subtle point too deep to be considered here.
• Multimedia can be motivating: almost as good as TV - compared with the poor old teacher with a piece of chalk.

The discussion groups took these points head-on: choose appropriate activities to back up or precede the multimedia; Americanization is inevitable; teachers can enrich - and know their students (who appreciate being known); the novelty of multimedia wears off with time, teachers go on for ever.
Laurence Rogers (University of Leicester) has produced a number of computer programs that help students use and make sense of graphs. He spoke about the latest version of his Insight program. Essentially, this allows students and teachers to delve into the meaning of graphs, attacking concepts which we physicists tend to take for granted but are serious stumbling blocks for students. This fact may go unrecognized, as it seemed to with the audience, who thought in general that the cure was more complex than the disease. Maybe the ideas were too new: one teacher was a user of the program and found it extremely useful. In view of the increasing use we make of graphs and the ease with which spreadsheet programs generate them, this topic merits a closer look.
The first day finished with a `Show and tell' session. Half a dozen delegates showed items of ICT that they had developed themselves or downloaded from the Internet. All of interest - too varied and complex to describe here, but look out for Leicester University's Challenger Learning Centre (space and astronomy) which gets on (limited) stream in October, and a really useful sample of excellent computerized astronomy activities from Gettysburg University.
Day 2 of the conference maintained the high standard of Day 1. It began with a presentation by Steve Dickens of Dixon's City Technology College. Technology colleges were `invented' by the last government to provide well-funded schools with a technological bias, the funding coming from a combination of industry and central government. The Dixon College provides computers at a rate of one per four students; all students have e-mail addresses and see computer use integrated into all subjects. Many have computers at home. So computer literacy is not a problem for either staff or students. Steve gave us examples of how the College makes use of its comparatively rich resources, but again emphasized that the prime objective of any activity or lesson was learning - and only if computer systems and programs could help in this were they used. All this fitted into the key messages that the conference was developing. Discussion centred this time around provision of equipment, time for `free' access, and the attitudes of teachers to ICT. A quick survey showed that about one-third of the delegates were confident that their schools or colleges would be as well-equipped as Dixon's in the very near future. There was a tantalizing glimpse of a change in methods of learning from a strongly teacher-directed experience to a form of `supported self- study'. We saw the danger of a development in which some students (perhaps most) had computers at home whilst a more impoverished group did not - yet another feature of a divided society. There seems to be an equally deep divide between ICT enthusiasts (and those of us willing to give it a go) and the entrenched opponents who from `fear of flying' or a deep conservatism are almost rabidly opposed to ICT. It will need more than merely technical training to overcome such a negative attitude to ICT.
The next session brought us into contact with a possibly less high-flown but to me a more exciting application of ICT - enthusing real children with basic common-or-garden physics. John Scaife of Sheffield University showed us a way of using ICT that, like a well-known beverage, reaches the parts that others do not reach. Instant nostalgia hit the more elderly participants as they saw that he was using the old and much loved BBC computer - but it will also work (with more fuss and bother) on a PC. It was simple enough: a motion sensor connected to a piece of neat software (Laurence Rogers again). You stand in front of it and it draws a horizontal line on the screen. Move about and the line slopes or wiggles. You are challenged to move in such a way that your `graph' matches a preset line. Add metre rules to introduce some measuring and we have the kind of maths-based but concrete activity that lies at the heart of physics. Students were quoted (from a Doncaster comprehensive school):
`I enjoyed using the motion sensor - it looked boring but it was OK. (higher praise hath no man)'
`It is fun but you also have to think to work out how you should move to copy the pattern on the screen. I learnt that to copy steeper slopes you have to move faster ... this is because you have to move further in the same amount of time.'
`Whoever said `A picture tells a thousand words' must have been a physics teacher.'
All this was backed up with appropriate research linked to the algorithm PEOR - Predict (what should happen), Explain (your prediction), Observe, React (comment, discuss ...). This is all very Vygotskian (we learned) - and it is constructivism in action. Brilliant, I thought.
In a parallel session Ian Lawrence demonstrated the use of ICT (via CD-R

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