Anne Mcdougall
email: a.mcdougall@unimelb.edu.au

John S Murnane
email: jmurnane@unimelb.edu.au

Sandra Wills
email: swills@csu.edu.au

The Educational Programming Language Logo: Its Nature and Its Use in Australia

Keywords: Logo, turtles, Logo in Australia, Lego Logo, constructivism 1

des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.

Introduction

Early in 1973 one of the co-authors, Anne McDougall, commencing a newly created position as Research Fellow in Computer Assisted Instruction at the University of Melbourne, set out to read every research paper then published concerning the use of computers in educational contexts. She found accounts of innovative work with drill and practice programs for learning, computer managed instruction, and some preliminary computer simulation and modelling programs. She also found a set of papers from a group working at MIT in the USA (Papert, 1971a;Papert, 1971b; the educational concepts behind Logo-and its subsequent versions such as LogoWriter and MicroWorlds.

A Language for Learning

The creation of a programming language of any sort is a complex business and the province of a special elite in the world of programming. Yet the difficulty of the creation of a language for fields such as business or mathematics, for which there is an existing set of well-tried models, pales into insignificance compared to the task of creating one for educational purposes: a space where a choice must first be made between various pedagogies, all with their own built-in advantages and disadvantages, advocates and detractors, before even the form of the language is decided on. Nor will the educational aim be simple. Is it to be a language to introduce the forms and disciplines of programming itself, or is it to facilitate a more general development in problem solving and analytical and logical thinking? Are we teaching computing and its applications, or are we using programming for some wider educational purpose? Looking back at the a-priori positions on the benefits that writing programs could bring to students, we find a remarkable unity of spirit among the pioneers of educational computing languages. Cynically, it could be argued that in the 1960s, apart from some rather inflexible Computer Assisted Instruction (CAI), and some (mostly non-interactive) simulations, writing a program was about the only educational thing students could do with a computer. But the pioneers, and particularly those with a hand in writing specialised educational languages, such as Kemeny and Kurtz who developed Basic, and Feurzeig and Papert, the developers of Logo, were all convinced that great educational advantages would come from programming a digital computer, although often for different educational and cognitive reasons. Weyer and Cannara (1975, p.3) put it this way: "If … any ideas which can be formalised may be studied concretely via a computer program, then, by learning programming in full generality, students can learn to construct laboratories to study any ideas they wish to think about."

The decade that produced the first educational computer languages is now 50 years in the past. With the singular exception of anything written by Seymour Papert, looking back through the papers and reports leaves a distinct impression of teachers striving towards goals imperfectly grasped, using computing equipment barely up to the task, and hampered by primitive translators, operating systems and input/output devices. Yet the overall feeling is of high optimism, more positive than one finds across the more recent literature. (Papert who had worked with Jean Piaget for many years, knew what he was doing from the outset, and Wally Feurzeig and Papert, working with Lisp at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT in the USA, not only had an example of a language congruent with their educational ideas, but one in which their new language could be written.) The pioneers, from their own experiences, knew that programming a computer had educational benefits, and were going to set about proving it to the world.

A Language for Learning Mathematics

Feurzeig's Logo group began with education and worked back to the form of their language. Early Logo was very simple. Like Basic, it came with built-in editing and file manipulation commands. If these are ignored, the 1971 version consisted of just 26 'operations,' five of which accessed the calendar and clock, and 15 'commands.' Most operations were concerned with program logic or list manipulation. An essential part of the design was to produce a language of such simplicity that it forced users to write their own library of commonly used routines, such as multiplication and division. From such a library, complex programs could be built. "Ideally, by the end of the course, each student would have created his own extended version of Logo" (Brown & Rubinstein, 1974, p.10).

There is no mention of the degree of difficulty inherent in learning to program generally, and certainly not in learning Logo, in Feurzeig's papers. The entire emphasis in The Final Report [START_REF] Feurzeig | Programming-Languages as a Conceptual Framework for Teaching Mathematics. Final report of the first fifteen months of the Logo project[END_REF] is on the difficulty of learning Mathematics, and how Logo was developed to make that easier. The programming language followed as a result of a specific educational need. The designers of Logo intended it not only as a vehicle to express Mathematical ideas and make Mathematical concepts concrete, they saw it also as a meta-language in which to express Mathematical thought (Feurzeig et al., 1969, p.5). Here is the origin of Papert's often expressed need to teach 'thinking about thinking' (Papert, 1971a, p.2) and the decision to write a computer language whose primitives and predicates inherently contained and expressed the mechanisms of logic and Mathematics. "Do we give children the instruction 'think!' without even telling them how to think?" (Papert, 1971a, p.4). The mathematical purpose expressed by Feurzeig is actually at odds with Papert who is at pains to stress the general problem solving capability of the language (Papert, 1971a;[START_REF] Papert | Twenty things to do with a computer[END_REF]). Lisp's origins in Artificial Intelligence were supposed to support this (Evans, 1992, p.14;Abelson et al., 1976, p.16), but no author we have read ever explained how it was to happen.

The 'Lo' in Logo suggested 'Logic,' and the earliest versions of the Logo system were written in Lisp, a list processing language. It is curious then that early papers (Feurzeig et al., 1969, p.1;[START_REF] Feurzeig | An Introductory LOGO Teaching Sequence: LOGO Teaching Sequence on Logic[END_REF].1) make it clear that Logo was "expressly designed" for the teaching of Mathematics. At that time there was no Turtle Geometry, and indeed no arithmetic functionality beyond addition and subtraction. Brown and Rubinstein (1974, p.3) flatly describe it as 'non-numeric'.

Many of the programs in the Final Report on the Logo Project [START_REF] Feurzeig | Programming-Languages as a Conceptual Framework for Teaching Mathematics. Final report of the first fifteen months of the Logo project[END_REF] seem forced, elementary and repetitive. Many from the primary level, ages 7 to 9, are examples of programs to reverse the letters in a word, print a set of consecutive numbers or simply print strings. The first lessons did not involve writing code at all. This did not happen until Lesson Seven (p. 67). In the secondary curriculum, many essential elementary functions such as divide and multiply were written by the teachers and given to the students to try to understand (p. 215), the inference being that students could not be expected to write these routines themselves. Johnson (2000, p.201) found "The position that the programming environments themselves, e.g., Logo microworlds, would become the school mathematics curriculum has clearly failed to gain the support of the educational system."

None of this suggests a language easily taken up by beginners and used for their own purposes. Part of the reason has to be the use, initially, of recursion for all loops, definite or indefinite. Recursion is, as Papert has said repeatedly, a powerful problem solving tool [START_REF] Papert | Mindstorms: Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas[END_REF]Papert, 1971a;[START_REF] Papert | Twenty things to do with a computer[END_REF]Papert, 2002) and indeed it is. But then, so is calculus! Papert's work with Jean Piaget resulted in a passionate belief in the idea of 'learning by doing,' something he later extended to what might be termed 'learning by making things.' Papert in particular has always insisted that Logo is designed to encourage experimentation, with students writing and testing their own creations. Given this emphasis, it is difficult to understand the reliance on recursion at the expense of a general iterative statement. We can find nothing in the early literature that asserts that students can be expected to discover a recursive solution to a problem on their own. All we can find are examples provided to students to explain, understand, and adapt. In his seminal book, Mindstorms, published in 1980, Papert states that "recursion stands out as the one idea that is particularly able to evoke an excited response." That might be so, but he devotes less than two pages to it, mentioning it once more in the Appendix in the context of 'circular logic' (p109). Brown and Rubinstein suggest that with suitable prior experience, students can write their own recursive routine to traverse a tree, but these writers give no clue to their success rate. They did find that "if a student couldn't figure out how to write a function, we could not slowly lead him down the path to discovery" (Brown & Rubinstein, 1974, p.43). Once acquainted with WHILE-DO in Basic or Pascal, or even the primitive Dartmouth-Basic GOTO, students have no trouble in writing their own indefinite loops [START_REF] Murnane | Models of recursion[END_REF][START_REF] Murnane | To iterate or to recurse?[END_REF]. (See also [START_REF] Mcdougall | Teaching and Learning about Recursion[END_REF]

Enter the Turtle

Even allowing for difficulty in conceptualising recursion, Logo is not English, and in its early versions Logo struggled to make progress. The cure for many of these problems was provided by Seymour Papert. Logo is often associated specifically with Papert, and particularly with his Turtle Graphics. He joined the project in January 1969 as a consultant (Feurzeig et al., 1969, p.1) and his invention of the Turtle and its commands transformed the language. A Turtle is a small robot which, when connected to a computer, can move and turn on the floor. At a stroke this eliminated the gap between entering a program and observing its outcome, since the Turtle could execute a command as soon as it was entered. It also solved the problem of students understanding what the command did. While they might need to be taught the meaning of "TEST IS COUNT /SENTENCE/ 1 (Feurzeig et al., 1971, p.45) they could easily appreciate what FORWARD 100 meant because it accorded with their own body actions and their natural language. Turtle Geometry provides an immediate and meaningful environment for the beginner.

Along with Turtle commands came definite iteration: REPEAT :N, relieving the programmer of the need to write all loops recursively. A recursive loop can only be executed by writing a procedure and then executing it. In keeping with the idea of observing actions as the commands were entered, you could now type REPEAT 4 [FORWARD 100 RIGHT 90] and watch a square being drawn. Note also the close correspondence to English syntax. Once the Turtle migrated from the floor to the screen, Logo became accessible and viable in any classroom.

Logo Comes to Australia

In The Logo project was instrumental in spreading computing, not only into primary schools, but also middle high schools because it changed people's perceptions of computing. At a time when the general population had never seen a computer nor knew what it might do for them, the Turtle and the English-like Logo language, particularly Papert's geometric Turtle commands, dispelled perceptions that computing was only for the Mathematical geniuses.

John Gilbert, originally from Hatfield in the UK but then working at the Centre in Hobart, wrote a version of Logo in which a virtual turtle left lines of asterisks on the screen to approximate the path the floor turtle was taking. [START_REF] Wills | Computer Education in Tasmanian Schools: ACS Lecture of the Year[END_REF][START_REF] Wills | Computer Education in Australian Schools[END_REF]. Papert's visit built on the pioneering work of the Tasmanians to inspire a generation of Australian Logo workers. The next few years saw the publication by Australian authors of several widely used Logo books [START_REF] Mcdougall | Learning Logo on the Apple II[END_REF][START_REF] Nevile | Let's Talk Apple Turtle[END_REF][START_REF] Carter | Thinking Logo: An Introduction to (the Universe through) Programming[END_REF]Newell, 1988a;[START_REF] Newell | Turtle Confusion[END_REF] A conference, Logo in Australia: Ten Years On, was held in Melbourne in 1985 to mark ten years of Logo work in Australia. By then Logo use was being investigated in many parts of the country, at all levels of education from kindergarten, where a single-key version of the language developed by Pauline Adams was used [START_REF] Adams | Various Computers in the Kindergarten[END_REF] through primary [START_REF] Wills | Doodle Design Debug: Process vs Content Issues in Classroom Computing[END_REF] and secondary [START_REF] Squires | Designing Computer Based Microworlds[END_REF][START_REF] Clarke | Logo Tool Kits[END_REF] schools, to teacher pre-service and in-service education [START_REF] Jones | Logo in Preservice Teacher Training: An Australian Experiment[END_REF][START_REF] Nevile | Some Comments on Logo after Ten Years[END_REF]. Selected papers from this conference were subsequently published [START_REF] Mcdougall | Teaching and Learning about Recursion[END_REF]. [START_REF] Richardson | Logo in Australia: 21 Years On[END_REF]. Children in Years 5-7 were each given a laptop computer with LogoWriter. The entire curriculum was conducted and expressed by the children as LogoWriter projects. Many schools emulated this approach, and LogoWriter and then MicroWorlds were used in laptop initiatives all over the country.

A second conference, Learning in Logo Microworlds was held in Melbourne in 1996, marking twenty-one years, the 'coming of age' of Logo in Australia. The Proceedings were published (McDougall & Dowling 1997) along with another book of Logo-related research papers, Logo in Australia: Selected Readings (Oakley 1996). The across-curriculum use of LogoWriter or MicroWorlds was associated with increasing use of thematic and project work approaches to curriculum planning, more collaborative, group and discussion work, and greater flexibility of timetabling [START_REF] Chapman | Logo and MicroWorlds at Westall Primary School: A 4 Year Tale[END_REF][START_REF] Best | MicroWorlds in a Year Seven Class[END_REF][START_REF] Betts | Teaching Programming Without Teaching Programming[END_REF][START_REF] Mcdougall | Logo Supporting the P -12 Curriculum in a Technology Immersion School[END_REF]Costa 1997;Kerwin 1997). As well as these cross-curricular applications, Logo use for enhancement of understanding of concepts in specific subject areas continued, for example in Science [START_REF] Duncan | Microworlds: Making the Connections between the Abstract Concepts in Elementary Science[END_REF][START_REF] Hopkins | Stars and Sprites[END_REF], Mathematics [START_REF] Yelland | 21 Years of Logo: Logo for the 21st Century[END_REF], and as a stimulus for reflection about natural language [START_REF] Dowling | Logo and Language Development[END_REF]. Student competence in programming [START_REF] Oakley | Young Children as Programmers: Fantasy or Flight?[END_REF] and issues in the teaching of programming [START_REF] Betts | Teaching Programming Without Teaching Programming[END_REF]) remained matters for discussion.

Research

In Australia, as in other countries, many research studies were undertaken investigating aspects of the use of Logo by students of all ages (see for example Gibbons 1997, p.10) and in a wide range of settings (for example [START_REF] Hopkins | Constructionist Learning and Teaching in a Computer Clubhouse Environment[END_REF]. We will outline here several more distinctive topics studied in this country.

Almost from the first, Logo has gone hand-in hand with Robotics, a natural extension of Papert's invention of the Turtle. Early experimenters often built their own interfaces to run computer-controlled models constructed from Fisher Technic and similar kits. One of the authors, John Murnane, built on ten years experience with Lego TC Logo and internally constructed interfaces for the Macintosh Classic by Jon Pierce at Melbourne State College. He was particularly interested in investigating recursion, as programming a robot in Logo not only requires it but provides a concrete model for students to explore directly [START_REF] Murnane | Bad Computer Science in Beginners Programming Courses: "Considered Harmful"? A case study of the Tufts graphical programming language[END_REF]. He also used Lego kits to investigate linguistic differences between using a written programming environment and a graphical one [START_REF] Murnane | Programming Languages for Beginners[END_REF]. Debora Lipson built on this work, concentrating on the mechanical design and construction of the robots, and providing new insights into teaching the Mathematics of gearing (Lipson, 2008). Interestingly, Lipson found confusing differences in the notation used by Mathematicians and Engineers to describe gearing ratios. Meanwhile, Peter Carter, working at Plympton High School in South Australia, was developing models in Lego/Logo to enable students to explore some of the issues in robotic locomotion [START_REF] Carter | Step by Step: Logo Legged Locomotion[END_REF].

The use of recursion in Logo has been the focus of a number of projects. [START_REF] Murnane | An empirical study of secondary students' expression of algorithms in natural language[END_REF] illustrated examples where children with prior experience in LogoWriter but without specific teaching about recursion, could have, but failed to use recursion in programming. In fact, there was almost no trace in their algorithms of them having encountered Logo at all.

The nature of some of the difficulties students have with using recursion in programming were analysed by McDougall in her Doctoral thesis [START_REF] Mcdougall | Teaching and Learning about Recursion[END_REF]. Anne was as able to show that young children can recognise, devise and interpret recursive structures and processes presented independently of the computer, in pictures, stories and everyday situations in their experience. She used techniques based on this finding to facilitate effective use of recursion in programming by children of upper primary school age [START_REF] Mcdougall | Teaching and Learning about Recursion[END_REF]McDougall, 1990b). Pamela Gibbons (1995a;[START_REF] Gibbons | Recursion: An Analysis of Individual Differences in Logo Programming[END_REF] extended this work in a study of individual differences among adult students learning to program with recursion. Gibbons (1997, p.7) discusses the value for a researcher of listening to students talking about their learning with Logo, and comments on students' remarkable ability to analyse and articulate their own thinking when they talk about their Logo experiences. John Vincent, working with upper primary school children and MicroWorlds found similar articulateness. He also studied individual differences, but focused on the visually rich aspects of the technology and interaction of these with children's writing. He found strong interactions, with excellent support for writing development in some students previously considered weak in language skills but with preference for visual communication [START_REF] Vincent | The role of visually rich technology in facilitating children's writing[END_REF][START_REF] Vincent | MicroWorlds and the Integrated Brain[END_REF][START_REF] Vincent | Visualisation, multimodality and learning with information technolgy[END_REF].

The weight of international research suggests that programming in Logo, by itself, does not teach Mathematics. Ross and Howe (1981, p.147) found that "the research of the last decade into 'mathematics through programming' has been more encouraging than discouraging, but only mildly so." Students, unless specifically taught about these points, keep Logo and Mathematics entirely separate in their minds, and few teachers seem to work to overcome this, or do so with much success. Even Abelson, Bamberger, Goldstein and Papert (Abelson et al., 1976, p.10) rather sadly remark that "Logo did not succeed in displacing Basic as the almost universal computer language for schools."

Despite encouraging results such as those with robotics, recursion and visualisation, Australian research on wider use of Logo and its subsequent versions has been consistent with the above. Tony Adams wrote "The Logo community has never come to terms with lists, they are just too hard to manipulate. Unlike turtle graphics they do not have a low entry threshold and for most applications a good working knowledge of recursion is required." (Adams, 1985, p.22). Pam Gibbons adds, "Despite what I have seen in the classroom, I know that Logo struggles into adulthood. …[I]t fights the perception that 'real programmers don't program in Logo, that is, it's just for kids; in a discipline where obtuseness and mystique command respect, Logo is its own worst enemy." (Gibbons, 1997, p.17) This problem has been exacerbated by a turn-around in one of Logo's original, fundamental, principles: keep the language small and have the student develop their own set of useful procedures. This forces them to write most of their own material and, the theory says, thereby understanding it.

Logo has been extended far beyond the limits any of its creators could have imagined: the Computer Science of the 60s gave no inkling of the possibilities the personal computer and object-oriented programming would bring. Logo, in the form of MicroWorlds, is part of a full-blown multi-media/robotics environment and in 2014 is probably the only language that makes Cobol look small, or offers the same invitation to write the same thing in so many different ways. Feurzeig's successors seem to invent a new command every time they have a new idea, even when existing commands would seem to be perfectly suitable to the purpose. For instance, the MicroWorlds Robotics version adds a completely new, quite separate set of commands to talk to the Logo RCX 'brick.' This leaves the existing, and quite adequate, 'Talkto' protocol in the main body of the language and separates Lego Robotics from the use of its rich array of logic. Redundancy in the language is therefore rife, while it is axiomatic in computer language design that there should only be one way to do something. On the other hand, the MicroWorlds Backpack is a brilliant model of an object, though the language itself cannot really be said to be object-oriented Gibbons is correct: commercial programs are not written in Logo, and it was never intended that they should be. Instead, it was developed as a vehicle for learning to work with and physically model otherwise complex and difficult situations and problems, making their nature visible, documented and testable. Automating the glittering array of operations offered by later versions does not materially add to the educational possibilities, it just changes their nature. It may well prove even more difficult to show the new multi-environments enhance learning and the general curriculum than did the simple original.

Conclusion

Sadly, the weight of research concludes that Logo's advocates have not demonstrated the gains that exposure to its ideas are supposed to bring. That said, given the enormous number of contributing factors, research demonstrating that experience with programming carries over into written expression, problem-solving and clearthinking is inherently extremely difficult. Essentially the teacher of today is in no better position than the pioneers, and is really just dependent on their own belief in the promise that having students write programs will bring educational and other advantages, a belief shared by the authors of this paper. The pioneers of educational computing knew that programming a computer had educational benefits and set out to prove it, but at the moment, when programming has all but disappeared from the curriculum, it seems that the world was not listening.

  1975 Scott Brownell, a teacher in Australia's island state of Tasmania, saw Logo at MIT on a study tour and in a visionary move brought a magnetic tape copy of Logo from Boston to Hobart to run on a PDP-11 mini-computer at the Tasmanian Education Department's Computer Centre[START_REF] Richardson | Logo in Australia: 21 Years On[END_REF]. With a Commonwealth Schools Commission Innovation Grant, he was able to recruit a Tasmanian teacher, Sandra Wills, to extend into primary schools the work on computer awareness and computer science already underway in secondary schools in the state, using Logo as the vehicle. He secured a rare and expensive robot Turtle from the General Turtle Co. in the USA. This was at a time when the telephone system was used to connect every senior high school in Tasmania with a terminal to the PDP-11. Over the next few years, Sandra would load the turtle into her car and travel all over the island visiting the Education Department's 300 schools. At each school the children would connect the Turtle and a Tektronix graphics terminal to a home-made modem to dial up the PDP-11 in Hobart.

Figure 1 :

 1 Figure 1: General Turtle Inc. robot (interface box in background) with Sandra Wills at the controls of the PDP-11 terminal, 1976.

  In 1976 the Tasmanian group sent Anne McDougall this version of the language to introduce Logo to her students in the Faculty of Education at the University of Melbourne.

Figure 2 :

 2 Figure 2: Virtual turtle tracks Once personal computers were invented in the late 70s early 80s, Richard Miller of the University of Wollongong in New South Wales wrote the first version of Logo to run on the Apple][, specifically to drive the Turtles in the Tasmanian project. Wills, in collaboration with Miller and Allan Branch, a Tasmanian engineer, oversaw the design and manufacture of a smaller and relatively inexpensive floor turtle, the Tassie Turtle, which achieved a degree of accuracy and precision that had eluded similar

Figure 3 :

 3 Figure 3: Primary school class in Hobart working with the robot turtle and Sandra Wills, 1977 A number of schools and teacher training institutions across the country were now using Richard Miller Logo and the Tassie Turtle to explore what might be done with Logo. In 1981 Seymour Papert visited Australia. Arriving in Melbourne to speak at a conference, he was moved to tears when he found himself in a room surrounded by a swarm of buzzing, beeping robot Turtles (Richardson 1997).Papert's visit built on the pioneering work of the Tasmanians to inspire a generation of Australian Logo workers. The next few years saw the publication by Australian authors of several widely used Logo books[START_REF] Mcdougall | Learning Logo on the Apple II[END_REF][START_REF] Nevile | Let's Talk Apple Turtle[END_REF][START_REF] Carter | Thinking Logo: An Introduction to (the Universe through) Programming[END_REF] Newell, 1988a;[START_REF] Newell | Turtle Confusion[END_REF]. Learning Logo on the Apple II, by Anne McDougall and Tony and Pauline Adams, was

  . Learning Logo on the Apple II, by Anne McDougall and Tony and Pauline Adams, was translated into German, French and Chinese. In Victoria, Logo was included as one of the recommended programming languages for senior secondary school Computer Science courses. A Special Interest Group of the Computer Education Group of Victoria, OzLogo, was established, and a quarterly newsletter, POALL, was produced and edited by Peter Carter at the University of Adelaide in South Australia. Contingents of Australians attended, and some presented at three Logo conferences, Logo84, Logo85 and Logo86, held at MIT. In the ensuing years Logo leaders from the USA, including Hal Abelson, Andy diSessa and Brian Harvey, also visited Australia, to speak at conferences and to work with locals in several of the states. Gary Stager from the USA did extensive work in teacher professional development in Australia and Seymour Papert presented a memorable closing keynote address at the 1990 World Conference on Computers in Education in Sydney.

Figure 4 :

 4 Figure 4: Seymour Papert and Sandra Wills with Tassie Turtle robot at Computer Education Group of Victoria Conference, 1981 Consistent with developments in computer hardware, new and enhanced versions of Logo appeared from development centres in the USA. These included LogoWriter, TurtleMath, GeoLogo, StarLogo, Lego TC Logo, Object Logo and MicroWorlds, and investigation and adoption of these continued in a variety of school settings across this country. Associated with the adoption of laptop computers in some schools, in

[START_REF] Papert | Twenty things to do with a computer[END_REF]. These argued that most current work in educational computing involved the computers 'programming the children,' and by contrast suggested that students should themselves learn to program the computers to enable powerful learning through exploration of novel ideas, situations, concepts and problems. These papers described a programming language called Logo, developed specifically for this purpose. Reading them, and being delighted by their approach but reflecting on the current state of computer hardware and software, she wondered whether such an opportunity might be provided for students during her lifetime. Just three years later, thanks to some extraordinary initiatives by two teachers in Tasmania, her own students were using Logo.This paper is concerned with the development and nature of Logo, and describes some innovative and influential Logo work done in Australia. We begin by examining


Arthur Tatnall
email: arthur.tatnall@vu.edu.au

Bill Davey
email: bill.davey@rmit.edu.au

Reflections on the Beginnings of an Educational Revolution (?)

Keywords: National policies, personal reflections, teachers, students, teacher education, curriculum

de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.

National Policies, Issues and Developments

Many chapters of this book have dealt primarily with how the introduction of computers in education happened in the country of the author, and described national policies and issues that arose in this early period. Some chapters were written from a very personal perspective, others just described what happened. The contributions related to: Norway (Sindre Røsvik,), The Netherlands (Joke Voogt and Alfons ten Brummelhuis, Bert Zwaneveld and Victor Schmidt, Jan Lepeltak), Spain (Javier Osorio and Julia Nieves,), UK (Don Passey), Ireland (Denise Leahy and Dudley Dolan,), Israel (Ben-Zion Barta and Liora Shapiro, Yaacov Katz), USA (Kevin Parker and Bill Davey), Finland (Jari Koivisto), Australia (Arthur Tatnall, William Keane) and Poland (Maciej Sysło). It is interesting to note similarities between the countries, both in what they did and when they did it. We can consider this time in terms of four periods.

The Punch Card Period

In the first half of the 1970s students in many countries were writing programs using punch (or mark sense) cards run on a mini or mainframe at a local university. Their programs mostly related to mathematics, and their teachers were typically mathematics or science teachers who had done some computer programming in their university degree courses. The punch card era could be seen to have evolved from the efforts of these teachers. This could really be seen as a 'pre-computers in schools' period. In this era the ability to make a computer do anything seemed a huge accomplishment. Those who tell of this era speak of the unbelievable patience of students waiting days to be told something like: 'syntax error in line 2'. The existence of punch card based computing did, however, provide a vehicle for convinving parents and administrators that computers were in some way relevant to schools. One should not discount the importance of public opinion on the later massive governmental and local efforts to find the resources to get computing going in schools.

Experimentation with the Microcomputer

By the late 1970s and early 1980s most countries were experimenting and coming to grips with what to do about the microcomputer and how it could best be used in their schools. Hardware was pre-eminent during this period, as there were few standards in common between manufacturers in hardware or application software. There was much discussion on whether it would be best to use Apple, Commodore, BBC, IBM PC or CP/M computers. Seymour Papert's book Mindstorms [START_REF] Papert | Mindstorms -Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas[END_REF] was published in this periods and experimentation began in many schools with the use of Logo. (Logo was, of course, developed in the early 1970s but was then running on minicomputers not easily accessible to schools.) The statistics in the Parker and Davey chapter show that it was the accessibility of microprocessor based systems that provided the impetus to make computing a viable classroom alternative. The first classroom computers were little more use than a card punch machine as student/computer ratios were initially very poor. The champions in each school could, however, leverage their experiments to justify further purchase and that was the principal channel for widespread computing in the countries we have presented.

Development of National Policies

The first half of the 1980s was the time when most countries started to take computers in schools seriously: to develop national policies and curriculum guidelines and to provide support and funding to schools. This was an important time and has been discussed in detail in many chapters. It is clear that many countries had significant vision when it came to both curriculum and policy. Many countries had policy in place well in advance of the widespread use of computers and those policies seem to be broad in their vision of computer use.

Consolidation

By the second half of the 1980s things had begun to settle down and there was more constructive discussion of curriculum and the most productive ways of using the computers. The number of computers in schools continued to increase rapidly.

A Student View

Several chapters described what it was like to be a school student in this period. These included: Australia (Therese Keane, Martin Chambers), South Africa (Martin Olivier), Chile (Fernando Toro) and the UK (Michael Hammond), and a number of these former students are now themselves teachers. These chapters provide a quite different perspective on this history. As many of us were past school age by this time it is good to see the other side of the story from a student perspective.

Teachers' Personal Reflections

Many of the chapters describe their author's personal teaching experiences with computers. These include a chapter by David Demant who describes his personal experiences in secondary schools in England, Canada and Australia as well as working in the Melbourne Museum. Another by Arthur Tatnall relates his personal experiences as a teacher, as an educational consultant and when working in an educational support unit in Melbourne. Alnaaz Kassam from Canada relates her journey as a teacher and her efforts to use new technologies to create inclusive curricula that were reflective of diverse societies. Other personal reflection chapters include those by: Stewart Martin, Therese Keane, Jari Koivisto, Richard Millwood, William Keane, Martin Chambers, Angela Lecomber and Michael Hammond.

Teacher Education

Most teachers both now and in the 1970s and 1980s came to their schools with a good background from 'teaching method subjects' in their own university teacher education. These teaching method subjects were designed to acquaint the potential teachers with standard approaches to teaching material relevant to their speciality. In the 1970s and 1980s this was, however, rarely the case for teachers working with computers. These teachers typically had no pre-service teacher education relating to educational uses of computers as there was none available at the time. One of the chapters in this book (by John Murnane) describes a Graduate Diploma in Computer Education course in Melbourne, Australia. Other similar courses existed elsewhere, but these were a new development. Another way that new teachers have an understanding of how to teach their material is by remembering how they were themselves taught, and their own experiences as a school student. Sometimes these experiences were positive, sometimes not but they had at least seen how someone else taught the subject material. This also was not the case for teachers involved with computers in the 1970s and 1980s. Most teachers at this time had to work out for themselves what best to do with computers in the classroom. Some help was provided in many cases through day or half day long professional development activities, typically provided by education department support groups, but more assistance would have been desirable. The important issue of teacher education was mentioned in many papers from around the world. These included: UK (Stewart Martin, Don Passey, Angela Lecomber, Richard Millwood), Australia (John Murnane, Therese Keane, William Keane, Anne McDougall et al.), Norway (Sindre Røsvik), USA (Kevin Parker and Bill Davey), Spain (Javier Osorio and Julia Nieves), Poland (Maciej Sysło), The Netherlands (Joke Voogt and Alfons ten Brummelhuis, Bert Zwaneveld and Victor Schmidt, Jan Lepeltak), Israel (Ben-Zion Barta and Liora Shapiro), Ireland (Denise Leahy and Dudley Dolan) and Finland (Jari Koivisto).

Curriculum Issues

The introduction and use of Logo [START_REF] Papert | Mindstorms -Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas[END_REF] in schools is discussed in several chapters. The chapter by Anne McDougall, John Murnane and Sandra Wills describes the development and use of Logo in Australia. They note that Logo was expressly designed as a mathematical language for use in education and was very logicorientated. Their chapter particularly mentions how the addition of Seymour Papert's 'Turtle' made Logo far more accessible to students and teachers. Logo is also discussed in chapters by Martin Chambers and Michael Hammond.

Another major curriculum issue at the time was whether the main emphasis should be to 'teach about computing', to use computers in many subject areas 'across the curriculum', or both. This issue arose in a number of chapters. In many countries teaching about computing -often called computer studies or computer science, was very popular during the first half of the 1980s, but after this time began to lose its place as teachers were keener to make use of the computer just as a tool in other subject areas. Schools in many countries spent much of their time in activities like teaching word processing or the use of a spreadsheet. Of course this need not have been an either/or situation, but in a number of countries it was with the result that computer studies lost out. It is interesting to note recent developments in which a number of countries are again stressing the importance of computer studies (or computer science or whatever name it is given).

Other Issues

A number of chapters also deal with other important issues related to computers in education. Developments in the use of computers in school management are described by Rory Butler and Adrie Visscher, and also by Richard Taylor. Pedagogy, in relation to the use of computers in schools, is discussed by Stewart Martin, Don Passey, Eva Dakich and Angela Lecomber. Richard Taylor writes on a blurring of boundaries between home and school computer use, and also within schools in the way that teaching and learning are carried out. Eva Dakich describes the dominant discourses, epistemological frameworks and theories of learning that have influenced the deployment of new technologies and their integration into learning and teaching.

But has Education Really Changed for the Better as a Result?

In the 1970s and 1980s many of us who were involved in the introduction and use of computers in schools believed that we could fundamentally change education for the better. We believed that in using computers, students could achieve many new things such as making use of science simulations, creating their own applications in different subject areas, developing thinking through the design of algorithms and writing of computer programs, expressing ideas and experimenting through play with things like Logo and through learning how to use sophisticated graphics and audio applications.

Senior secondary school students could also learn about and use computers as preparation for jobs in science, business and industry. In many cases our own motivations to get into this area related to our excitement and sense of achievement in making a computer do something that we had determined: in programming.

In an article in The Australian newspaper in 1990, however, Peter Juliff [START_REF] Mcintosh | Schools are Trapped in 'Typewriter' Mentality[END_REF] argued that in using the computer only as a tool, "We have succumbed to the terminal atrophy of imagination". He goes on to say that: "In the process of moving the mystique of the '60s to the blasé reality of the '90s, we have lost sight of the magic and the wonder." Juliff suggests that schools need to be more adventurous and creative in their use of computers. He notes that: "Often they are only used as laboursaving devices in the same way as dishwashers and microwave ovens."

This sentiment seems not to have been restricted just to Australia, as many authors from around the world have expressed similar sentiments. It could be said that in the early 21 st century computers in schools are used largely for typing (word processing), access to an encyclopaedia (the Internet) and communication (email). Is this what we envisaged at the beginning?

In the 1960s in the USA and in Australia (and in many other countries around the world) the physics syllabus in the last two years of secondary schools was given a significant boost by the introduction of PSSC Physics [START_REF] Chiaverina | Teaching PSSC Physics: A Remembrance of Things Past[END_REF]. The Physical Science Study Committee (PSSC) in the USA set out to integrate experiment and theory and to introduce principles through the use of lost cost, but interesting and accessible equipment. The idea was that the students could get a good understanding of what was going on, rather than just getting lost in the use of complex equipment or being taught pure theory.

If we compare this with approaches to the use of computers in education, many current computer applications just teach the student how to use tools; how to use 'complex pieces of equipment' such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Google, Wikipedia, Facebook etc. rather than to integrate practice with theory. By contrast, approaches involving algorithmic design and programming, as well as the use of tools, could bear some relationship to the PSSC approach. Papert also had some ideas

on this [START_REF] Papert | The Connected Family: Bridging the Digital Generation Gap[END_REF]. A commentary from 1993 foretells of a fundamental difficulty in attaining the ideals of Papert:

"the seemingly marginal use of computers and telecommunications in schools and classrooms is due less to inadequate funds, unprepared teachers, and indifferent administrators than to dominant cultural beliefs about what teaching, learning, and proper knowledge are and how schools are organized for instruction." [5 :15] Has the use of computers in education changed education in the way we thought it might in the 1980s? Has it resulted in a significant difference and an improvement, or just a different way of doing the same old things? Have we lost sight of the magic and the wonder?


Michael Hammond
email: m.hammond@warwick.ac.uk

My Work among the Keyboards: Remembering the Early Use of Computers in the Classroom

Keywords: computing, small programmes, early career teaching

This paper reflects on the early use of computers in school. It begins with an account of the author's own introduction to computing, while a school student himself, and his first attempts to teach computing and information technology courses. The next section of the paper describes his enthusiasm for teaching in another school and the challenge of engaging students' interest. The teaching of Logo is then described in a third section and a following section discusses a project to promote the use of data handling with computers. The paper concludes by: reflecting on the role of computer studies in the curriculum; the romantic versus rationalist view of technology; the purpose of schools and schooling; and the unpredictability of the take-up of computing. It concludes with an appeal for schools to provide children with an opportunity to reflect on their own use of technology.

First Experiences of Computing

I first became aware of computers and computing when at secondary school. This would have been in the early 1970s. Those of us who were considered mathematically minded were invited to attend a short course, which drew on materials designed by ICL 1 , to learn the rudiments of programming and get an idea about the impact of computers on society. I was a little reluctant as these classes were offered instead of sports and I was a sports enthusiast. The point I am making is that I began an engagement with computers through the study of computing. I was taught to write simple programmes using, as I recall, an early version of COBOL. Our lines of code were punched on cards; the cards were sent to terminals and returned with printouts. Very often the programmes did not work -two cards stuck together or the holes were not punched cleanly enough. I am not sure that really mattered, the construction of the algorithm was interesting enough in itself. As for the impact of computers on society, the set of video recordings we saw implied that there were going to be big changes in every sphere of life. You can argue that this has turned out to be the case, but on nothing like the timescale suggested to us. One scenario I remember showed patients turning to a computer to diagnose their ailments through an early kind of Artificial Intelligence software. Patients would find the process quicker and easier and they would not have to leave their house or interact with an overstretched medic. The scenario might be seen as prescient given that most of us today self-diagnose through any number of medical web sites but it had got something significantly wrong. Interaction at the computer was presented as an individualised process and the scenario had not built in our need to discuss our symptoms with each other or indeed our need to invest trust in someone, in this case a medical practitioner, who had a 'warrant' of professional expertise. I do not recall the course making a deep impression on us. However it did invite a way of thinking about computing and the power of computing and, at the very least, it created an awareness that tasks which were being carried out 'manually' would be automatically processed in the future. This was not, however, enough for me to follow up an interest in computing and I went off in other directions.

Becoming a Teacher

After various career and determinedly non-career excursions I qualified to teach and I found myself working in three different secondary schools in the periods covering 1984 -1989. In the first I was filling in short term for an absent teacher. I was to teach mathematics and this 'of course' involved computing. I was asked to illustrate examples of programming and, if possible, get the pupils to write a few lines of code themselves. This was not going to be easy. There were only a couple of computers (BBC) 2 ones in the whole school -one had to be rescued from a broom cupboardnot enough for any meaningful 'hands on' programming in the classroom. Rather than punching cards programmes could now be recorded on cassette tapes. This was famously unreliable. As a teacher you could spend a break time loading a programme for your next lesson only for it to crash at the last minute. Thankfully the computer studies course was a short one, only a lesson a week over six weeks with one group and then repeated with the next. Within this short introductory course I was asked to involve youngsters in debates about the impact of computers on society and I had access to recordings of two or three short films produced for schools. These films had the potential to be interesting but I failed to engage the youngsters' imagination. We were back to considering future scenarios. I recall one film showed a handheld machine which enabled text to be displayed digitally and which would alter the notion of a 'book'. Using this device you could change font and font size and you could store a whole book on it, even a mini library, which you could, with difficultly, take around with you. Again prescient but it had missed out something quite essential. Digital books did not take off until devices were affordable and truly portable and until it was possible to comfortably read from the screen in natural conditions.

2

As is well known the BBC 'badge' was given to a series of microcomputers and built by the Acorn Computer company to tie in with the BBC Computer Literacy Project during the 1980's. BBC computers were very popular in schools due perhaps to their reliability. They were seen as more robust too. Eventually of course schools moved over to PC and some to Apple Macintosh machines.

After this first brief introduction to school teaching I took on my first 'proper' teaching appointment. I was again teaching some computing and I was now able to access a whole room of computers in a small local area network. I had by now a little more experience of the computing curriculum but no formal training in the subject. My subject knowledge was shaky and I tried to keep one step ahead of the syllabus. When it came to practical 'know-how' I would circulate the class, pick up a skill by observing or troubleshooting a problem with one pair of students. I could then confidently demonstrate the skill I had only just picked up to the next pair of students. I gained what I needed 'just in time'. However I do recall one lad -Andy -asking me week after week 'when were we going to do assembly languages?'. I had little idea as to what he was talking about and had to 'gen up' furiously to prepare a lesson that bore some relation to the description of assembly languages in the text book. The great day finally arrived when I could confidently present assembly languages as a topic and impress Andy with my knowledge. However he was not there. I learnt that he had a troubled background and had moved home and school a lot, his family had now moved on. Someone thanked me for taking an interest in him but that was that. My view at the time was that he was a programmer with potential but let down by a stodgy curriculum and my lack of knowledge. He certainly had copied many programmes from books and magazines and was an enthusiast for coding. However, looking back, I do not think he had understood the logical structure of programming and he had no more idea of an assembly language than I had or he would have seen through me straight away.

During this period I was learning my trade as a school teacher. The classes were challenging -to be fair more at the level of tiresome low level disruption rather than any outright hostility. It was an uphill struggle to engage students in computer studies classes, particularly in issues of computer architecture. The impact on society should have been more interesting for them but it took me time to realise that what was happening in the world outside often had limited appeal. One of the scenarios we looked at in depth was at how computer algorithms were able to control and coordinate traffic light signals to speed up traffic flow. However my students did not drive, and their parents tended not to have cars and, for that matter, neither did I. The scenario washed over them. I have nothing against traffic lights and I have seen and worked with youngsters really who enjoyed working with programs such as Flowol 3 to set up and control simple traffic light systems. The problem lay in the lazy assumption on my part that computer control was necessarily interesting because it was about real life -there was nothing necessary about this.

After some reflection on my lessons I decided that I could better engage my students by turning to more immediate examples to illustrate how computers were affecting their lives. I created a module on educational technology in which they could review whatever titles I could get hold of (this was largely software developed within the Microelectronics Education Programme (MEP) programme 4 ). I recorded a couple of BBC television programmes about information technology in schools for 3 Flowol is described by its designers as an easy to use drag and drop approach to flow chart programming and has been widely used in UK schools. them. A key idea in these programmes was that computers needed to be in subject classrooms rather than in specialist computer rooms alowing technology needed to become a normal part of teaching and learning. The films also took a critical look at 'instructional technology' something later made more familiar in England and Wales in the form of Integrated Learning Systems [START_REF] Wood | The UK ILS Evaluations: Final report[END_REF]. My module on educational software went much better, particularly the software evaluation, though it did not generate any outright enthusiasm for, or critique of, computer supported learning. Interspersed with this module I carried on with computer coding and programming. Students were able to produce simple programmes in BASIC. Key for assessment was the writing up of the design, implementation, testing and evaluation process and by and large this was something students did not take easily to. However a fair number enjoyed the work at the computer and I felt I had developed a comfortable way of working with the class which allowed me to troubleshoot and support pupils at machines and to present tips and guidance to the whole class at odd points during the lesson.

I found little use of computers around the school and perhaps this was due to lack of interest on the part of colleagues or simple lack of access. I did, however, notice that teachers of English were using word processing in some classes and the language support teachers were experimenting and enjoying working with Developing Traya text revelation package. In mathematics, which was my main subject, we used a lot of equipment: number blocks, dice and of course calculators but nothing in the way of desk top computing. I had not seen or used Logo. Later I got hold of a MicroSmile5 , a suite of programmes for learning and teaching mathematics containing games, puzzles, and simple 'revelatory' scenarios. As a new teacher I was ambitious and I wanted to challenge students to investigate mathematics not just carry out the controlled practice that the textbooks provided. My efforts met with a mixed reception. I particularly remember one child I taught, let us call him Roy. We were doing an investigation of some kind and he was having none of it: 'Why are we doing all this investigative stuff, can't we do something useful like square roots like we did with our previous teacher?'. Roy had, what I would describe without irony as, 'natural wit and intelligence' but he was a challenging boy, and had made very little progress in any of his subject work. Why on earth would he find square roots useful? He would never do anything with square roots after he left school. Only now can I now see he was not asking for square roots, he wanted familiarity and order. I think if I met him today I would not be so dismissive and I hope I would understand him a lot better.

It was logical that I would turn to computers in my maths lessons. After a great deal of asking I was able to book a networked room and I set Roy's class to work on various MicroSmile scenarios. The students worked in pairs or threes. I tried to prompt them as I went round the room. Of course I wanted them to focus in on the maths, but, to be honest, I was looking more than anything to change their attitudes to their learning. The use of the software kept them busy and made me feel much more comfortable in my role of teacher. In fact I had been worried that Roy might mishandle the keyboard or disks but to my surprise he became an enthusiast for the use of computers and for me as a teacher. It was a breakthrough that meant a lot to me. On the flip side I was aware that a lot of what the students were doing was playing at the machine. In particular they were attempting to solve puzzles and problems by trial and error rather than generalising from their attempts, which was the underlying rationale for the programmes 6 . When commentators say too much software is only used for motivational purposes they are right but it is the word only I object to. I needed to see pupil motivation at that point in my career though the problem of motivating students does not ever go away.

In reminiscing on the use of technology I have described some of my feelings about the software and the teaching of computer studies but I have not really communicated the intensity of being a new teacher. If I looked around my school I could see mixed teaching and mixed outcomes but this did not matter. I was engrossed in my enthusiasm for the job and in awe of many of my What struck me was the deep moral compass of the school. It had, at the time, a remarkable mix of students from different ethnic backgrounds and it sought very much to create a sense of belonging for all students and for the wider community. For example music teachers promoted a strongly inclusive steel band, 'community' languages were taught, some post 16 teaching was open to the community and at Christmas lunches were put on for local pensioners. Many teachers spent a lot of time mentoring youngsters both informally and formally. I saw impressive 'active' tutorial work and a constant appeal to students to behave responsibly and be reasonable when considering other people. Those struggling for language or other reasons were given whatever boost to self-esteem and self-confidence was possible. I remember one girl, let us call her Shahira, an eleven year old who had been working with a teaching assistant in one of my mathematics classes. The assistant sent her to me to show off some work she had done. I said 'thanks that was good, well done'. Perhaps it was a little perfunctory and Shahira looked a little disappointed. The teaching assistant picked up on this and said: "well done Shahira, this is very good, you are pleased with it? Mr Hammond is very pleased with it, shall we now show the head of the department and see if he is pleased with it? Shahira duly went out to show her work to the head of department and was told, with more enthusiasm than I had mustered, how well she had done. The point is that the teaching assistant understood Shahira's fragility as a learner in a way that I did not. She would not let Shahira go until she had been convinced about the value of her work and was willing to accept that she had the capacity to learn. I know this kind of reinforcement is maddening for conservative commentators who see explicit ranking of performance as core to the work of a school and ultimately in the best interests of students themselves. However the liberal ethos in my school was very inspiring for me and very different from my own schooling. I had never properly understood what it might be like to struggle academically or lack belief in my potential for learning and the teaching assistant had, whether intentionally or not, pointed this out to me. I thank her to this day for doing so.

The school in which I worked played an important role in the lives of all the young people, not just those that were struggling. This was demonstrated to me in the weeks leading up to the Christmas holidays. Students' excitement mounted and with even three weeks to go I was asked 'we are not doing a proper lesson today are we sir, it is nearly Christmas?'. This went on and on until the end of term finally came, the students went home and I imagined how pleased they would be. Leaving the school later that day I was astonished to see the same children who had been desperate for the holidays congregating around the playground. They told me they were bored at home and looking forward to coming back to school.

Working with Logo

After two or three years I moved to another school and the story moves on apace. What is worth mentioning was that this new school gave me my first experience of using Logo. All students were taught to create simple programmes and those that took to it were able to go on and write their own procedures and super procedures. Some students really enjoyed Logo, some did not, some went along with it in the same way that they went along with most things that school offered. It made no great impression on me and I was astonished later, as I became interested in educational technology as a field of study, to see how Logo played such a central part in the story of computing.

Logo was about handing control to children over computing and over their learning and so many hopes for curriculum change seemed to have coalesced around its use. Papert [START_REF] Papert | Mindstorms: Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas[END_REF], at least it seemed to me, saw children as having an intrinsic interest in problem solving and almost saw 'debugging' of programmes as a transferable and lifelong skill. Through Logo the invitation was laid out for us to think differently about schooling. I can see Papert's point, in fact I can see the point better now than before. Later I was more than happy to promote the use of Logo amongst student teachers I trained and I would explain the principles on which Logo was designed. I know colleagues who have found the teaching of Logo creative and life changing 7 and I have no reason or wish to argue with them on this. However Logo was very much a footnote in my story of using computers.

Software for Handling Data

At the beginning of the 1990s I was unexpectedly able to work full time on a project, led by Peter Holmes, to promote the use of databases and spreadsheets for data handling. I had the best of times. I visited teachers, went on courses, collated exemplar materials and made up activities for classroom use8 . Some, at least, of the ideas worked well in the classroom. Overall I could see the project as part of a push for using general purpose programmes in school and, in doing so, creating a 'tie in' with software, such as Word, Excel and Publisher, used in industry. One argument for general purpose programmes was that students could use the same software right across the curriculum: in an ideal scenario subject teachers would be able to take students' IT skills for granted and students could reinforce and extend their knowledge of IT. As I visited schools I found computers in teaching rooms not just computing / IT rooms. I saw examples of desk top publishing and word processed text displayed on classroom walls, it looked a bright new world. I also saw some strikingly original approaches to data handling. For example a history advisor showed me a data file of miners who had died in an accident that had taken place in a nearby coal colliery in the nineteenth century. She described setting up teams of student journalists tasked with writing up a story of the mining disaster. These teams had to interrogate the data files in order to find out who had died, how old the causalities were and how many of the dead were related to each other. They wrote up their stories on a front page simulation package -this package could be pre-set to deliver news flashes to students and provide reminders of deadlines. I was intrigued and it seemed to me that this kind of 'real life' problem solving approach, backed up by technology, was becoming mainstream. I could see and had always seen the motivational value of technology but as my data handling project progressed I wanted to go further and understand how the software could be used to enable students to do things that would not be otherwise possible. For example the use of software for data handling enabled children to work with authentic data -large sets of data could be searched quickly and easily and these data could be easily manipulated and visualised. Data loggers allowed data to be collected over very short or very long time periods. Word processing allowed easy amendment of text. However my enthusiasm for general purpose programmes meant that I had not noticed the passing of small programmes and had missed the close link that had existed between programme designers and teachers. A host of programmes, including Microsmile or Developing Tray, were on the wane. And in terms of software for data handling I was aware that relational office data bases were becoming widely used in school even if they were largely unsuitable for the simple searches and graphical representation pupils needed for classroom data handling. Of course teachers could get around the use of, say, Access by creating templates in spreadsheets, but as soon as you start talking about getting round things with technology you are in trouble. Small database programmes (I was, for example, familiar with Key and Grass as school programmes) were quite suitable but largely disappeared in the following years. In a similar way the programme Model Builder, which had been developed through classroom research into school based modelling, lost out to Excel.

Reflections

The period covered in this book was a significant one for me as I was able to develop a stance on computing and the use of computers in the curriculum. I had experiences of teaching, I visited many schools early on in my career and I had acquired subject knowledge alongside a level of pedagogical expertise. I was innovative and enthusiastic about teaching even if I felt at times ineffectual and weighed down. This was an intense period for me personally coinciding with an important time in the history of computing in schools. What then had I learnt from my experiences and to what should I draw the reader's attention? Four things stand out. Firstly, I came away feeling that the teaching of 'computer studies' was problematic -perhaps not less or more so than any other subject but claims that it held a special interest for all children at school were wrong. The teaching of programming was interesting for some, the impact of computing on society could be made interesting, but the teaching of computer architecture would always be a challenge. This left me a sceptic in regards to the teaching of computing as a specialist subject for all pupils. My experience of using general purpose packages would have led me to argue for a cross curricular approach to information technology and for computing to stay as a minority subject. Yet ironically I later became a tutor for training pre-service teachers with a specialism in ICT, as it became called, as a subject and this became one of the highlights of my professional career. I changed my mind on the value of ICT as a subject and valued the approach to problem solving it implied 9 .

Secondly, I can see that I was, and indeed I have remained, a 'rationalist' rather than a romantic in regard to the use of technology. I was aware, and I was keen to show, that the use of technology enabled students to work in ways that would not otherwise be possible, but I did not see the use of technology as turning the curriculum upside down or doing anything particularly revolutionary in how I thought about teaching and learning. Others have argued that if you put computers into school nothing would or should remain the same, but this is not how I felt. Of course there must have been something that drew me into technology. I liked to be identified as one of the technology enthusiasts and I was one of a minority of teachers who wanted to give computers a go. I overcame difficulties such as room bookings and a lack of subject knowledge in order to do this. In my early career it never occurred to me to say 'I can't teach computing I have not been trained for that'. However I was as likely to be inspired by colleagues who did not use technology as much as those that did. The first book I read at length about using technology in school was Olson [START_REF] Olson | Schoolworlds/Microworlds: Computers and the Culture of the school[END_REF]. Olson explained the importance of routines in teaching, for better or worse these were needed for the teacher to manage his or her classroom and as a new teacher I could see how important it was for me to establish routines with my students. In my view Olson had got it right, computers would be very disruptive for teachers who had already settled into routines with which they were comfortable. As it happened in my own case I could establish routines with technology and the use of computers could make the classroom a more comfortable place for me to be in. However I was new to teaching and the use of computers was core to my role. I was not a typical case. 9

In brief Information Technology became a subject in itself to address the limitations of the cross curricular approach and to provide progression in terms of data handling, modelling, communication and control. The more problem based approach set out in the IT and the later ICT curriculum was hampered by the promotion of a rather narrow, vocational assessment framework 14 -19. However I could see via my visits and the work of my student teachers that it was possible to teach an IT curriculum that had appeal to all children at least some of the time. I discuss this in more detail in: Hammond M. (2004) The peculiarities of teaching ICT as a subject: a study of trainee and new ICT teachers in secondary schools, Technology, Pedagogy and Education, 13,1, 29 -42.

Thirdly, if I was a rationalist about technology I was a romantic about school. I was very influenced in how I thought about schools by my first permanent teaching appointment. This enabled me to see how schools could draw on the local community and support that community, but also transcend limitations within the community. I came to believe that schools were custodians of moral principles and had a special role in developing a sense of self efficacy for all, including the least able and most vulnerable. Even when I felt overwhelmed and ineffective a sense of optimism about schools as institutions never left me. Sometime after reading Olson I read Papert [START_REF] Papert | Mindstorms: Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas[END_REF] in which it was argued that schools had not changed, indeed had barely changed over the centuries, and perhaps were impervious to change as could be seen by their failure to embrace technology. This had no resonance for me. Schools had changed appreciably from what I could remember of my schooldays. Schools were offering students greater opportunities to exercise creativity and teachers were learning to be authoritative without being authoritarian, no matter how often they might fall short. I know many people will, with good reason, disagree with me here and I know much better today how schools are compromised by the wider social structures in which they operate. I know how the work of schools in most educational systems has been distorted by top down change and rapid shifts of policy. However, when I think of schools I still feel optimistic and I have felt it a privilege to spend most of professional career working with teachers and student teachers.

Finally, from my work with computers I learnt that the take-up of technology is, to some extent at least, unpredictable. I had presented scenarios based on the use of technology but I could see that those who predict the future often get it wrong. If it is assumed that something will happen just because it has now become technically possible some quite basic economic, psychological or sociological dimensions, let alone financial and production issues, will be left out. Computers, it was predicted, would offer us less intensive working lives when the opposite seems to have happened, computers would offer a more individualised and differentiated society but new media seems to have strengthened not weakened social bonds. I think it is important for us to present the future as uncertain and to show we can have a say in how the future pans out. Schools can help here. It is not the job of schools to mimic the use of technology in the home or indeed in the world outside or be cheerleaders for the use of technology. Rather the job of the school is to notice changes and to provide a window for reflection on those changes.

6

  These observations led me later to consider the importance of intervention when pupils work on classroom mathematical puzzles: Hammond, M. (1995) Exploring a World of Number, Journal of Information Technology for Teacher Education, 4, 3, 363 -376. [A version of this paper can be accessed on line at: [http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/]

International Computers Limited, or ICL, was an early British company engaged in the manufacture of computer hardware, computer software and computer services. It operated from 1968 until

The Microelectronics Education Programme ran from 1980 to 1986 in UK. Its brief was to explore and promote the use of computers in schools. MEP could be seen as a forerunner of NCET, and then Becta.

For more on MicroSmile go to the national Archive of Educational Computing http://www.naec.org.uk/artefacts/software/micro-smile

For example: Hammond, M. (1993) Handling Data with Databases and Spreadsheets, London, Hodder and Stoughton.