Slaves to the machine…* The fault of ICT?

Where did it all go wrong? When did we become 'slaves to the machine'?

Way way back in the late 1970s I took a two year course at school (I was 14 - 16 years old at the time) called 'Computer Studies'. This was a course that was not run by many schools in the UK at the time, and out of nearly 300 kids in my year there were only about 30 of us taking it. The course actually pre-dated Margaret Thatcher initiative in late 70s and 80s to get a PC in every school.

Computer Studies in the late 1970s, although rather basic (sorry for the awful pun), taught me how to program computers - a skill that I have used ever since. Admittedly I do not use the languages that they taught us then, but I do use the basic skills of how to recognise a problem and how to break it down so that it can be written as a program and run on a computer. In fact I have always argued that there are only two key skills required to program a computer: 1. An ability to recognise and breakdown a problem, and 2. A knowledge of the syntax of a programming language so you can 'talk' to the computer. I would suggest that 1., is in fact, much harder than 2.

Besides programming Computer Studies also demystified computers and removed our fears of the machine, and one particular aspect of the course I really enjoyed were the 'crystal ball' gazing sessions in which we thought about and discussed what computing and computers would be like in the future. Interestingly at the time we thought most of ideas were only 5 years away (e.g. computers in kitchens, electronic newspapers, computer driven cars, every home with a computer in it, speech recognition, computers you could carry and take with you, computers on every desk in an office, digital paper, digital offices, computers that were easy to program, etc.), and a number of these things are now true, but it took closer to 20 years for them to materialise.

The one key thing that we discussed, and the one thing I really thought would happen, would be we would now see computers that were easy to program, and that everyone would be busy coding computers to do what they wanted them to do. And it is because kids are not taught how to program in schools, and that computers are not easy to program, that we have become slaves to the machine.

'The computer says No!'

A comedy programme in the UK called 'Little Britain' had a wonderful character called Carol that in nearly ever sketch would be sitting in front of a computer busy typing in information from a customer, and then getting the answer and saying 'The computer says No!'… (see video). This really highlight the problem. We believe the computers, we trust the computers, we do as the computers tell us, we are their slaves.

Slaves to the machine

What I mean by 'Slaves to the machine' is that computers instead of liberating the workforce and making people's lives easier they have made life more difficult. Don't get me wrong, I am not arguing that we should get rid of computers, or that computers have not helped society, or that computers are a bad thing, what I am arguing is that a lot of people are using computers incorrectly, and therefore making things much more difficult than they need to be. After all, a bad workman blames his tools!

A computer is a tool

The bottom line is the computer is a tool. And as with all tools, it is only as good, or as useful as the person using it.

This is where we get to the critical point, the heart of the problem, and that is people have not been trained to use computers properly. Computers are incorrectly viewed as 'smart typewriters' that can do a bit of maths.

We have all seen examples of this, and some of us are guilty of it, and the example I most often see is the 'futile admin cycle'.

The futile admin cycle

It is not just administration that is guilty of this, in fact it occurs a lot where humans and computers 'meet'. The number of times I have seen really smart people in research labs doing this is both alarming and depressing.

People have become locked in to ways of doing things, and there is an element of 'the computer says no' in this. It is the old argument of 'we have always done it this way, therefore we will always continue to do it this way'.

As Harold Wilson (former British politician and prime minister (more info)) said in 1963 - 'The Britain that is going to be forged in the white heat of this [technology] revolution will be no place for restrictive practices or for outdated methods on either side of industry.' (see The white heat of Wilson). Now, nearly 40 years on we are seeing the benefits of this technology, but in a lot of cases the old ideas, methods, and approaches have not been changed. There has been a failure of education.

A failure of education

So, is it failure of education? I believe it is. That is people are trained how to be used by computers at school, but they are not trained how to use computers. There is a big difference.

In UK schools (pre-18 education), there is a course called ICT, which stands for iInformation and Communication Technology, and is part of the National Curriculum. I had foolishly thought that this course taught school children how to use computers. From what I can gather it teaches the school kids how to work FOR computers. That is, the skills of programming that I picked up at school are no longer included. The school kids don't get to demystify the machine. They are just taught how to use Word, Powerpoint and Excel.

This is all a very sad state of affairs, and means that children are not picking up the skills they need. This in turn impacts what they can do at University, and will also impact the development of eLearning in the future as there will not be the people around who have the skills to develop the next generation of eLearning tools.

The future?

I am not the first person to comment on this. Ben Goldacre has written some excellent material on this subject (see Willetts really is a pretty awesome science minister and Three things we have to teach in schools) and it has also featured in the Guardian newspaper in the UK (see What future for ICT in education? and Kids today need a licence to tinker). These problems were also pointed out by Eric Schmidt from Google (see Google's Eric Schmidt criticises education in the UK). In fact, there was an excellent piece on this subject by Rory Cellan-Jones on BBC Newsnight yesterday - Can the UK raise its game? - that looked at how the lack of programming skills being taught in schools was impacting the UK gaming industry. It is all well and good to look at the gaming industry, but more importantly how is the lack of programming skills being taught in UK schools impacting science and development?

One thing that may help the process is the introduction of the Raspberry Pi which is a $25 computer aimed at getting children to program (also see Raspberry Pi: Elite writer David Braben's £15 computer). The Raspberry Pi will be running Linux, so I guess that the usual range of programming languages will be available (php, Perl etc.), however, none of these are really 'beginner friendly', we need a new BBC Micro or ZX80 to be available. Where are the new easy to use programming languages to get people started? Plus, will todays kids, who have been brought up using modern computers, really want to go back and write code to get a square to moves around a screen?

The problem of a lack of computer programming on the UK National Curriculum now appears to be on the radar of the UK government so hopefully something will get done.

Summary

The future looks bleak. It is going to take number of years to get programming back in to schools. It is then going to be many years before we see this new batch of programmers starting to appear at Universities and in research centres. It is going to take time.

In the meantime, I guess a lot of us will still be Slaves to the machine….

* With apologies and acknowledgement to Slaves of the Machine - The Quickening of Computer Technology by Gregory J. E. Rawlins, published in 1998

Image credit: The Raspberry Pi logo

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