Daily Archives: January 7, 2007

The Old Person’s ICT Curriculum

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Due to some mysterious glitch, this morning’s Observer column appeared in the paper edition but not on the Web. So here’s a pdf version. Sample:

The QCA is a fascinating organisation, staffed by responsible adults in suits. It produces tons of earnest documents, all of them possessing a single common property, namely that of reducing their readers’ will to live. Put such an organisation in charge of designing a curriculum on ICT, and you can predict the result: An Old Person’s Guide to ICT.

The Old Person’s ICT Curriculum (OPIC) has three ‘themes’: ‘using ICT systems’; ‘finding and exchanging information’; and ‘developing and presenting information’. The first involves learning a Key Skill — that of ‘interacting with ICT for a purpose’. Pupils should be taught important things like ‘take a turn playing a screen-based game, using a mouse, selecting options and keying in information’. Teachers should ensure that pupils are able to ‘choose between option buttons displayed on a cashpoint screen’, ‘follow instructions when using interactive TV’ and ‘receive a text message to make arrangements, e.g. where to meet a friend’.

Now I know what you’re thinking, dear reader. You think I am making this up. In that case, can I refer you to the QCA’s draft ‘ICT Skill for Life Curriculum Document’ released in September 2005 and available online from www.qca.org.uk?

There’s a surreal quality to the QCA’s ICT curriculum. It conjures up images of kids up and down the country trudging into ICT classes and being taught how to use a mouse and click on hyperlinks; receiving solemn instructions in the creation of documents using Microsoft Word and of spreadsheets using Excel; being taught how to create a toy database using Access and a cod PowerPoint presentation; and generally being bored out of their minds.

And then the same kids go home and log onto Bebo or MySpace to update their profiles, run half a dozen simultaneous Instant Messaging conversations, use Skype to make free phone calls, rip music from CDs they’ve borrowed from friends, twiddle their thumbs to send incomprehensible text messages, view silly videos on YouTube and use BitTorrent to download episodes of ‘Lost’.

And when you ask them what they did at school today they grimace and say ‘We made a PowerPoint presentation, Dad. Yuck!’

Vatican goes Wilde

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From Times Online

Oscar Wilde, poet, playwright, gay icon and deathbed convert to Catholicism, has been paid a rare tribute by the Vatican. His aphorisms are quoted in a collection of maxims and witticisms for Christians that has been published by one of the Pope’s closest aides…

It is said that Wilde converted to Catholicism on his deathbed. I prefer to believe the story that his last words were: “Either that wallpaper goes, or I do”.

Another scurrilous deathbed joke from my childhood surfaces. It concerns Michael O’Leary, a celebrated reprobate who never darkened the door of the parish church. But eventually he was laid low by a heart attack and his family, seeing an opportunity to rescue him from the fires of hell, summoned a priest to give him Extreme Unction. In accordance with the rite, the priest bent down and said, “Michael, do you renounce the Devil, and all his works and pomps?” Whereupon Michael, summoning up all his remaining energy, hauled himself up onto one elbow and said, “Jesus, Father, this is no time to be makin’ enemies”.

Eagleton on stereotypes

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Terry Eagleton had an hilarious review of Typecasting: on the Arts and Sciences of Human Inequality in the London Review of Books. The article, alas, has disappeared behind a paywall, but here are two passages which made me laugh.

It would make for a bolder, more innovative study than this one to put in a good word for stereotypes, even though academics at certain American universities might find themselves under fire for doing so. Those of us who are not American academics, however, may feel less constrained. It is an open secret, for example, that Ulster Protestants are not by and large dandyish aesthetes notable for their extravagant wordplay and surreal sense of humour. The English middle classes are for the most part less physically and emotionally expressive than Neapolitan dockers. It is unusual to meet a working-class Liverpudlian who dresses for dinner, other than in the sense of putting on a shirt. Corporation executives tend not to be Dadaists.

And,

Academics who study these facts are known as sociologists, and like Stalinists have no interest in individuals. Without stereoypping of some kind, social life would grind to a halt. If the plumber turns up to fix drains dressed in tights and a tutu, I would natually be liberal-minded enough to invite him to perform a few pirouettes at the sink; but if the bank manager insists on discussing my loan in Latvian, I might take my business elsewhere. Human freedom is a question of life being reasonably predictable, not of being joyously liberated from rules. Unless we can calculate the effects of our actions, which includes the way others might typically respond to them, we will be incapable of realising our projects effctively.

Footnote: Apropos plumbers in tights, J. Edgar Hoover, the fearsome Director of the FBI who held even presidents in thrall, was a distinguished cross-dresser who wore tutus to informal social occasions. The absurd thing is that he didn’t have the legs for it, being short and stocky of build, and exceedingly hirsute to boot.