Information Technology Reference
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on energy expenditure for the authority was to offer the subject and see if it captured
sufficient student numbers to survive. The subject had little chance to succeed in this
environment as there was a co-operative relationship between university departments
and both the other streams, but no interest from any department in the IT and Society
subject. Similarly the industry groups anxious to increase the number of available
employees in computing had no interest in co-operating with a subject that covered
the potential evils of technology without developing many job related skills.
4.1.4 The Fourth Turning Point: Failure of the New Subjects to Attract Girls
One of the principal tenets for creation of the change from Computer Science to the
three new streams of computing (Information Systems, Information Processing and
Management and Information Technology in Society) was the desire to make the
subjects more interesting and attractive to girls. By 2008, however, we find the gender
balance in the two remaining subjects (Information Systems, Information Processing
and Management) to have dropped to less than 25% girls. Clearly the intention to
make these subjects amenable to girls has not been achieved and we need to look into
the history of computing subjects to try to find out why.
The ecological approach is required to understand this continued failure, despite
deliberate and conscious efforts to change subjects to include material of interest to
girls. In this case the important issue is competitors in the form of other HSC subjects.
The enrolment of females in the final year of high school and in subsequent university
places increased over this period. These student enrolment resources were typically
being taken up by 'traditional' female subjects such as those in commercial streams
including legal studies, accounting and such, but were also being increasingly cap-
tured by biology and even mathematics. The commerce subjects can be seen as an
example of least energy expenditure: a female student choosing a subject because she
can 'end up doing the same things that mother did'. The movement towards biology
and mathematics appears to be related to the large efforts in marketing by the feminist
lobbies in society. These teacher and university department based groups were able to
see a co-operative relationship between their aims and the identified subjects. This co-
operative relationship was, however, never developed with any of the information
technology subjects.
5 Conclusion
A naïve view of curriculum development sees central organisations making changes
to curriculum in high schools in logical response to the needs of industry and society.
The most cursory examination of any example of the history of computing in schools,
however, shows numerous examples of changes that are neither logical nor related to
changes in industry or society. Often central bodies are required to cancel subjects
because of the lack of student numbers. We have shown here, using a particular case,
that the history of computing in schools can be understood more clearly by using an
ecological model based on the organisms, resources and the environment and looking
at their interactions in terms of niches, expenditure of the least energy, cooperative
and competitive behaviour.
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