Learning with Technology: Module 4 Post

ISTE Standard 4: Critical thinking, problem solving, and decision making

Relevant question: How can computational thinking be applied to the history classroom?

It seems this question is not a common one, as at first glance I only found one useful resource that addressed it. Unfortunately for me, that resource is another teacher's blog post - not exactly scholarly or peer-reviewed. Further, I suspect the blog post is similar to this blog post - written as part of a school assignment.

Upon further research, I found this article which addresses specific ways computational thinking was adapted and used in a history classroom. It notes that computational thinking was used for such things as developing proper note-taking skills,  improving active listening skills, improving recall skills, and recognizing the difference between studying and homework. It lays out a method for teaching proper note-taking by utilizing pop-culture phenomena, specifically hashtags, to help students catalog information they take notes on during class time. It suggests that similar methodology can be applied to teach the other three things the article claims computational thinking can be applied to in a history classroom.

Personally I feel that history only has limited use for computational thinking. Computational thinking is not useful as a historical analysis tool, but rather only as a method for teaching useful student skills like note-taking. As a classmate pointed out earlier this week in online discussions, history is not a subject known for frequent use of logical linear decision-making. On the contrary, history is a nearly continuous stream of illogical, irrational, emotional decisions, made by men dealing with complex problems to which reason never applied. The decision to blame Germany for the entirety of the first world war, for example, is not logical or rational, is deeply emotional, and does not obey any laws of computational thinking. Since this example is not unique to history, I would argue that computational thinking cannot be used to analyze most historical decisions or events.

Computational thinking is, however, useful for teaching student skills that are often learned (or at least reinforced) in the history classroom. Such skills include note-taking, active listening, recall, and noting the difference between homework and studying. These are all skills that require training in a logical thought process in order to be done correctly. That lends itself nicely to computational thinking - and this is how I feel computational thinking can be most effectively applied in the history classroom.