Research On The Information Technology Curriculum From The Perspective Of Culture

The information technology (IT) curriculum of elementary education in our country originates from the computer science curriculum of the earlier period, as a result, it obliviously takes the trace of the systematical curriculum, and is greatly influenced by scientism. People can easily find that the curriculum development is technology-based. Some of the specialities of this kind of curriculum are the emphasis on the instrumentalism, the worship of technique, and the separate training of computer operative ability. Meanwhile the important education of students' cultural character, which is really the spirit of the information culture, is given up.What is the most essential is that we should regard the curriculum as culture, or as a special kind of culture that is taken into educational field. This paper tries to examine the IT curriculum from the perspective of culture, taking it both as information culture and as a sort of special curriculum culture, aiming at rectifying the tendency of scientism, instrumentalism and the worship of technique in the IT education curriculum, and reveals the cultural value of it. We believe that in this way we can better form students' IT ability and IT literacy, and better reconstruct IT curriculum.Firstly the paper thinks the information culture is the combination of the sign, the behavior and the meaning in people life. It is the life style in the information era, whose key components are the respect for its subjects, and the critical reflections of the subjects, and which expresses itself by technical symbols and the problem-solving behaviors corresponding to the information ear. And thus we should design curriculum aims and its practice approaches based on the definition of information culture, so that it can be easily interiorized.Secondly the paper holds the opinion that the information curriculum, which bases itself on the information culture, is the culture of self-construction, and it shoulders the task of committing the objective culture to people's minds. In a sense, it is the culture of which the great mission is to bring up man. According to the mission of achieving the development of man, the construction of the IT course has to encourage the interaction and communication between information culture and man. This also asks the IT course to play the role of promoting the interaction between culture and man.On the basis of the analysis above, the IT course construction of cultural perspective should centers on student's real life in the information age, converting the course into the true cultural experience. To carry out the ideas, (1) the course design has to take the comprehensive course pattern instead of the disciplinary course pattern. As a comprehensive course, the IT course follows the "topic- activity- expression" mode, taking topics as the center to organize the course; (2) the course implementation has to shift from the systematic construction-valued instruction toward meaning constructive instruction. In the instruction of meaning construction, the students' study activities become the key factor among others, including integrative topics and the information technology tools. Accordingly the course implementation will be carried on a series of study activities of high quantity; (3) the evaluation of teaching and learning will no longer adopt the sole quantity inclination, and it will lay emphasis on both the quantity and quality approaches. And as a necessary part of the process of teaching and learning, it will be able to meet the demands of the comprehensive curriculum development, paying great attention to students' comprehensive technical literacy and their comprehensive ability of conducting information. This means to combine traditional quantity evaluation with the performance evaluation based on the projects.