Browsing by Author "Eloholma, Mikko Aleksi"

In the 1970s information technology started to become part of everyday life and as a result of this process, computer programming has become an important theme in the digital society both in the labor-market and on the educational field. In this study, I examine high school students' everyday conceptions of computer programming and technological development. I explore these conceptions relying on the theory of social representations which is focused on defining how people make foreign technical and scientific phenomena familiar. I interpreted the meanings produced by the high school students in relation to the cultural history of computer programming and especially in relation to the general meanings given to computer programming on the educational field. As a separate research question I examined computer programming in relation to meanings that are connected to technological development. The aim of this study is to offer more understanding about how computer programming is made familiar in an increasingly digital society where it has emerged as an important skill, especially through education. I produced my data by interviewing seven high school students who had attended a voluntary high school course combining electronics and programming. I analyzed the interviews discourse-analytically by defining oppositions that describe the social representation of programming. I also produced concepts that seemed to synthesize the oppositions and examined subject positions that were constructed in the speech. Besides, I analyzed how the representations of programming and technological development were connected in the speech. The representational field of programming was constructed by the oppositions of human-computer, material-virtual, technical-playfulness and proximity-remoteness. I defined the opposition human-computer to be the most fundamental themata of the social representation of computer programming. Programming was perceived as taking technological development to the next level. Technological development was seen as a partly autonomous process but humans were still given the most fundamental role in the definition and delimitation of technologies. On the basis of this study it can be summarized that high school students saw programming as an important phenomenon which at the same time was difficult to approach and define. This observation r a challenge for the establishment of programming both in education and in the wider society.