The system life cycle has a central role in ICT. It describes the evolution of a product. First of all the features of the product have to be identified; there has to be an analysis into how it will be used and its precise requirements; it has to be designed in detail; the product must be made; it must be tested; then it must be evaluated to see what its limitations are, what extra features could be incorporated in an upadted version and how the existing features could be improved. Then it all repeats - over and over. Microsoft Word, for example, has been through this cycle more than ten times.
This systems life cycle takes up a big display board in my classroom and I refer to if fairly often in my teaching. It is helpful to remind learners where their current work fits into the systems life cycle. For some time I have wanted to replace it with a learning life cycle so that I could show learners where their current task fitted into a learning life cycle. I have thought long and hard about it but I could not really get anything to fit.
Eventually I hit on the idea of a learning spiral which I could make to fit the idea of a learning cycle, however, ICT is coming to the end of its life and will be replaced with computing so it seemed more fitting that instead of a learning spiral, I should have a learning flowchart.
The learning flowchart could be applied to many, if not all subjects and soon it will replace the system life cycle - or at least a horizontal version of it will.
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