Interactive learning: Twenty years later
I find the articles here quite interesting. An article from 20 years ago predicting the effect of computers on education, and the same author's comments on this article form the perspective of now. http://www.citejournal.org/vol2/iss4/seminal.cfm """ Why was my prediction wrong? I can see a number of reasons. One, already mentioned, is a tremendous fascination with the Internet, in spite of the fact that there is little empirical evidence to show it is effective in helping learning. Another is the rise of the mouse as a computer device. People had the peculiar idea that one could deal with the world of learning purely by pointing. An even more important factor is the lack of research in learning with computers, effective research professionally done with very large numbers of students. """ I disagree about the Internet. My son would be much less "educated" without this exposure. Though I guess the fact is that it was all non-classroom time. There is in fact an entire child peer culture on the Internet. The beauty is it has no particular educational intent. But it so, as a byproduct. My son learned how to write glibly and entertainingly, keeping up with the wits in a group chat setting. I know quite well he would be much less comforatble with the keyboard and and his ability to express himself with the written word, were it not for the Internet. I agree about the mouse. As I have repeated ad infinitum. Art
Another is the rise of the mouse as a computer device. People had the peculiar idea that one could deal with the world of learning purely by pointing.
hmm.. I don't think the idea of mice was that could 'do everything by pointing'.. Begs the question how well do most people deal with the world without looking? Hand-eye-mind coordination is an essential part of who we are as human beings. Mice are arguably a primitive first step towards that in a digital domain. The real problem as I see it is that there is crucial triangular disconnect when using keyboards and mice: triangle = hand eye screen and I'll argue that disconnect its really tetral in nature : tetra = mind hand eye screen The main assumption of keyboard use is that you are a good typist, accurate and can keep ones eyes [+ mind] on the screen [subject]. [QWERTY mapping is an assumed subskill or worse if you come from Asia]. Perhaps cultures with strong calligraphic [gestural symbolic] backgrounds like China and Japan feel very differently about mice and their progeny. If you are a lousy typist like me, then something has to give, spelling, concentration, expression etc.. or even typing into the wrong focus window on occasion. But I have good spatial hand-eye coordination so mice come pretty easy. I know some poets who are hopeless with a mouse. Drawing with a mouse or even a tablet is another matter. Though as anyone who learns to play an instrument knows - eventually one is neither looking nor aware of doing so. Computers are instruments whose most 'expressive' interface is perhaps still the keyboard. Mice are so primitive in design and use still. But even small innovations make huge difference. For example, I consider dual buttons with a scroll-wheel essential to me now, at least because they use most of my hand. [middle three fingers for commands, outer two fingers + wrist for position] When we have widespread tabletPCs, as I believe we will within 10 years, then a fundamentally more direct and natural relationship can be invoked and designed for. SciFi and Hollywood are already understandably very fond of the virtual gestural interface. The point being that you look at what you are doing, with your hands in the right place, at the right time - and supported perhaps by speech or even more direct eye movement 'gestural' sensors. Aircraft and military designers are pioneering some of this. As long as one is dealing is symbol and abstraction, there is always a cognitive distance -- for better and for worse. That's the whole idea - graphics, writing, math, etc. In that sense it's same difference [for different people] whether they use mice or keyboards, or scratch marks in the cosmic sand with string and seashells. Jason
hmm.. I don't think the idea of mice was that could 'do everything by pointing'..
Begs the question how well do most people deal with the world without looking?
Hand-eye-mind coordination is an essential part of who we are as human beings. Mice are arguably a primitive first step towards that in a digital domain.
Let them play golf! But the truth is I am not meaning to be as extreme as I might sound in some of my ranting. For example, I am a fan in many ways of Microsoft as well as open source. Recently have devoted some energy to understanding .Net and am excited by what I am understanding. For reasons I won't go into. But rather than contending point by point with your comments, I will make my own comments. I choose to work from a windowing envrionment, whether I am working on Windows or on Linux. Probably for the same reasons that does most of the world. But then I am often in "interface" mode, not learning mode. Perhaps my backwardness is due to the fact that in the end I can only take as true what it is I know from my own experience. In learning mode, I have always been mostly at the keyboard. Notice the "mostly". None of this is boolean. We (you and I) seen to run around the same cricle alot. In the end I think very little has changed, or will change, by the fact of existence of the computer in truly defining what it is to *be* educated . One can argue that since the computer is a fact of modern life, the ability to interface with it should be an educational goal. And in many cases that is the extent of, or at least excuse for, making exposure to computers part of education. To me, that puts "computer ed" on a parr with drivers ed. In the end, words are words, literacy is literacy, understanding is understanding. The damn 3 R's are the damn 3 R's, and I don't live in a science fiction world where they have been replaced by a new paradigm or twenty. In continuing to assume that promoting a facility with the use of words as central to an education, maybe a handwriting recognizing tablet might be a acceptable alternative to a keyboard - where an alternative to pencil and paper are called for - but not the mouse. Nope, no and no. And then you would have to help me understand what of significance we have accomplished. All this is Zen stuff really, But the truth is that to the extent that it has been studied, there is simply no evidence that computers are making a difference, or if the are, there are great negatives that offset the great positives, and we are left at zero. Obviously I think great positives are possible. The greatest educational benefit of PyGeo was to myself, in creating it. It will never have nearly the same benefit to anyone else. Happens to have been one of the most productive educational experiences of my life. So the point is not to use PyGeo or the like, so much as to help and facilitate others in finding ther own PyGeo. And I can promise I could not have created PyGeo working from some else's environment designed with brilliance for the creation of PyGeos. I needed to be as far outside "environments" of any kind - looking in fact to create my own. We are a consumer society, and I would like to see education exempted. My take on your take, is in accepting the consumption as technology as educational. To me, only participation in the production of it can be educational - and the sense of empowerment (to use a horribly correct term) thereby achieved. We do too much consumption of technologies we not only do not understand - we are not expected to understand, we are not encouraged to understand. Education should be in direct counter to all this. When I think of it, I despise the thought of a machine reading my kid's handwriting at school. Unless and until he is in a position to reproduce the machine that it is doing it. I want my child building a radio by wrapping wires around a tube. Not listening to lectures from far away. Art
I don't want to over-prolong this discussion but some points that Arthur made merit a comment... At 16:39 28/06/2003 -0500, Arthur wrote:
......................... ...... the truth is that to the extent that it has been studied, there is simply no evidence that computers are making a difference, or if the are, there are great negatives that offset the great positives, and we are left at zero.
I don't think this is true. There is plenty of evidence that computers can make a difference to learning - but usually in the case of rather specific situations of very small numbers of teachers/mentors, students and computers. The continual problem has been to "map" those isolated successes onto the mainstream of institutionalised education - it is at that point that the evidence dies away into neutrality. What you arrive at, then, is as much a socio-political problem as a technical one. Maybe computer technology is just too new (only 20 years old, really) for educational institutions to do anything sensible with it, and maybe (as left wing thinkers tend to assert) the prime function of social institutions is to replicate existing class structures, and squash out any kind of liberating force for change.
Obviously I think great positives are possible.
The greatest educational benefit of PyGeo was to myself, in creating it. It will never have nearly the same benefit to anyone else. Happens to have been one of the most productive educational experiences of my life. So the point is not to use PyGeo or the like, so much as to help and facilitate others in finding ther own PyGeo.
............. We are a consumer society, and I would like to see education exempted.....
This is well put, and it is the core of the message that needs to be pushed into the mainstream. So this is my point - we DO know some of the ideas that work - what is at issue is how to nurture them to the bigger scale. - Phillip ++++++ Dr Phillip Kent, London, UK mathematics education technology research p.kent@mail.com mobile: 07950 952034 ++++++
And one side story. There is a worldwide network of private schools called Waldorf schools, which grew out of the educational philiosophy (about which a know next to nothing) of Rudolf Steiner - a nineteenth century mystic/theosophist. Happens that the movement took a great interest in projective geometry concepts. And one of my favorite books on the subject of projective geoemtry - accurate, but freewheeling - came out of this movement. Opportunist that I am, I tried to explore whether PyGeo might be of interest to the Waldorf movement schools. And learned quickly that they totally eschew the use of computers in the classroom - until perhaps the end of high school. Which is as far as I am concerned a perfectly reasonable position. And - my mind is open to the possibility - perhaps more than that. Art
Introducing myself: http://groups.google.nl/groups?selm=36DD9F9B.26DE96C%40pobox.com I am now, as you may have guessed, 17 years old, just finished my exams and having progress with my first real game (http://pybrian.sf.net/). I have heard a lot of programmers started with game(s) :)... Arthur wrote:
I disagree about the Internet. My son would be much less "educated" without this exposure. Though I guess the fact is that it was all non-classroom time. There is in fact an entire child peer culture on the Internet.
Well, without the internet, I would not know Python. I would probably be programming in QBasic. I would not know Linux. I would still be using Dos/Windows. Internet is everything. However, this is all about computers. Outside computers, I have learned less, but not nothing. My first knowledge about politics came from the Jeugdjournaal website. I would probably not me a member of the Dutch Socialist Party because I would know far less about it. I would never have been on television without my homepage. I don't understand how anyone can deny Internet's educational influenc. yours, Gerrit. -- 37. If any one buy the field, garden, and house of a chieftain, man, or one subject to quit-rent, his contract tablet of sale shall be broken (declared invalid) and he loses his money. The field, garden, and house return to their owners. -- 1780 BC, Hammurabi, Code of Law -- Asperger Syndroom - een persoonlijke benadering: http://people.nl.linux.org/~gerrit/ Het zijn tijden om je zelf met politiek te bemoeien: http://www.sp.nl/
participants (5)
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Arthur -
Arthur -
Gerrit Holl -
Jason Cunliffe -
Phillip Kent