Joe's Jottings
Jottings Number 56, Reply D, by Hudi Cantrell:
Date: Thu, 6 Jun 96 14:42:14 -0700
I see two places where IT can contribute to the teaching and learning processes. First, IT (the technology itself, not the function that manages it) is ideally suited for straightforward skill building. Unlike a classroom teacher, computer based training can be set up to let the student proceed at his own pace, let him go over the same material as many times as he needs to, track his responses and give him immediate feedback, base the next student experience directly on the result of the previous one, meet the student time and place needs, and meet some students' preferences for making their mistakes in private. It's super for any kind of learning in which there are clear right answers (multiplication, spelling, using Freelance for a predefined set of tasks, assembling an atom bomb, etc.). Second, IT provides a terrific communication medium for students and teachers without time & space limitations. It can give me access to lectures by great masters, or the ability to watch them at work, and, if the great one is willing, it can allow us to have asynchronous dialogue. It can also let a far flung community of learners share progress, problems, ideas, etc. in a limited way (most effectively between face to face encounters, not instead of them). This can be especially important where the teacher or student has a physical disability, where one or both of them are isolated by geography, or where they do not share the same primary language. (This method also limits the impact of race, gender, age, disibility, sexual preference and other prejudices which have a huge impact on face to face teaching and learning. What IT cannot do well, that I think is essential for important teaching and learning, is to let the teacher and student deal with each other in a rich context which includes smell, tone, tempo, stress, facial expression, body language, and the great richness of simultaneous laughter. It also gives the teacher and student very limited access to indirectly relevant (but crucial) information. Thus, I may not care about the behavior of someone who teaches me French, but I may care a great deal about the behavior of someone who teaches me ethics ore religion or philosophy; behavior which IT based teaching and learning would give me very little assess to. We learn our most important lessons, the lessons about how to live with ourselves and each other, about how to work, to love, to be good citizens, etc. from exposure to whole models in context. The teachers who change us most deeply do so as complete people, not as mere deliverers of instruction. So my vote is to use IT for teaching and learning whenever it is an adequate technology, and save the precious face to face time for the important things that can only be taught and learned in a rich context. If we would start doing this in schools, we could have class sizes of ten (or fewer), and far more meaningful contact between students and teachers. If we did it at work, we could have very efficient self paced training followed by short, rich human interactions. The barriers to this change are: - we don't have cultural norms to support self paced instruction (permission to schedule it during work hours, rewards or recognition for doing it, respect for the activity,etc.) - we don't have very many good tools (there's a growing, but still small, repository of good, student centered self paced instruction... and most of us don't know how to get it or how to find out what's good) - teachers aren't too sure about what their value would be if they gave up conducting skill building, vocabulary lessons, and supervision of rote practice - the infrastructure is very expensive to deploy (not much of an issue at HP, but a huge issue in most educational institutions - we don't have social structure for supervising self paced instuction (this is an easy problem to solve where there aren't unions involved, but it does take some creative thinking) Of the barriers listed, the first one will be the really hard one to overcome. It's far more complex than what I stated above. In addition to the cultural norms I listed, there are deep beliefs about our adequacy as learners that inhibit this change. Most of us have been socialized to believe that we can't learn on our own, and this belief persists in the face of all sorts of evidence to the contrary. Hudi
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