I normally have some basis of knowledge for the technical subject matter that I am asked to write
about in these pages, but on this topic ("The Future of Education"), I am at a total loss. I don't
know beans about education today. I married too late in life to have a family, and probably what
I experienced in my education 30 years ago is all obsolete now. Besides, I was educated totally
under a Catholic parochial (nuns with switchblade rulers!) and then later a Jesuit college system,
so even then, I never experienced the real world.
Way back in my school daze, if you were kinda scholarly but not a jock, you were automatically
tossed into the dweeb basket. Being a life long, nerdpack wearing four eyed hacker myself, I
considered myself to be a member of some sort of geek clique. I don't want to suggest that
getting good grades automatically made you 4F for student activities. The #2 guy in my
graduating class was captain of the football team, went on to law school, and became the
youngest judge ever in Sonoma County. There can be life after books, even in high school.
Naturally, I assumed that school today must be rather like school in the 50's, except that Elvis has
been replaced by the soothing sounds of Metallica at sock hops. And so if you were going to
really introduce computers into the educational experience, that you were going to have to first
convert whole classrooms into charismatically challenged Internet surfers, like the character in
the cartoon strip Foxtrot.
To get some information for this article, I decided I would have to do some research. I started by
putting on my Reporter's Fedora hat, sticking a hollerith card in the hatband on which I scrawled
the word "Press", and went to interview some people who do know about this education stuff.
The first person that I interviewed was the guy in the office next door, who has actual kids in an
actual public school. I was getting to think that this reporter gig was gonna be pretty easy going,
until I found that he gave me all the wrong answers, which is to say, not the answers that I was
expecting, or wanting to hear. So I sort of worked my way up the academic food chain, going
from elementary teacher, to high school teacher, to finally district administrator, and they all
gave me the wrong answers, although they were sort of the same wrong answers. Which made
me believe that I might be asking the wrong questions.
I have sadly found that the geek is dead, BillG notwithstanding. One of the first things that came
out of my interviews, is the obvious fact that just about anybody can be proficient at using
computers nowadays. If you have a computer system available with a WIMPy (Windows, Icons,
Mice and Pictures) interface,everybody under the age of twenty can start using it, and in a
productive way. Most kids, even the real underachievers in academic settings, can and do take
to this computer stuff like ice cream to a cone. It is just a video game with some intelligence,
after all.
Spokane may or may not be on any kind of forefront in using computers in education.
Apparently Microsoft has been tossing a few buckets of money into some Spokane schools to let
them buy some iron, software and web access. And the valley voters recently ponyed up some
bread for more computers in the classrooms there. Serious use of computers in education
appears to be just getting started, and is still experimental, but the people involved are quite
excited at the results that they are seeing.
One thing that appears to have been learned, is that if you have 20 classrooms in a school, and 20
computers, you do NOT put one computer into each classroom. First, nobody can get at that one
computer without disturbing everybody else, and without missing whatever is going on in the
class while you have your shot at the system. Second, most of the teachers today have not a clue
how to use the things, or why to use the things. It is my understanding from my extensive
research that very few teachers, even the ones that have graduated in only the last few years, have
computers in their homes. Or if they do, the computer belongs to and is used primarily by a non
teaching spouse.
I remember when I was in college, and had just taken my first computer course. I was taking an
upper division physics course from a fresh Berkeley PhD who was in his first year of teaching. I
handed in a homework assignment where I used a computer, rather than try to solve a third order
equation by hand, and he was totally flabbergasted. Here was a guy that had just spent three
years researching particle physics, and he had never touched a computer himself.
If using computers in education is going to be a viable thing, the first thing that you have to do is
somehow teach the teachers. And unlike the kids, you will often face a real hard sell here,
because this ain't the way Socrates did things. The teachers have to be prepared for one of the
few remaining geeks in our classrooms to know more about the subject than the teacher does,
and to have fun with that idea.
What has been shown to be effective is to create computer labs, where you put your 20
something computers into an area where some sort of technical help can be made available, and
where using the system does not interrupt 20 classes of kids. Now you can schedule students
into these areas, and you can focus them on projects where the computer makes sense.
This weekend, I finally found the web page of my college alma mater, and I was rather surprised
to find that they are doing the same thing. There are rooms set aside in about four areas around
the campus, where there are fifteen to twenty systems per room, available for student use up to
24 hours a day. If a classroom needs a computer, they have carts, built up of a laptop, overhead
projector, and flat screen display, that a professor can use.
It appears that the sorts of things that these Spokane school computers are used for are not
Computer Based Training like you might think. Generally, students are given a project in some
sort of subject, and are asked to use the computer to find their own data to put together a paper or
report on that subject, and they are given general pointers of where it would be most productive
to look for the data they are interested in. The World Wide Web is one of those resources, now
of course. It appears that E-MAIL is another good resource, if only to keep several members of a
student project (including the faculty members) up to date. One reads about how easy it is for a
student doing a report on the ocean, say, to send E-mail to the Woods Hole Oceanographic
Research people maybe and ask them for data. I suppose that can happen, although I would
think that a researcher bobbing around in the middle of a pacific storm would get rather tired of
this after the 300th request from the 200th school system.
Some people have a vision that the physical library will disappear, and access to any document
you would go to a library to get will be via your computer terminal. The day that all the
resources in the Library of Congress gets online will be beyond my lifetime, I think, although it
is certainly the case that everything published at least in reviewed journals is now available in
computer readable form. (I just got an ad for a new scientific journal to be exclusively
distributed over the Web.) I certainly can envision that the normal materials that a pre college
student would need, could soon be available by electronic means. The full text of the
Encyclopedia Britanica is on CD Rom now, not to mention MS Encarta.
There has been some talk of -- why go to school at all? Do home schooling, except instead of
mommy dusting off old algebra books that she hasn't seen in fifteen years, dial in, get your
lectures electronically, communicate with the teacher via E-mail (the teacher stays at home too,
of course) and create your term papers in the form of web pages or something.
There are in fact college level courses being taught right now via the web. This week, one of my
chemistry journals announced "an on line chemistry course for advanced college chemistry
students", which can be found in http//:dirac.py.iup.edu/college/chemistry/chem-course/webpage.html. UCLA has instituted Virtual Office Hours for their chemistry departments
on their own local intranet. It provides electronic posting of course materials, and an opportunity
for students and faculty to engage in on-line question and answer sessions. They have a really
neat home page at www.ucla.edu/uclavoh that makes me thank the heavens that I switched out of
Chemistry and into Bitwacking way back when.
Locally, there is a group at WSU starting plans for a Virtual College of Information Technology.
Professor Roy Rada there is involved and you can read more about that in
http://www.eecs.wsu.edu/~rada/research/proposals/ITcoll.htm, or email him at (I think)
rada@eecs.wsu.edu.
So, this computer stuff is getting slowly worked into the educational infrastructure, and it is sadly
no longer the provence of only the dedicated dweeb who is finding access to this tool, but the
whole classroom, jocks and all. It is becoming just another tool, like slide rules were in my day,
and calculators were in the next generation's day.
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