The Roundtable in Multimedia is an invitational conference held annually
since 1990 for discussion among leaders in developing and applying the
new media. Education is always a special focus. The panel discussion
abbreviated here is drawn from a session on April 7, 1994. A fuller
version, along with other discussions, is published in Content and
Communications, a book edited by Martin Greenberger. Greenberger, a
professor at UCLA, is chairman and organizer of the Roundtable in
Multimedia.
George Gilder argued in the July/August issue of Educom Review that just
as computer technology is breaking down the hierarchies, pyramids,
monopolies, and bureaucracies of industrial society, so too will it
bring about the demise of education as we know it. Does the cataclysm
that befell the Soviet Union foreshadow what's in store for the school
system? Is it just a matter of time? These are among the questions
considered in the following provocative exchange.
Martin Greenberger
The education session highlights each of the Roundtables in Multimedia.
Education is a strategic place to make a major difference with
technology. Our distinguished panel is led by John Kernan, who was CEO
of the largest educational software company until he got the
entrepreneurial bug and went off last year to start a new company. John
will launch the discussion.
John Kernan
The topic that Martin has set out for us is Transforming and Preserving
Education. The idea is to explore ways we can use the new technology to
make a positive difference in education--to transform the system while
at the same time preserving values we cherish from our own school days:
the caring teacher, friendships made in school, field trips, prom night,
and so on.
We have a diverse panel: a practicing teacher, author, and education
consultant [Alan November]; an eminent professor and author of books on
the use of technology in education [Seymour Papert]; a senior venture
capitalist who is investing in education and multimedia [John Grillos];
an educator and technologist now turned software entrepreneur for higher
education [Bernard Gifford]; a manager of a huge, 30,000-member
Internet-based network connecting teachers together across the state of
Texas [Connie Stout]; and an education researcher who is studying ways
that technology can be effective in educational reform [David
Niguidula]. Each of the panelists will conclude his or her remarks with
a thought-provoking question on how we can use technology to transform
our nation's educational system while still preserving traditional
values.
Alan November
For my first overhead [brandishes a toilet seat]. How do we transform
and preserve what's good about this technology and this organizational
design? Suppose we could apply supercomputer multimedia technology to
this toilet seat. If we wanted to add features to it, what would they
be?
Here's what my research has shown. One, it has to have a gender
recognizer. It has to know who's coming: the seat flips down or up
without any hassles in the family. It has to glow in the dark. If you
have a 3-year-old son, like I do, it has to be remedial, and it has to
move to catch his stream so he gets it right every time. Not only that;
it has to be able to change color and change with your bath prints and
it ought to be ergonomic. It ought to adjust for wide bodies, rise up or
move down, and if you have a little trouble, it ought to be ejecting as
well. Maybe it ought to have some butt recognition, so it can do
complete multimedia for you. Knowing who you are, it can project things
that interest you while you're there so you don't have to open the
magazines or newspapers.
Last year in Singapore and Japan, 80,000 people spent $20,000 on a high-
tech toilet. I haven't found one yet that's worth $20,000. This is the
question in education too. What is really worth the technology? Let's
push our imagination.
In Singapore and Japan, Nippon Telephone is a big investor in this
technology. There's a touch pad in the bathroom wall. You punch in your
personal code. The toilet has to know who you are before you go. The
telephone line connected to the base of the toilet makes a call to get a
complete urinalysis every time and can check for colon cancer as well.
The data flows to your doctor's office, where it is processed by a 120-
day averaging algorithm. If something doesn't look good after a few
days, the office calls you to come in for an examination. This is real-
time medicine--not a checkup every two years, but in real time. Real
time is a very important concept in education as well.
What's worth $20,000? As I read the literature, there are only two ways
to think about technology in the schools. We can take technology and
improve what we're already doing, called automation. Almost all of what
I see these days is automation. We're trying to improve current reality,
like warming the seat or flushing the toilet faster. We're flushing the
curriculum faster. An automated feature is not worth $20,000, because it
hasn't given us a new vision of what schools can be. Until the time we
put in the telephone line and had data flowing to the doctor's office,
the business of the toilet stays the same, even with multimedia. But
when we add telecommunications in real time, the toilet enters a new
business: wellness. Depending on your medical condition, it can extend
your life by 10 or 15 years. That's worth twenty thousand bucks!
So, my question is, What is the new business--not the new technologies,
but the new business--of education? What problems can students solve,
and what role can they play in life with these technologies that they
simply cannot play without them? In improving tests, learning more
stuff, learning more stuff faster, we're just automating the current
reality. But stepping back from the technology, what is the role of
students in a complex global economy? What kinds of problems will
students be able to solve that they've never been able to solve before?
Seymour Papert
Marvin Minsky and I cofounded the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at
MIT in the middle 1960s. In those days, artificial intelligence [AI] was
this cognate enterprise that looked into such questions as, Can a
machine be made vastly more intelligent than a person? Then came the
1970s. An interesting kind of Gresham's law took hold. Many critics say
that AI collapsed because of a failure of vision. More likely, it
collapsed because of its worldly success. All of a sudden it became
possible to make a little expert system that could do all sorts of
things that could be used tomorrow. This took the energy and the
funding, and it dominated the atmosphere of the field.
I wonder if there might be a similar phenomenon taking place now. I
remember during the 1970s when Alan Kay and I used to talk about what
computers in education would be like. This was a grandiose vision of a
revolutionary change in schools. Then in the 1980s, as computers began
creeping in, I caught myself telling school establishments and
administrators that what I've got with this technology is what they
need. Wow! It's not what they need at all. It's poison to them. It's the
kiss of death. It's the end of education as an organized entity--of the
school as we've known it. That's the question I propose here. Is there
any reason to believe that the school--with its structure of classroom,
segregation by age, and so on--will exist in 50 years? I like Alan
November's example of the toilet seat, except that the toilet in some
form is always going to be there.
Today we have a force--in fact, many forces. This whole technology
movement is one. But there's a more potent force. It's child force. I
recently visited with a grandchild who's three. I was amazed watching
him select a videotape (he's got a collection of National Geographic
videotapes), load it into the VCR, and look at it. He can't read, but he
could tell what videotape it was. He's growing up with access to
knowledge in a spontaneous, natural, self-directed way. It is
inconceivable that this child will happily sit through anything like a
curriculum where a teacher has an agenda of what to learn today. The
whole concept of curriculum, accreditation, and segregation by ages is
entirely a product of outmoded ways of disseminating knowledge. This kid
is learning the difference. So that's my question. How long will it take
before children say, "We won't take this anymore," and the school will
collapse?
John Grillos
The topic of this session was a challenge for me because it refers to
transforming education while preserving the traditional values of our
schools, and I wasn't sure what these values are. Given that technology
will probably affect teaching, I asked myself whether our goal should be
to preserve teaching as we see it. I think not. So I tried to
conceptualize what I thought the mission of education should be, and
came up with a list of eleven things: (1) subject matter mastery (the
three Rs), (2) learning to think, (3) discipline, (4) peer interaction
and cooperation, (5) learning leadership skills, (6) learning respect
for the opinions of others, (7) learning to listen, (8) building pride
and confidence, (9) getting close to intellectual excitement in
learning, (10) ethics, and (11) morals.
That's a long list, but it appears to me that technology may play a role
in only two of these areas: (1) core subject matter mastery and (8)
building pride and confidence. What technology can do, if you believe
this mission statement, is relieve teachers of rote activities, allowing
them to transform their job into more of the coaching and social
interaction required to prepare our children for society. How can that
happen? At a minimum, multimedia technology can provide a level of
expertise and completeness that we can't expect from a teacher or a
curriculum.
These are significant advantages, but they raise the issue of money.
Will technology add enough value--in the areas where it can really work-
-to make a difference? Will schools be willing to pay for that value?
I've visited over a hundred schools with computer labs. The vast
majority of those labs are in the hands of people who are not well
trained enough to use them. In fact, in almost 50 percent of the schools
I visited, the computer labs weren't being used very much at all.
That brings me to the question of whether multimedia will happen in
schools. My answer is, Without a doubt. I've never seen more horsepower
behind an industry segment in the 25 plus years that I've been in this
business. There are over 5,000 multimedia titles in development right
now. Multimedia software sales in the fourth quarter of last year were
$104 million out of over $200 billion in total software sales for 1993.
Hundreds of millions of dollars are being invested in this industry
segment by the federal government, state and local governments,
industry, venture capitalists, investment plans, you name it.
But will the multimedia school market be a viable economic proposition?
I am of the strong belief that if we cannot make it a viable economic
proposition, we will not be able to keep the private sector engaged in
trying to develop multimedia technology, and we will not see the
positive impact on schools. We won't get out of the chute.
Bernard Gifford
First of all, traditional value does not mean traditional behavior. I
think we too often confuse our own habits, proclivities, and prejudices
with traditional values. Traditional value does not mean teaching. It
means learning. There's a profound distinction between the two.
Traditional value does not mean schooling, but intellectual growth and
development. Traditional value does not mean passive acceptance of
received information, facts, and bits of knowledge, but the active
participation of learners in the construction of their own knowledge.
Traditional value does not mean technologically assisted eye-candy, but
learner-centered, technology-mediated learning.
What we have in school today is the traditional teacher/textbook/student
model, with prescribed directions of influence and interaction. What
we've been doing in education for the last 12 years is bolting
technology onto an existing teaching and learning enterprise. We have
not changed it; we've tried to fix it through a form of technological
grafting. We have no notion of what does and does not work. In fact,
even researchers are quite often unclear as to whether they are adding
technology to the capabilities of the instructor, the student, or the
textbook.
Let me offer another model, a model in which the learner is placed at
the center of the teaching and learning enterprise. It places
instructional text, the instructors, and a technology-mediated learning
environment at the disposal of students. A technology-mediated learning
environment is a system that allows students to go through a course at
their own pace, at their own schedule, in accordance with their own
diagnosed learning needs. It incorporates a learning management system
and continuous real-time evaluation. The student's own learning drives
the system and makes the instructor aware of acceleration or
retardation.
In the long run, we are going to move away from the school, the college,
and the university as we know it, defined by buildings and physical
boundaries, to an institution defined by its capabilities to distribute
interactive learning experiences. With the advent of the superhighway,
we're going to see the emergence of colleges and universities that
understand how the world is changing, and they will distribute learning
to businesses, to homes, and obviously on their own campuses.
Not only is this model more effective in promoting student learning; it
is far more efficient. Higher education is suffering from a cost disease
today, with costs increasing for the last 25 years (along with those of
pharmaceuticals) at rates 3 to 5 percent higher than inflation. Only
through intelligent utilization of interactive multimedia technology can
we make higher education simultaneously more productive and more
efficient. My question to the panel is, How do we move from the bolt-on
solution to a true transformational solution in education?
Connie Stout
I'm going to speak from the perspective of a classroom teacher. I taught
for about 16 years, and as I reflect on teachers before me, I realize
that a teacher certified in 1890 who walked into a classroom today could
go to the chalkboard and begin to teach. A doctor certified in 1890 who
walked into an operating room today would be bewildered. Education has
not changed much in the last hundred years.
As a teacher, I was a troublemaker because I tried to do things
differently. So I left the classroom, went to the State Department of
Education, and began to look at what we could do to make an impact. The
Texas education network has now been operating for 21/2 years based on
the Internet. Over 30,000 educators use it, logging in at a rate of over
150 interactions per month.
We did some surveys over the network. Let me tell you what we learned.
Teachers feel it revolutionized their work, even though it's not high
tech and we do not have large workstations in our schools. But teachers
feel a great deal of newfound freedom, and students feel they can do
something very productive.
We also found that networking leads to new communities. At the
University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, we test
children with nutritional problems. The doctors in the hospital are
working with nurse practitioners and parents to monitor the way kids eat
at home. [Their families] live all over south Texas. We put them on a
network to provide a support mechanism. It's a wonderful application
that does not require high-end technology.
Vice President Al Gore has given us [the] goal of having every school
linked by the year 2000. My questions are, How do we do it? And how do
we use it? Are we going to use technology to impose an old teacher model
on the system? Or are we going to find the new kinds of uses that Alan
November was suggesting?
David Niguidula
I work at the Coalition of Essential Schools, one of the organizations
that sprang up in the mid-'80s to help with restructuring. We are not
inherently high tech, but some of us think about how technological
applications might be useful. Everyone agrees that the industrial age
model is not good enough, but who's going to change it? The people we
trust to change the system are not the government agencies, vendors,
textbook publishers, or high-tech conferences, but the teachers. Along
with parents in the local community and students themselves, teachers
have the most vested interest in what happens--and they are there for
the long term. They will make the changes.
Our organization is based on a few simple notions of teaching and
learning called Common Principles. What is the primary purpose of
school? It is to help students learn to use their minds well. Our
approach is to ask teachers what they want their students to know and be
able to do--not just the gifted kids and not just the kids going to
college, but everyone receiving a diploma. We call this a backwards-
plan-ning model. You people in business know about this, but it is a
relatively new idea for teachers.
Two harder questions follow. First, how are we going to know? Every
school in the country has a goals statement. Typically it includes such
goals as, "We want our students to be good citizens." What does this
mean? That students know how to move a lever in a voting booth or are
able to read an opinion in the New York Times? What is it we want to
see? What demonstrations? What indications?
Finally, given this vision of what we want kids to do and of what kinds
of activities they may actually be involved in, then and only then do we
consider how to arrange the school and put the structures in place.
Going through this process rarely results in a decision to do 40 minutes
of math followed by 40 minutes of English followed by 40 minutes of gym.
The schools with which we work are in a very difficult transition.
What I think we're looking for--and what students seem to be looking
for--are new tools with which to create. In using computers in
education, we started with BASIC and then moved on to computer literacy
on the assumption that this is what kids will want to do when they
graduate from high school. It is the same theory that was used when I
was in elementary school. We all learned the New Math and how to add in
base 8, because this is what my generation was supposedly going to need
when we graduated from high school. What students really need, however,
are new tools for creation. And teachers need new tools for
communication.
The real questions are, How do schools and educational organizations
have to change to use the new technologies well? How can the design of
the new technologies and the development of titles accommodate a new
paradigm of education?
Seymour Papert
The entire structure of school is determined by primitive technologies
of the past: cutting knowledge up into little pieces and distributing
them in an unsegregated way, with a curriculum and a teacher in front of
a classroom. This has shaped our concept of the knowledge children need
and of the very nature of knowledge. If we can't call this [system] into
question, little will change. According to the principles of John Dewey-
-and open or child-centered schooling--the child should be in charge of
the learning process. But that once said, there is a fundamental
contradiction in then deciding what children are going to learn. As long
as we decide what kind of knowledge they're going to have, we can't
change the system.
Every baby learns to talk, walk, manipulate parents, laugh, and love in
a natural way that's rarely like the way a researcher learns later on.
The artificial kind of learning we call a school was simply proposed to
get children to know things they didn't acquire naturally from the
learning environment. As this need disappears, the institution of school
will disappear. Our focus has to be not only on giving the new vision
but also on taking away the old idea--firmly planted in society's mind--
of the need to learn the multiplication table, fractions, and everything
else that's called the curriculum.
Donald Norman (Apple Fellow and audience member)
For 30 years before joining Apple Computer, I was a professor at Harvard
and at the University of California. I studied and wrote about learning
and memory. Technology isn't the issue. The issues are the way we go
about things, what it takes to learn, and the way we learn throughout
our entire lives. We don't learn by being lectured to. That's the least
efficient way to learn. It's the most efficient way to teach. That's the
point. The reason the educational system is so hard to change is that
it's designed for the teacher. I'll emphasize the higher educational
process, which I know best, but this applies to all levels. It's easy
for the professor to give a 50-minute lecture, but no one has an
attention span of 50 minutes. William James in 1890 said his attention
span was 10 seconds.
The way we learn is by trying something, doing it, and getting stuck. In
order to learn, we really have to be stuck, and when we're stuck we're
ready for the critical piece of information. The same piece of
information that made no impact at a lecture makes a dramatic impact
when we're ready for it. We don't have to study it. It just hits.
How do we change the educational process so this becomes the normal way?
It's not a technical issue; it's a social issue. The university system
will never change until we change the reward structure. I became a very
senior, respected professor by publishing books and papers and by going
around the world giving talks, not by being a good teacher. The more I
was a good teacher, the more it took away from my publications and
therefore my promotion possibilities. I managed to succeed, but the
reward structure was against me. We have to change the reward structure.
Connie Stout
We need to do some social marketing to get the parents behind us. Texas
has a large textbook-adoption system. Last year we spent $270 million on
the procurement of textbooks--outdated, of course, immediately. One of
the wonderful young elementary science teachers, Dr. Barbara Tenbrink,
started a revolution when she proposed the option of offering either a
textbook or an electronic media system. The parents revolted against it
in the elementary school that my children attended, because the children
would not be [bringing] home a book. It was the parents who were holding
back change.
It's more than an issue of technology. We need to do social marketing,
and we have to have the whole system involved or we're not going to get
anywhere.
John Kernan
I've seen that from a practical point of view. The last company I ran--
Jostens Learning--is a big educational software company. In order to get
our message out, we had 25 full-time lobbyists working just to break the
textbook monopoly and get charter school propositions through the
legislature.
John Grillos
I think personal responsibility is central to the issue. My feeling is
that the institution will change in the same way our lives will change.
The company does not take care of most people anymore, and the school
does not take care of [people's] kids. As we expose people to the new
technology and make it available to them, they will have to take on more
of the responsibility for their own education. The technology will help
them do this.
We'll still get educated for the same reasons we've always gotten
educated: because social institutions put pressure on us to conform, or
because we're motivated. Most of my learning happened after I left
college. Most of it was without an instructor. It was done for one
simple reason. I needed it. I was motivated to accomplish the objectives
I set for myself. I had to figure out how to do it. One reason I've
stayed in technology as long as I have is [that] technology represents
the potential of providing the information and the structure we all
require to educate ourselves.
John Kernan
I'm going to ask Alan November to answer his own question. What's the
job description of the child in the education system of the future?
Alan November
A Martian coming to Earth to figure out what the job description of kids
is today would have to conclude that it's to prepare for tests, take
tests, and learn what the big people, books, and computers already know.
I propose a new job description: That children go to school because
school will one day become a place where their wisdom and knowledge are
honored. We'll reverse the model. Kids know a lot, and they can solve
very complex problems. We just don't ask them because we're so embedded
in the test preparation business.
The last thing I want to see is technology being used to improve test
preparation. That's the obvious and easy thing to do, and it may be the
way to make a quick buck at the moment. A more idealistic path to
determine how we can honor the knowledge and wisdom of children and make
them feel that they can solve, contribute, and become a valued asset to
society rather than a drain. I can show you schools around the country
with individual pockets of excellence where children are solving very
complex problems. Such children believe they can make a difference to
the world. When asked what they're doing, most children, even when using
technology, almost inevitably reply that they're doing what the teacher
told them to do. What we would like to have them respond is, "We are
making a difference to the world."
It's the bane of good managers never to receive credit for their
success. That should be the new job description for teachers. Let
children think they have brought the knowledge together, applied their
own wisdom, solved the problems themselves, and made an impact on
society. They won't think the teacher taught them anything at all. This
will take a very sophisticated application of cognitive, moral, and
emotional development, along with organizational design and the
technologies as well. I do think we need that kind of ideal to reach
for.