Technology for Learning (1995)

my my father was a scientist and my mother was an artist and a musician so I

grew up working both sides of the street in fact I could never see any real

difference between the two so call sides of the seat the science side is actually

an art as any scientist will will tell you and it's the newest of the art maybe

the greatest of the art forms of the of the 20th century

now I my awesome task here I was going to say I'm the only thing that stands

between you and lunch but it's actually more dire than that I'm the only thing

that stands between you and the bathroom

so if you start fidgeting I'll realize I

should speed up and get to my final point now in a half hour talk I think

the best thing to do is to just bring up a few ideas to think about as the

introduction indicated I might sort of switched over from being a professional

musician to being a full-time computer is when through looking at the work of

Seymour Papert in the early six in the

60s 1968 or so I realized that what we

had here was not just a tool like a screwdriver but we had a medium we had

something like what the printing press was and it was going to have many

degrees of freedom and the tools were going to be made inside of it now the

tools on the printing press are things like comic books biblical tracts romance

novels political essays scientific papers in other words all the different

forms of rhetoric that have been formed to express things and we realized back

then that the destiny of the computer was going to be one of these things it

was going to be a 500-year invention only one you only get one of these every

five hundred years and that like the printing press that was going to completely redefine childhood and we

were just starting to suffer back then through another technology that was

starting to redefine childhood called television and I don't think television has

redefined childhood for the better I think the printing press did and so

the 60s ethic that we had back then is

let's make sure the computer doesn't turn out like television let's make sure it turns out with the content carrying

the argument carrying the range and depth for artistic expression that the

printing press gave us well the jury is

still out on that and will be out for another 25 or 30 years and this group is

part of that jury because there are lots of different ways of interpreting what a

computer is and can do one of the ways that educational institutions sometimes

sometimes look at it and parents often do as well is as something that is very

important for their children's prospects of getting a job later on something

every parent is very anxious about both for good reasons and also they make

perhaps would like to be assured that the kids will move out of the house and a decent interval and I call this the

driver's ed theory of the computer

everybody needs to learn how to drive particularly down here in Southern

California we all know that we have driver's ed programs for it it's about

getting from A to B that's what I call a to beam us a to beam us there's a

problem so we've worked out some solution to it we'll teach the kids how

to drive now nobody here I think would suggest that because the kids are going

to learn how to drive when they're 16 or so that we should strap them into motorized vehicles at age 6 but think

about it think of all of those extra years they would have learning how to

steer all of those things that we could do but we would say no that's ridiculous

we're going to completely stunt their

muscular growth that's a terrible technology for children it's one that

adults can use more reasonably because they can decide whether they're going to exercise or decide whether there

going to go in a car but if we just

strap the kids into that thing we are actually setting up a process that will

atrophy something that's very important about a child so I think all of us would

agree that if we were going to give a child to transportation technology we

want it to be more like a bicycle because the bicycle allows the child to

exercise flat out and it amplifies that right so I don't believe for especially

for early childhood education that there's any necessary connection between

the vocational aims later on and what we want to do with children in the early

grades what we really want to do with children in the early grades is get them

is help them build the Intuit Intuit intuitions the Intuit intuitive

foundation that they're going to need to learn in CRISPR form later on this

complicated century that are in and the even more complicated century to come so

this is a very complex issue because there's a lot of anxiety and in fact one

of the one of the most horrifying sites

to me having been doing this now for 25 years is happening today when you're

taken to a school to observe and you go into it and this the principal takes you

into this classroom where there are lots of computers on the desk and the kids

are happily working away and the teacher is happy and there's some parents observing they're happy the kids are

happy and you know what nothing is happening nothing important is happening it's just

like a bunch of illiterate sitting around being able to deal with a couple

of words in a book and it only seems like a good thing if you don't happen to

know what the real thing is that's just true in mathematics - it's my introducer

said I have a degree in mathematics and I can't think I can maybe think of one

classroom in 500 that I've been to in an elementary school in the last 25 years

in which I've seen actual mathematics happen what's really going on is

process called learning how to do the arithmetic of accounting and it happens

to be called math just like junk food as

label hamburgers now if you think of there being a dictionary police around

they would get after people who use old labels for things on stuff that's just

plain crap but in fact if you can get millions of people to accept that as the

standard and you do that by simply flooding the marketplace with both

advertising and exemplar of this stuff people adjust their norms accordingly

and so what is likely to happen with computers is that the easiest problem to

solve is putting a computer or 50 of them in every classroom it's just stuff and

there's nothing easier to make in the 20th century than stuff and the easiest

stuff to make in the 20th century happens to be made out of silicon and it's going to be easier and easier as we

go through years from now the accurate prediction of what was going to happen

to silicon was made in 1965 by Gordon Moore who then went on to found Intel

and that he has been off by less than 5% in those 30 years since then this is how

you guys got to the moon right it was right where Newton said it was going to be so to to me and this is not to

downgrade the space program because I'm a I'm a real have been a real not about

that my whole life but one of the one of the slides I like to show is a

comparison of the earth taken from space maybe even on your voyage with a globe

made in 1780 which is how people who

couldn't get out into space thought the earth might look and it looks exactly the same now which one is more

impressive think about it to know your universe without being able to take that

Olympian view is an incredible feat and

the thing that would have been surprising if they'd gotten out there and they'd found a surprise would have

been surprising if the moon weren't where it's supposed to be it would be surprising if the earth didn't look the

way we think it'd look like now think of what that means and it also would have

been various surprising if Silicon hadn't turned out the way Gordon Moore predicted it

because he was a physicist and he was using really good science to make that

prediction now in spite of that the personal computer has taken everybody by

surprise because nobody believed in IBM didn't believe it Dec didn't believe it

right but in spite of us it was something that is going to continue

again so don't even worry about getting the stuff into the school but consider

the following dilemma suppose and actually we could even imagine this

somewhat seriously here in Los Angeles where we have a lot of show biz suppose

the actual issue weren't computers but suppose it had to do with music suppose the parents we're getting really

anxious maybe because of watching too much MTV that children were not going to

succeed in life as musicians they start

beating on the state legislature and they start beating on the LA County School Board for years and years and

years about our children are not getting any training as musicians and finally the politicians say all right we've got

a solution we will put a piano in every classroom and unfortunately we don't

have enough money to get any musicians to deal with this but we'll do is we'll

take the existing teachers and give them two weeks of training in the summer

think about it every musician knows that

the music is not in the piano if we were we'd have to let it vote if there's

music and this is where the quote from Plato is the right one the music is a soft fire in every child and it's a fire

that has to be fanned and it's fan by doing music you don't need a piano or anything else you just need some people

around and have music happen we already have all the musical instruments we need

and we also have all the instruments we need for thinking and so a piano at its

best is a kind of an amplifier it's not the thing computer at its best is a kind

of an amplifier in amplifiers don't care

much what they amplify right you put bad

signals into them and you're going to get those bad signals back out in a huge

huge profusion now it's precisely what you're going to get and put the

amplifier like the computer in without having some sense of what it is inside

the children that you're going to try and light it not to light it up because

it's already lit that's one of the most marvelous things about six-year-olds is

that they already are terrific scientists they already are terrific

mathematicians they already are terrific computer ist's they're already terrific

artists they've got the whole nine yards I'd rather work with first graders than

any other age including adults they are just the greatest but they can't tell

you what you do with a computer this is

a fond myth that the children will show us with no way the children are great

mathematicians at age six but they can't tell you what you should be teaching

them so that they'll be great mathematicians at age 15 or great math

or break computers or great writers or any of those things what they've got is

the start of the whole thing and it's our job to try and figure out what this

thing is we have to figure out what it is we have to figure out what the what

the ethics are that are connected with it what it's what the appropriate is this is of connected with it so now

here's here's an interesting paradox and this has happened too many times over the past years is I've been invited to

give a talk about the hip about the future of Technology and when

I asked for AV equipment I was told sorry we can't do that now I always I

always give demonstrations I always have supporting media just as we would like

to have in our schools I can say that if

I had to think of a percentage I would say that college schools of Education

probably are the least equipped to deal with the talk on the technology of the

future right because and one of the ways of thinking about it because it was

perceived as it difficulty partly because of the light here you should

think that and realize that this technology is not here yet most of this

stuff is not really here yet there is still time to try and understand it and

to think about it appropriately in fact if you think about it for for a couple

of seconds about 95% of the deep content

that humans have come up with can be printed in the Los Angeles Times can be

printed on newsprint in cruddy old black-and-white and not terribly good

contrast ratio and the reason is is because most of the human content has

been encoded into symbolic forms that don't require a super high resolution in

order to get that rendering perfect right it's now great art you can say

well you can't put that in the Los Angeles Times but the truth is you can't put great art in a wonderful coffee

table book with high resolution color photographs and anybody thinks you can

has never seen the real thing you have to realize for stuff like that the best

you can do and the worst you can do are both ads they're advertisements for the real thing

right but the nice thing about all of the literature in the world and all of the science and the world and all of the

math and the world and all of the music in the world is that you can put it onto

something that is actually quite low tech and in fact the three most

important things you can ever learn through a computer can be done on an Apple - it can be done on a little Casio

or sharp wizard that you can put in your pocket buy it for 200 bucks the most

important things you can ever do now you can't imitate

all the things that paper can do on a sharp wizard and some of those things we

do want to do but we have to separate out the distinction just as we should

separate out the distinction in learning to read between actually reading and

understanding complex ideas now the state framework for English in the

language arts just my favorite framework a framework by the way that is not is a

perfect example of I think what happens when you have very talented people who

did an outstanding job formulating the ideas in that framework it is a model

you could use it for science you could use it for math it is fabulous it has

almost completely failed in the state of California over the last 10 or 12 years

I've been following it very closely now they had a wonderful idea based on

some of the ideas of Frank Smith who is a marvelous educator in Canada that the

core of any literature program is ideas powerful ideas the kinds of ideas and

issues that human beings need to think about and talk about and that is what you have to get into

the classroom before literature makes any sense why go to all that trouble

reading those long sentences if the they

aren't about something and so Frank Smith's idea is you should start off

with the ideas that's the teachers have

to be comfortable at dealing with ideas

that many of them which have no good answers and have to deal with the notion

that they're going to be arguing about these ideas with the kids and that's what they want and if there's a

supporting literature and there's a reading and writing process that supports that and I think that's a

wonderful model should be adopted for the computer and the number one thing

about it is that because we've had this stuff around for hundreds of years it

was easy for Frank Smith to say that the issue has to do with ideas now we don't

know what to say about computers what is

the issue with computers are they adding machines are they things

are designed to imitate other like being more erasable paper slightly better

calculators you know are they a philosophical form is there something

like the essay yet to come that's going to allow us to change our conceptions of

the way humans live together these are going to be a new kind of science fact

we know there is going to be a new kind of science based entirely on the

existence of the computer because it allows us to deal with models that don't

that can't be handled with ordinary mathematics there's a whole bunch of

stuff coming but to me the most important thing before we worry about

teaching the computer so much is that would make our first research project to

ask what is it and actually the the is

you know English is a tough language because it has hard nouns you've

whenever somebody says a noun you start looking around for the thing so a better

word is to say what isn't what is the computer isn't what science

isn't so civilization for instance is not a thing it's a process it's the

process of trying to be more civilized science is not a thing that's the process of trying to be more scientific

and thinking is the process of trying to think better there isn't a place on it

but there are thresholds that are that are very important so a cautionary tale

just to throw in here is at an educational technology that I'm

very fond of which is called the basic

organization of knowledge you may not have heard about this educational technology but it was invented a while

ago and it had some wonderful characteristics of a solid state self

powered super high resolution capacity

one to one hundred megabytes the cost is only about five to ten dollars per

megabyte many millions of different

titles available and it can hold the

highest thoughts that human beings have ever formulated does anybody guess what

that basic organize yeah the book the Bo okay

in case you've forgotten since I can't show slides I actually brought some

concrete okay here's a B oh okay and

here's one of my favorite ones Tom pains common sense this is a short

one it's only fifty pages long but consider the following this thing was

written in about seven weeks later

months of 1775 published in January 1776

we were already fighting the British and we weren't sure quite why except there

are some things about taxation without representation and so forth and this

book is an argument it's a 50-page argument about why monarchies might not

be the best way of organizing things remember this is complicated because monarchies came from God the king was

God's representative on earth and there were stained-glass windows that attested

to that now imagine trying to argue

against a monarchy as the representative of God using stained-glass windows have

to do it this way and what's astounding about this there are only 1.5 million colonists and

600,000 copies of this were made and

distributed in six months between

January and the Declaration of Independence almost every family in

America got a copy of this thing and a lot of them were able to follow the argument that defined what the Hulton

was about and the Declaration of Independence was a manifesto that

outlined just in no uncertain terms what the what the issues were this is the

context of it now imagine trying to do this today need a hundred and twenty

million copies of this not an inconsiderable feat not even TV Guide

has that many think about it and the

mass medium that we have today television cannot carry this argument

you cannot put Tom Payne's argue no matter what you do

it doesn't go into television because television is not about arguments

television is about showing you various kinds of things that personalities Carl

Sagan's Cosmos was not about science was about Carl Sagan but what was great

about it is that it got four million people to buy Carl Sagan's Bo okay and

that Bo okay without science science was

in there so television was until you could make a pretty good ad campaign to

get people to go out and buy this but even the Los Angeles Times would be

hard-pressed that's rotary presses to actually supply the discourse that built

this country and we have no other discourse to replace it the television

is not a replacement me now think about this now here's the other thing to think about is this thing is almost impossible

to read off of CRT you ever notice when

anything long happens on a CRT you printed out you ever wondered why we

found out 20 years ago at Xerox PARC I'm a really good reader and we designed the

best displays that money could buy back at Xerox PARC and I was astounded even

with all of the typography that we put in there that I couldn't read it nearly

as well as I read a book and it looked like it so he finally tracked people's

eyes who are reading the CRTs and we discovered that the better of the reader

you were the less easy it was to read off a CRT and the reason is is that in

everybody if you can do this without poking your neighbors is an interesting thing if you look straight ahead and

wiggle your hands out here go ahead this is California

so wiggle your hands outside your field of vision then gradually bring them in

at some point you'll see a flicker out to the side but you won't see what it is everybody notice that you can't see its

fingers okay now why did nature do that well the reason nature did it is that

all of the resolution in our I almost is concentrated in a little thing that's

smaller than a quarter and our eyes see by bounce around like this to compensate

for that nature built into our eyes that out in the periphery where we're almost

blind that our sensitivity to brightness

change would be a factor of a hundred more than it is straight on every pilot

was this one okay and so when there's a flicker out here what is your idea

because what is it looking for the saber-tooth Tiger right we don't have

eyes in the back of our head so why so every time you try and read something

extensive officee are your eyes are constantly looking for the saber-tooth Tiger around the periphery of the screen

because you can't see it blinking when you're looking straight ahead but your

peripheral vision can see it blinking you just have to realize this so people

who try and teach reading on a computer

that has a CRT are giving the kids

something that is anti what the process of reading is physiologically do you

suppose anybody cared to even test that out no it's been known for a long time

but nobody in education has ever I say at every talk just to give you a point

of view that there's always a Faustian bargain you make with technology right

if you walk up and there's a knife on the ground you've never seen one before you might pick it up by the blade

instead of the handle and that is what you're starting to do with computers if

you can't tell the blade from the handle on tool you should probably just let it

lay there until you find out what the blade and the handle is now fortunately

there is a solution which is flat panel displays don't blink and the reason we

thought of the this kind of this kind of

computer was thought of back in 1968 and it was partly thought of in the terms

not just to be portable like this but to have a display that

actually would match up with what our eyes and physiology can actually do

notice I got that out of the way and the reason is is if you step on one of those

it breaks whereas when you were a kid

did you ever hit a baseball with a book so it Utah 25 years ago I did shock

tests to see what the acceleration

imparted to a computer would be if you hit a baseball with it now it's about

750 G's right so we're ways from being

able to do all of the things that books have served us every culture has done

science if science is being interested

in how the world works every culture has done mathematics because every culture is interested in counting things right

so every culture computes in every culture but the problem is is that there are

thresholds and what you really need to be worried about is not whether the kids

have access to the stuff at whether their access is in a form that's above

threshold because if it isn't all you're gonna get is form and no content you'll

just get another thing to dumb the kids down just be another waiving it okay and

I think the perhaps the second one is in

league with the first point and that is that illiteracy is not nearly as

dangerous or non literate not nearly as dangerous as unlit er Asiya we have

maybe 30 million to 60 million depending on who's counting of people who don't

read at all in any functional way in the US and people worry about it

but the thing I worry about is the 200 plus million people who cannot follow

the argument in this book those are the non literate right I'm sorry those are

the unlit err 'it's so we have people who don't know anything about science

but the worst people we have might be a high school chemistry teacher who actually doesn't

understand how chemistry works right so that's unscientific and whenever we get

this we get this substitution that allows us to act as though we're doing

something important well I think a good way to close is a couple of weeks ago is

that vice president Gore's house for dinner with a bunch of other people

talking about the information superhighway talking about problems of

education very similar set of concerns that that you have here today and Al

Gore is very concerned about getting access for every child in America and it

sounds good it sounds like a good idea but my wife actually had a really wonderful argument

that she countered him within her argument went like this she said look

most of the important information in the world is already in free public

libraries accessible to all it's really

not on the internet yet and it isn't it's already there in books and the big

problem is who goes and makes use of it and who doesn't go and make use of it and she said the real haves and

have-nots now and in the future are going to be those who either have

discernment or have not discern mminton it's not a question of processing

information and there was a statement earlier that the the LA Times only

publishes 1% of the stuff it gets it would even be better I think if it published a quarter percent of what it

gets that is one of the most important functions for both educators and

institutions like the news why the newspaper will never go away although the paper form of it might

because the editorial function is what is important about any newspaper and the

editorial function is going to be 10 times as important when people start getting more things off the internet and

the editorial function is part of what

discernment meant now Thomas Jefferson said something very similar I was very

proud of my wife had it right on the nose he said

he knew of no safer repository for the

powers in a country than in the people and if the people's discretion was not

finely tuned enough then it was up to us to better inform their discretion thank

you [Applause]