The HG2S Training Blog

The archives collection  at Wired.com has a transcribed discussion between computer gurus Alan Kay and Danny Hillis that, surprisingly perhaps, includes a few comments about learning and education. It’s a worthwhile read in many respects but I’m plucking a couple quotes from it that relate specifically to knowledge, learning and pedagogy:

“There’s this interesting interplay between what you might call talent and how much of a meta-system we can put down on top of meager talents to learn how to do things. Two recent tennis champions, Ivan Lendl and Chris Evert, were not actual athletes. They were people who just learned how to play tennis. Some of the most natural tennis players, like Nastasi and Agassi, only do well when things are going well – they don’t have learned skills to drop back on. So in any given population maybe 5 to 20 percent have a natural hacker sort of talent; they are often not helped by pedagogy. Pedagogy is about getting the other 80 percent of people within hailing distance. So I’ve been very interested in taking some very important ideas and wondering how you get them in a state where the 80 percent can actually learn them in an operational way. And that’s why I keep coming back to computers.”

Interestingly the conversation concludes with:

“DH:

The question that I keep asking myself is, where is the next frontier? Where is that place that a new world is being constructed? Do you know any candidates?

AK:

I think the frontier has to do with human learning. Knowledge is not completely relative. There are a hundred or so powerful ideas that basically mean the difference between life and death, and I think one of our major jobs should always be to be true and get as many people enfranchised into them as possible.

DH:

But in fact, if you look at what’s happening, it seems just the opposite. We’re very much heading toward a two-class society, where either you’re somebody who sort of knows about, or feels empowered to deal with all of the complexity in society, or you’re one of the people that is a victim of it and is just on the receiving end of it all.

AK:

And I think the gap actually gets bigger as the leading edge of knowledge gets less intuitive.”

The full transcript by Steven Levy and Kevin Kelly can be viewed here.

Researcher Annika Lantz-Andersson has taken an interesting look at how students respond to making mistakes while being tutored with mathematics software. Comparing both traditional textbook students to those using mathematics software she found that the computer-based group had a decided tendency to blame the computer (or the software) when they got a problem wrong:

“When students attempting to solve a mathematical problem, were informed by the computer that their answer was incorrect, they often focused on trying to find the reasons for this in the functions of the educational software itself. ‘They would maintain that their answers merely needed to be rephrased, that the computer’s answers were wrong in the same way as answers on an answer key of a mathematics textbook could be wrong, or provided other similar explanations,’ says Annika Lantz-Andersson. Her study shows that the often-repeated proposition that educational software is self-instructing is just not true.” [1]

What seems apparent from Lantz-Anderson’s work is that software employed in this fashion has to be used in conjunction with a teacher who gives feedback in order for the software to be effective as a teaching tool. As the old teaching maxim goes: “Telling is not teaching,” even if a computer does the telling.

“The extremely rapid increase in educational software predicted around the year 2000 has not been realised, although most textbooks today have a digital application linked to their conventional text. ‘Educational software has many advantages, not least its interactivity and its opportunity to promote cooperation amongst the students. There is still a strong belief that digital technology improves learning, despite the fact that this has not been proven’, declares Annika Lantz-Andersson. ‘Instead of getting mired in a debate about how digital tools can solve various types of classical pedagogical problems, it would be more relevant to focus on the new types of interaction and knowledge that can arise from the use of digital tools.’”  [2]

Annika Lantz-Andersson presented these findings as part of her thesis “Framing in Educational Practices. Learning Activity, Digital Technology and the Logic of Situated Action” at the Department of Education, University of Gothenburg, on Friday, 29 May, 2009.