Somewhere on the West Coast of America five children are kicking around
ideas for the design of an Antarctic research station. Their talk is peppered
with references to prototypes produced on their PCs, e-mail from scientists
on site, and jokes about a video conference with a potential backer for
the project.
This is not the opening gambit from some Hollywood kids-out-smart-the-grown-ups
movie, but video footage of a real maths lesson for teenagers devised by
educationalists in California. And it鈥檚 part of a movement that is gaining
ground in both classroom and boardroom as America comes to terms with the
implications of the information revolution. Enthusiasts say that old-style
pedagogy will teach the wrong skills in a future where people will work
in groups brought together for the lifetime of a particular project, where
they will constantly have to learn new skills, and where the traditional
corporation, with its rigid hierarchical structure, will have lost ground
to companies that dare to bring in more complex, self-governing management
styles.
The Antarctica Project has brought together staff from Stanford University,
teachers from the San Francisco Bay area and researchers from the Institute
for Research on Learning (IRL), a nonprofit-making organisation based in
Palo Alto and founded by Xerox in 1987 to 鈥榬ethink learning鈥�. Almost without
knowing it, the children are absorbing the basic principles of geometry
and algebra as they work in much the same way as the professional engineers,
architects and scientists they are mimicking 鈥� and even consulting from
time to time.
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This is all a far cry from the 鈥榟ard-tech鈥� vision of future education
being pushed by the makers of CD-ROM encyclopedias and the enthusiasts
for interactive TV. These people see our children and grandchildren glued
to their computers, learning more and faster because their textbooks are
souped up with graphics, songs and video clips, or watching lessons-on-demand
TV that beams the media stars from the teaching profession right into their
living rooms. Some even talk of providing children with virtual reality
headsets and gloves so that they can 鈥榚xperience鈥� the look and feel of
the chemistry laboratory without bothering to leave home.
鈥榃iring up the kids鈥� is dismissed by Ted Kahn, a consultant at IRL.
Education, he says, must be more than a means of pouring knowledge into
children鈥檚 heads: it needs to recognise the way people learn. 鈥業f you want
to be a scientist, for example, you need to know what it means to be one
of these people, you need to talk to scientists and understand how they
talk to each other,鈥� he says.
鈥楶ouring information into students may have been appropriate thirty
or fifty years ago, when the aim was to develop people suited to working
in a hierarchical system,鈥� says Kahn. But these days, commercial organisations
are breaking down hierarchies, staff are devising their own work practices,
and the idea of a career for life has been superseded by the notion of teamwork
and the prospect of changing jobs four or five times.
For teachers, the changes mean coming to terms with a new identity,
says Debra Pollard, an education specialist at Microsoft. Most of them are
accustomed to 鈥榣eading鈥� the class to some degree; but the needs of the
future, will place them firmly 鈥榠nside鈥� the learning process. Pollard recalls
the comments of one teacher who worked on the IRL software program, which
encourages children to use diagrams to express scientific reasoning: 鈥楬e
said, 鈥業 went from being the sage on the stage, to being the guide on the
蝉颈诲别.鈥�
Across the continent, at the Massasachusetts Institute of Technology鈥檚
Media Lab, others are also working out how to respond to a very different
future. For Mitch Resnick, the Media Lab鈥檚 head of learning and common sense,
advances in technology such as using radio frequencies to transmit data,
faster processors and cheaper memory are opening up new areas of exploration
for networking. Children could use a network to pool experiences and seek
advice from other children experimenting with the same ideas 鈥� something
that is already hap-pening in the growing number of American schools that
are plugged into the Internet.
BBN, a computer company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is one of
11 organisations rethinking a whole generation of schools for the New American
Schools Development Corporation, a nonprofit-making group set up last year
by American companies and foundations. At BBN鈥檚 two Co-NECT experiments
running in Massachusetts, mixed-age groups use technology such as e-mail
and online databases to help them solve specific problems. Learning is done
in the context of a project, says Paul Horwitz, a senior scientist at BBN.
So the kids at the Co-NECT school in Worcester, for example, learnt about
TV production and news by making a video of the mayor鈥檚 visit to their school.
Just as new technology is changing the nature of work and forcing people
to keep learning new skills, so it is making it possible to dream up new
ways of providing education. Stanford University is planning an 鈥業ntegrated
Open University鈥� to reach professionals 鈥� all the way up to the boardroom
鈥� who don鈥檛 want to live on campus and don鈥檛 want another degree. They just
want a skill for which they have an immediate need, and they want to be
trained at their home or office.
Stanford already runs the Stanford Instructional Television Network,
which transmits over 200 engineering courses to 153 companies in the Silicon
Valley area using conventional TV. Over the next few years it intends to
go beyond this 鈥榯alking head鈥� approach. Jeffrey Ullman, chairman of Stanford
University鈥檚 computer science department, envisions teaching assistants
providing students with guidance over video conference links. The students
would have access to course materials that include graphics, sound, text
and video. The hard part is developing the training materials, and the software
tools for moving information between the students鈥� machines and computers
at Stanford. Secure and effective ways of checking assignments and charging
for courses will also be needed. But Ullman is confident that technological
developments will soon make this possible.
This confidence in technology is echoed by researchers at IRL, the Media
Lab and BBN. But doubters point out that previous attempts to use technology
to trans-form education have not caught on. In the early 1980s, for instance,
Seymour Papert, who worked for BBN before moving to MIT to continue his
pioneering research into computers and education, developed computers to
help children learn maths. Ten years later and the majority of children
still sit at tables, in traditional classrooms, struggling with problems
using pencil and paper.
But Resnick believes that 鈥榯hings feel as if they have to change鈥�. He
says that schools usually follow the culture, and if outside school hours
children are playing with interactive games, logging on to bulletin boards
and watching interactive TV, something is going to have to change in school.
And as IRL noted in its winter newsletter in 1988 amid vocal demands for
a return to traditional teaching: 鈥楽olutions such as 鈥榖ack to basics鈥� would
try to do more of something that doesn鈥檛 work very well in the first place鈥�.
But predicting the future is risky. As Ullman says, who would have guessed
in 1984 that Microsoft would be the dominant PC software supplier in 1994?
Only time will tell whether information technology will propel group learning
and new ways of interacting, or whether it will simply provide more attractive
ways to glue kids to the TV or computer screen so they can absorb every
morsel of information that the world鈥檚 leading authorities can provide.