This panel discussion was part of a June 4, 1996 held at the MIT Media Lab
If you care to edit the transcription, you may do so here.
Paul Starr:
… discuss these issues today and there have been some interesting points of difference and I think we’re going to get a chance now partly to bring this discussion together for those of us who’ve been part of it and to open it up here. You can hear the different perspectives and there’ll be plenty of opportunity for questions and comments from you to be able to get your own.
There’s a lot of talk in America these days about computers. It’s interesting because there’s very little talk at this point about any kind of bold public initiatives. Public money is scarce, faith and public remedy are even scarcer, but technology and education has been a great exception to that.
Bill Clinton’s challenge to connect all the American schools to digital networks by the year 2000 is really the only initiative today that echoes if only faintly John F. Kennedy’s call to put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s. Like the moon shot, linking America’s classrooms to computer networks appeals to a kind of technological nationalism that seems beyond partisan politics.
Everybody, well, almost everybody likes the idea of putting America first in the race to the future. But, is this really going to work? Is this enterprise of introducing computers and computer networks into the schools going to make the substantial difference that advocates hope or is this really just a diversion from our real problems?
We have five prominent experts here this afternoon to talk about the prospects of educational reform using the new media. The format to begin with is simply to go around and give each one the opportunity to set out in a few minutes, maybe five minutes, maybe a little more their view of what we ought to be doing to turn the new media into a net gain for kids.
We’ll begin with someone who has tried to take the power of computers from the great bureaucracies and give it to the world’s children. Seymour Papert is the author of two of the most influential books about computers and children, “Mindstorms” and “The Children’s Machine.” He’s professor here at MIT and the leading advocate for a progressive constructivist or he says constructionist approach to learning and technology. Seymour.
Dr. Seymour Papert:
Is it a diversion?
Paul Starr:
Yes.
Dr. Seymour Papert:
It’s a pure diversion, [a dishonest one 00:03:17] especially since it plays on [results we all like 00:03:23] . Nobody can go and say it’s a bad thing to have every classroom in the country wired to the internet. Obviously, we can’t say it’s a bad thing. On the other hand focusing on that as a significant contribution to education is extremely diversionist.
I think it’s very unlike the moon shot. It’s cheap. It’s a cheap thing trying to get industry to put up a few miserable pennies in exchange for getting a lot of concessions from the government. The moon shot at least put significant funds behind something that with the same sort of funding we could give every child in the country a computer and that would make a difference.
Now, I don’t think that giving a child a computer automatically makes a difference, but I do think that there’s a lot of potential force in the teaching world, in the learning world for people to try to learn and teach in different ways from what’s been done in the past.
For example, [inaudible 00:04:32] a long time since [inaudible 00:04:35] Dewey and before is being almost a consensus from everybody’s thought about schools in isolation from the practical problems that this is a bad way to learn to have somebody stand there and preach to the kids. A better way to learn would be through experience, though all sorts of things that go together under the heading of progressive education.
I think that failed for a lot of reasons but I think that if everybody did have a computer, it would have a vastly better chance of succeeding and that we would see pockets here and there of good education and that I think this is the only hope that I see of real change happening in that progressive direction. I think it will happen. I think that willy-nilly more and more kids are getting access to computers and some of them will use them in very good ways.
I think that the most interesting innovative learning that I’ve seen recently is always in somebody’s home, some bunch of kids, some family who’s done something more interesting rather than in schools and I think that this is creating, beginning to create models of different ways of learning and it’s going to have an influence on the schools and that this is going to be the major change, the major pressure for change on schools as we go into this next century.
Paul Starr:
Thank you. Our next speaker is Mitchell Kapor, the founder of Lotus. He’s been prominently involved in information policy issues through the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He’s the author of an article that appeared in the third issue of Wired Magazine called “The Case for a Jeffersonian Information Policy” and he’s also written extensively on intellectual property issues. He was a member of President Clinton’s National Information Infrastructure Advisory Council before resigning in protest.
Earlier this afternoon he was talking about, he was giving his confessions in fact, confessions of a technological neo-romantic. Do I have that right?
Mitch Kapor:
That’s right. I thought that Seymour really got right to the heart of the issue that you posed about, wiring the schools and is that a reasonable public policy alternative. First, I find myself in substantial agreement with what you said. I just want to add, try to add a little dimension of that to my own. As a participant in the NII Advisory Council, I saw firsthand what actually happens when you try to make law and policy and if somebody observed there are two things you really don’t want to see being made. One is sausage and the other is law.
The real question is, is the idea of “wiring the schools” which has gained a lot of prominence, is it a slogan that is going to divert attention away from real solutions or can it be a means to direct inquiry deeper in a way that makes a meaningful change in advance in education. I think the jury is still out but there’s a lot of evidence that suggests the sloganeering mentality has a lot of momentum.
The NII Advisory council for instance brought together a very high-powered set of people with good intentions to try to work, to advise the Clinton administration about what was important about the information superhighway which is a big initiative.
Unfortunately, the setting that it was in undermined its ability to get any real work done because it for instance was operating with an ethic of “let us not rock any boats, let us not cause any controversy and let us not try to propose anything that somebody might find difficult because it won’t get a hearing.” So, what happens in that kind of case is the sort of there is a retreat from seriousness into seeing those things which sound wonderful but don’t stand up to scrutiny.
In the case of wiring the schools, it’s a wonderful picture, the idea that every classroom should be connected and the inner city, out in the country should be connected to this great emerging worldwide internet and World Wide Web. There are a lot of volunteer efforts that are going now to make that happen and they have to be volunteer efforts because in fact there is no money to do this and there is not likely to be any money.
Let me give you my short list of questions that I think sometimes failed to be asked when people get very enthusiastic. There is a lot of enthusiasm about the net because people have their own individual experiences and they find them very empowering often and they spend lots and lots of time prowling around the World Wide Web.
There’s a bunch of questions about wiring the schools that I just want to make sure stay on the agenda. The first of which is:
How much sense does it make to put an Ethernet in an innercity school or elsewhere if it is not a safe and secure place and in which not a lot of learning goes on to begin with because the physical environment and the social environment isn’t at a level where that can happen?
To me, it’s a diversion of attention unless the effort to put in the Ethernet somehow brings people to greater awareness of the fact that in a lot of schools it’s not safe to go to the bathroom. That’s the first question.
The second question is:
Do we manage to ask ourselves what’s important and what’s worth having in education or do we just assume that a net connection is a good thing because it enables us to reach out and connect? There’s no question that even in the school where my kids go to, I’ve seen a small taste of the World Wide Web in the hands of a skilled teacher with students integrated into the curriculum adds a lot to the experience.
On the other hand, there’s a lot of rhetoric about how the internet creates virtual community and it will enable students to participate more in the world at large or to make connections or to interact with other people. The comment that I would make is that the vast amount of investment in software and on the web which is being driven by commercial interest is unfortunately not at all going to the kind of software that really creates virtual community but it’s going almost entirely into software, into various types or forms of information retrieval, into entertainment.
Perhaps there’s nothing wrong with those things but I think our enthusiasm shouldn’t blind us to the possibility that investments are not being made in places that will produce the technology that we really want and infrastructure does not grow itself.
In sum, there’s a kind of, there’s a lot of looking under the lamppost for your lost keys because that’s where the light is. There are some difficult problems, I mean huge enormous problems in the educational system. My observation is that the technologists and business people who tend to populate these kinds of commissions coming with a lot of energy and not necessarily a great deal of understanding of what really constitute a valuable education and tend to dominate the process and educators and children’s advocates who really have a lot of value to add may not feel empowered or comfortable with the technology or they may not be in the right meetings and their voice is not heard and there’s a lost opportunity.
None of this should be construed as saying that I think the technology is bad or on the whole harmful. I mean certainly, and I should have said this at the beginning but I’ll say it at the end here, compared with other media of newspapers, radio stations and televisions, it’s a heck of a lot easier to become a presence on the World Wide Web than it is to start one of those. It costs less, there’s no shortage of spectrum, you don’t have to deal with the FCC and there are 50 bucks in the corner bookstore that can tell you how to set up a website and hundreds of thousands of people and institutions are doing it and that decentralized nature of the internet is on the whole a really good thing.
To understand how to use that well and wisely is incredibly important because good things do not come from the technological affordances themselves. They come when there are people who have the wisdom to understand how to use it and when there’s the institutional ability to apply those good ideas in practice, and that seems to be what is a much shorter supply than what many of us would like and we should not let our enthusiasm for the technology misdirect our attention away from where the problems really are.
Paul Starr:
I thought there was a risk that our panel would whip up this audience into a fever pitch of enthusiasm for technology and now I’m convinced that that is clearly going to happen.
What can I say about our next speaker now that Technology Review has called her the Margaret Mead of Cyberspace and Wired Magazine has celebrated her in terms that might embarrass a rock star, if a rock star could be embarrassed?
I’ll have to stick to the facts. Sherry Turkle is a professor here at MIT in Science, Technology and Society. She’s the author of three books – “Psychoanalytic Politics,” “The Second Self” and most recently, “Life on the Screen” and she is a wise person.
Sherry Turkle:
Thank you. The storylines that we hear about computers and education tend to be simple storylines, tales of hype and tales of horror. Let me first deal with some of the hype and what I think is sensible response to the hype is although as Paul was saying, I don’t think that is necessarily what you’re going to be getting this evening.
Ten years ago, the hype was about solving the problems of education by putting computers in classrooms and it seems to me that the only sensible response to that hype was to say, as many of us did, you can’t parachute 50 computers into a school and expect something wonderful to happen in that school. You need the teachers. You need the training. As Barbara Tuchman said about writing a book, first you need an idea. The technology alone was not enough.
Today, the hype is about wiring the schools and expecting something wonderful to happen. It seems to me that the only sensible response to this is to say indeed as both Mitch and Seymour have already said that there is danger that we are displacing our lack of vision about education and perhaps more significantly right now, a lack of political will to do something about education to a new fantasy about a technological fix.
The New York Times last week ran an editorial called “Begging for Books” that begins, “when New York State’s education Commissioner Richard Mills recently announced that high school graduation requirements would be toughened statewide. He asked the Legislature to support the effort with more money for education in general and for textbooks in particular.
As things now stand, public schools will lose more than $150 million over all under Governor George Pataki’s current budget proposals and the schools may not get all of it back but by making a special plea for textbooks, Mr. Mills’ underscored an obvious point, effective education is impossible when students lack the most fundamental learning tools.” He’s talking here about beginning with an outlay for textbooks of $35 per student for textbook purchases, a number that already at its starting point was ridiculously low.
In other words, this is the kind of thing that when this is going on, when the physical deterioration of the schools is at an all-time, I don’t know what to say, high or low. What is this about the internet?
Let me deal with some of the horror stories now. That was the hype. Now, let me talk too about sensible. Let me talk too about sensible responses to the horror stories since clearly I’m a person who thinks that the truth lies someplace in-between.
Ten years ago, the horror story was about children becoming little calculators, about the computers, calculator turning children into little calculators but in fact, as research that I did, much of it in collaboration with Seymour Papert with Mitch Resnick, with other people here at MIT and particularly in the Media Lab the reality was a lot more complex, that people made computers their own in the own way.
This was an expressive medium. It wasn’t a simple calculator that people could take and some people used it in the style of planners. Other people use it in the style of bricolers [tinkerer] It was a kind of projective screen for cognitive style, for personal style. There was a kind of pluralism that this medium evoked when it was allowed to be used that way.
Today, the horror story is captured in the phrase of a computer critic who often says, indeed he begins most of his presentations by saying, “I hear a giant sucking sound and it’s the sound of children being sucked into virtual reality.” There’s a notion that there is a war of the worlds and war of two worlds and there’s a sucking, a kind of compelling invasion of the body snatchers kind of dynamic going on that is taking us away into the virtual.
In fact, you could answer this critique and sometimes in jest I like to, by saying that what one really hears is a giant clicking sounds and it’s the sound of children typing messages to each other. In other words, they’re learning to write, to express themselves, they have a new medium for creativity, collaboration, fantasy. In short, a new medium for education and what I study very concretely a new medium for the developmental tasks of childhood.
In both cases, in the hype stories and the horror stories about the technology, you see something very important that’s shared in common. This is technological determinism. The idea that the technology speaks, the technology determines an outcome. In fact, we make the technology, the technology remakes us sometimes, we make the technology and this is an area in which we have to take control.
Now, a significant lesson from negotiating the hype and horror of the ’80s was that if you have an idea, something good can happen. In those places where people did have a vision, the computer was used to foster different styles of mastery, different styles of learning, a sense of personal empowerment for learners. I mean if you had that idea and you made it happen, something good could happen.
I think today the same applies except that today the things you need to think about for your vision are perhaps somewhat different and I think there are two key things. I mean in fact, there are more than two key things but I’m going to just, for starters to open the conversation, mention two key things.
The first I think is the integration of the real and the virtual. Excuse me. Not the real. The physically embodied and the virtual because my argument is that both of these need to be thought of as constituting our subjective, our psychological, our learning reality. This notion of the integration of the physical and the virtual needs to be very important.
I once heard John Gage at a conference quite similar to this one, a conference on education and media, talk about Net Day and the story that he chose to tell was about a junior high school that when they went in to wire the schools, the teacher said, “Excuse me. The biggest problem we have in this school is absenteeism. All the girls are home because they all have urinary tract infections and they got them because the bathrooms are so filthy and so dangerous that they hold their water. They get these urinary tract infections. They’re absent. This is our problem in this school. We’re actually quite hostile to you coming in with Net Day.”
He said, “Put it on your page.” In fact, this school was wired and this message about the most critical thing in this junior high school went out and mobilized members of the community to come in and clean the bathrooms.
Now, I like the story because it says the technology enables a kind of … The representation of the school on the web facilitated this meshing of the physical and the virtual in a way that actually got something very constructive done for children. I like the story. I think it’s a design principle when you think about much of the real value of what being wired can offer.
The point is and then the second thing that I think is the design principle is to develop habits of readership of simulation. I like to tell a story about playing with kids in Games like SimCity, SimLife where there is no context, no sense of what lies behind the rules of the game. Children play it. How does it work, they don’t know. You can play it like a video game. You can play it by doing it. We’ve developed over centuries habits of readership of textual media where we asked who, what, when, where, why, how, what are the motivations, what’s on people’s minds, what are the assumptions behind the models.
We still don’t have the good habits of readership for reading simulation and we need to develop those. I think that’s the second issue that really is an important design principle as we move ahead. The point is to move out of a passive position like let’s wait for the wired classroom to show its effects and then we’ll study the effects of wiring a classroom into a much more activist position where we engage with the problems of readership, of simulation and where we engage with the problems of making the real and the virtual mesh in the way where we leverage the power of the virtual to improve the quality of life in the real. I see this as the challenge for educators in the culture of simulation.
Paul Starr:
Okay. Our next speaker is Howard Gardner. He’s a psychologist, professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. He’s the author of many books, “The Cognitive Revolution,” “The Unschooled Mind,” most recently “Leading Minds”. He’s widely known for his theory of multiple intelligences which I agree with although there are some moments in class when I’d settle for one. With his colleague, Shirley Veenema, he’s talked today about some new work which is called “Varieties of Mind, Varieties of Media.”
Howard Gardner:
Thank you, Paul. Am I on? I’m going to focus on possible uses of the new technology for educational goals of importance. My point of departure is a meeting which took place at MIT just 40 years ago this year. It’s a meeting which is widely credited with having been the beginning of what Paul just mentioned, the cognitive revolution, a set of ideas which I think were new especially in the American context about the mind and ideas which I think have interesting educational potentials which we haven’t even began to really explore yet.
You can’t have a revolution unless you’ve got an enemy and the enemy in this context was twofold. One was behaviorism, the ideas associated with Skinner, the notion that we are a black box, the only thing that’s important is the stimuli in the world and the responses that we emit and if we can control the environment, we can control what’s important which is human behavior and the educational apotheosis of this way of thinking was the teaching machine still with us.
The other idea acknowledge there was something between the two ears but it was a static thing called intelligence that you’re born with, you couldn’t do much about, we may as well find out who’s smart really early on and give them all the awards and the technology again very much with us is the intelligence tests and its offspring.
I think the cognitive revolution presented some much more interesting ideas. The central one for my purposes today is the idea of mental representation, the idea which perhaps will only surprise psychologists in that era but they are for better or for worse powerful in the educational world. The idea that there actually is something between the two ears and it’s important to know what’s there, how it got there, how it can be changed and the like.
In the consensual view of cognitive science, we begin with certain kinds of mental structures; we’re not a blank slate. These can be transformed or not transformed in various ways. It’s important to understand what these representations are. They’re often called languages or schemas or frameworks and the more precisely we can understand them the better we can model mental processes and perhaps affect them.
Now, as an educator, I’ve been particularly interested in two ideas which well out of the cognitive way of thinking. The first one is that in fact we don’t have one or two but a whole multiplicity of mental representations, types of mental representations. I call them intelligences. Other people have other names for them.
The important idea is that not only do we have different languages or schemas in our mind but the people differ in the ones which they favor, in the ways in which they combine them. Just as we all look different from one another, we all have different personalities, we have different kinds of minds. While I suppose intuitively people have known this, it’s remarkable how little seriously it’s been taken in education for thousands of years.
The second idea which I think is by far the most interesting empirical result coming out of cognitive science for those of us interested in education is that the representations which we’re born with are extremely powerful, they’re extremely potent. Some of them are great and we probably wouldn’t survive if evolution hadn’t produced these robust representations, but many of them are extremely inimical to sophisticated thinking in the disciplines across the disciplines.
A book I wrote called the “Unschooled Mind” goes through all the disciplines – the sciences, the arts, the humanities, mathematics and shows that no matter where you look, there are very powerful conceptions formed early in life and this prove remarkably refractory to change.
Seymour and I had a little exchange between talks about whose fault that was but independent of whose fault it is, there they are and we got to do something about them or accept them as given forever.
What are the key implications of these ideas for education? If indeed we have a variety of representational systems, what should we do about this? We could ignore that variety, simply teach one way, assume one kind of mind and that will be great for people who happen to think that way, but it would be a rather high cost in human beings, something which I don’t favor on ethical grounds and also I think is impossible nowadays in economic grounds.
Awareness of these multiplicity of representation opens up two interesting possibilities:
One is we can present things in many, many different ways. We can allow children to interact with media and technology in many different ways and we can offer to children … I like the word affordances which Mitch Kapor used. We can give kids affordances to represent what they know, to present what they know in many different kinds of ways. There’s really no excuse for a unilinear and uni-expressive approach to education.
Second of all, let’s assume that the cognitivists are right and it’s very, very difficult to change early mental representations and yet the that sophisticated understanding in any field which we value requires an alternation of these early engravings. What follows is we need to understand what those representations are, what kids are born with. We need to be humbled by their power.
In my own feeling we have to confront them repeatedly, directly and indirectly. I think the power of some of the stuff that Mitch Resnick is going to talk about, the power of museums and other kinds of interactive environments is they often are better places to challenge these robust, but not very helpful representations. Eventually, if we are lucky, we should be able to change some of them in ways which we think are powerful and productive.
Now, I will echo everybody else in the panel by reinforcing in conclusion that technology by itself can’t do any of these. The educational goals have to come first. I put forth two educational goals:
One, giving more kids an in; and two, helping them to understand better by altering those representations which are [mischievous 00:34:03] .
This involves a statement of goals, the pursuit of those goals and that hard cold look at which of the technological candidates actually achieve either of these goals because it’s actually completely open. I mean the first sets of studies are very unconvincing of any power in and of itself of these technological interventions.
I’m going to conclude with the question “Will the cognitive revolution change education?” An interesting discussion we had earlier which I hope to repeat is defining people like Larry Cuban that most technologies had very little change in schools and this could be the same story. Again, Seymour has some interesting way of framing that.
They could be destructive. The new technologies could be destructive either because they are put in the hands of manipulative market forces, something not unknown in this country even when education is concerned or they could fray the bonds of society even further either by a kind of hyperindividualism or [inaudible 00:35:13] by causing a tremendous reaction on the basis of people who are very threatened by change.
In fact, listening to the talk today, I didn’t know which was worse – the anarchy of the left or the repressiveness of the right, but both of those are enemies of the new technologies. There could be a happier story. We tried to tell one in the written version of this paper with Shirley Veenema.
I would like to pay tribute to our sponsors, in addition of course we always pay tribute to the Spencer Foundation, but I like to pay tribute to the American Prospect because I think it is one of the beacons of hope in our culture that there can be some positive ways of thinking about things like the new technologies.
Paul Starr:
Thank you, Howard. Our final presenter is Mitchel Resnick. He’s associate professor here at the Media Lab. He studies how new computational media can help bring about deep changes and how and what people learn.
He’s the author of a book called the “Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams” and also co-founder of the Computer Clubhouse – I noticed all of these have alliteration, is that – an after school learning center for youth from underserved communities. That in fact is the subject of the article that Mitchel has written for the next issue of the American Prospect and perhaps he’ll give you a preview of that article.
Mitchel Resnick:
Thanks. Actually, I never thought about the use of alliteration but it probably does key into a sort of playfulness which I think is something that I see is important in getting engaged in thinking about learning and the role of playfulness in learning.
In my remarks I was going to focus on this paper for the American Prospect that I wrote together with Natalie Rusk who’s now at the Science Museum of Minnesota. Natalie and I began working a number of years ago on a project called the Computer Clubhouse. We started out while Natalie was director of education at the computer museum here in Boston. This has been a collaboration between the museum and people here at the Media Lab.
In some ways the project got started with someone inspired by things here around the Media Lab. I’ve been often been struck by the contrast between if you walk around the halls of this building versus if you go down the street and walk around the halls of a local middle school or elementary school.
If you walk around the halls in this building, you generally see a lot of people engaged in making things, creating things, designing things. In one area you might see some people creating some new type of personalized newspapers. You go down the hall and you’ll see a group of undergraduates, that are creating some new type of musical instruments.
If you go down the street to middle school, oftentimes you don’t see nearly the same levelsof these types of design activities and you don’t see the same type of use of computational media for the purposes of design, construction and exploration.
One of the factors is that often times there’s not access to technology and clearly there should be greater access to technology but I think the more interesting point to look at is what happens when there is access to the technology, because there the story generally isn’t very good either.
You see a lot of places where there is some access to technology but the way in which it’s used is very different from the way you see it used here at the Media Lab. Rather than engaging people in designing and constructing, it’s used much more for teaching some basic skills or playing some games or today in the age of the net, to be used for some web surfing.
I think one thing that we really want to get at as Natalie and I started the Computer Clubhouse project was to see how is it that we could bring a different approach to using computers to a wide range of kids particularly kids from underserved communities. I think our goal is to try to help kids become fluent with these new technologies. We use that term fluency around here to mean something much more than just learning how to use these technological tools.
We sometimes say that fluency in language is not just a matter of knowing if you phrase from a phrase book. That’s what just using technological tools would be like just learning a few phrases. To be fluent in the language, you have to be able to really express yourself in the language, to be able to tell a good joke or to write a love poem to a good friend.
We won’t be able to do the analogous things with new types of technologies, not just to use the tools but to learn how to express themselves, to create things, to start with a germ of an idea and to realize the idea in an extended long-term project.
[Inaudible 00:40:10
] So with that goal in mind, we started a few years ago this place called the Computer Clubhouse which is a place that we were trying to have inner city youth from the Boston area meet together with a lot of volunteer mentors to work on these extended projects.
I think a couple of themes underlie the work that goes on at the clubhouse one of them is captured by the idea of construction. Almost all of the projects there involve design and construction. We’ve given kids a variety of construction kits whether it’s kids were actually building computerized Lego devices or virtual construction kits for making video games on the screen or creating various types of simulations.
We’ve done all different types of kits that kids could use to start thinking about how they can make things because we have the strong sense that as kids try to engage in making things, it enables them to create this artifact to rethink the nature of the underlying ideas that are part of the process.
Some of the representations that Howard talked about I think become much more clear and obvious as you make these physical artifact. I think a lot of times the new computational media had this greatest influence when kids become aware that their new representations are possible because of these new media that they are constructing with. Part of the idea of the Clubhouse is to give kids these construction kits, let them work over long periods of time on design projects.
There’s also a second strong element is the idea of working within a community. If you walk into the Clubhouse, you always see groups of kids working together and it’s very different from the sense of what you see in school classrooms where there’s a lot of emphasis on collaborative learning in school classrooms where it’s usually someone tells a certain group of kids to work together on a certain project.
At the Clubhouse, we really try to let kids build on their own interest and by building on their own interest, they make connections with other kids with similar interests and we see communities emerge over time. It’s not just among the kids themselves but also among mentors who play an important role. We see mentors often will come in with an idea and they just don’t sit there and try to help the kids. They’ll often work on their own projects, things that they are passionate about.
We think it’s too rare for kids to see adults passionate about learning something. In the school classrooms, they almost never see that. We want to create an environment where kids will see adults that are passionate about learning things and then maybe joining with projects that would match up with their interests, do offshoots of it, do variations on the theme which they say. These ideas of kids working on design projects, growing out of their own interest, working as part of the community is what we see the clubhouse is about.
I want to end up by saying a few words about the latest technology which is grabbing everyone’s attention as people have been talking about the internet because I think the vision that we’ve had at the Clubhouse provides a certain type of framework for thinking about how we might make sense of the internet.
Because I think one thing that’s probably the most important thing to recognize is the same way that we see that just the computers themselves aren’t going to make a difference but the way you make use of the computers in the Clubhouse. The same is certainly true for the internet. It’s interesting that there’s [love fest 00:43:20] going on with the internet now.
When you go to an educational conference and all the educators and educational researchers, they’re all saying they’re so excited about what could happen with the internet, but then if you talk to them more closely, you find out they’re often talking about very, very different things so this excitement about the internet is masking over very, very different philosophies of education, very different visions of the way educational learning should take place.
As you have sometimes taught of it in terms of 10 years ago, Sherry Turkle used the phrase the “Computer as Rorschach” to talk about the fact that the way people think about computers reflects a lot about how they make sense of themselves and make sense of other things in the world. In these days in the educational world, I see the internet is a type of Rorschach test for people’s educational philosophies.
Just listen to someone talk about the internet and you can tell an awful lot about their vision of learning and education. You go to some conferences and you’ll see people talking about that the internet is this wonderful new device for delivering information better than ever before. You can have the master teacher who can instead of just reaching a class 30 kids can now reach 30,000 kids over the internet.
This metaphor of delivering information is something that’s driven by a very strong commercial interest. Some of the other speakers have earlier mentioned that the direction internet goes will be driven by this interest and sort of [left on some 00:
44:
41] devices. I think this delivery of information is what is really gets pushed hard, the idea of someone producing the information, pushing it out there for people out there to consume.
That’s [sort of one image to you 00:
44:
50] here. You start talking to somebody else of this educational research conference and they might also talk about information but from a very, very different point of view. They might say, “What’s good about the internet is you have this infinite library online and kids could access to any information that they want so by surfing the web they can find [whatever 00:
45:
10] they could get in any library all over the world.”
In some ways, that’s a very different vision than the first one because it’s focused more on empowering the child in exploring for this information so it’s a much more learner-centered approach. On the other hand, I think there’s a strong connection between these two approaches. They both focus on information and I think if you hear people talk about the internet these days, there’s such a strong focus on information that it tends to mask out everything else. I think Mitch talked a little bit about this.
I think it’s important to recognize that information is not the thing that necessarily is going to make the biggest difference the way people learn or to make the strongest connection to people. Someone once pointed out that the AT&T commercials, they didn’t say reach out and inform someone. They said reach out and touch someone.
In fact, the internet can be used in ways other than just this information. So, building on what we’ve seen at the clubhouse, we tend to focus our views of the internet on the two ideas of construction and community. We tend to see the internet as new ways to let people construct things, to build things but to do it in a community spirit, that they could do it in collaboration with other people. They might make something. They then show other people who then critique it or extend it or revise it or merge it with what they’ve done.
We have a variety of projects here at the lab and at the Clubhouse that tries to bring kids together where they can work [on their 00:
46:
31] making things on the internet. It touches on Sherry’s story about putting the information about the sanitary problems in the bathrooms and the urinary tract infections. The fact that the kids were expressing themselves and then sort of talking out, putting this out there, constructing the information on the net, reaching other people with that is what made it a meaningful experience.
I guess the bottom line is with all this excitement about connecting, it’s important to stay back and always ask the question for what end and at least for the way we’re thinking about it. Making sure the information isn’t the thing that blinds everything else and making sure that ideas of construction and community have a strong presence in the way that we think about the internet and learning.
Paul Starr:
Thank you very much. I’d like to open it up now for comments and questions. We have two microphones in the aisles but as I’ve looked out I realize that this might create a discrimination against those on the inside seats. You might feel awkward about getting up and going to the aisles to ask questions.
If you are in one of the inside seats and you feel more comfortable raising your hand, we can do it that way, but it is best if you use one of the microphones so that everybody can hear.
Yes. If you could come to the microphone, that really would be best.
Speaker 1:
I should have a disclaimer. I recently graduated from the group of Mitchel and Seymour and so I’m very biased but I think that implicit in a lot of what’s being discussed is a vision of a sort of this citizen’s role in the larger community. I think one reason that often educational reform efforts fail is that there’s a disagreement about what that role is, so I would be interested in hearing people discuss how they see that and how they see that discussion playing a role in whether these efforts succeed or fail. Thanks.
Paul Starr:
By role [inaudible 00:48:36] mean [inaudible 00:48:40] connection to this?
Speaker 1:
I mean if you think about arguing whether having a child working with some sort of simulation environment or some sort of construction design environment or something like that is better than working in some sort of rote learning environment. Standardized tests may show that working in that rote memorization environment provides superior performance for hours spent in the environment. Arguing that there is something additional the child is getting in terms of feeling empowerment, a different relationship to knowledge requires that you have the argument first that that’s a desirable thing.
I think oftentimes the [change in performance 00:49:26] just seem well. Gosh, of course, everybody knows that it’s a good thing to have people empowered when feel a certain relationship to what they learn things [inaudible 00:49:37] . I don’t know if that necessarily is shared widely out there in the world.
Paul Starr:
As a sociologist my own reaction is that this is an aspect of social class differences that people who work in the kinds of positions that Robert Reich has described as symbolic analysts require the more advanced self-starting skills but on the other hand those in the more mechanical production activities and so forth, that those jobs have less requirement and so you tend to see in the educational system a reproduction of those differences which corresponds to the two alternatives that you laid out. Now, that’s not necessarily a good thing but that does tend to be the pattern. Any other comments? Howard.
Howard Gardner:
Answering that as psychologist particularly by somebody who reads the newspaper and occasionally turns on the radio, what’s striking to me is almost nobody who has the public microphone ever talks about educational goals and anything other than economic terms.
People can not name the secretaries of education. The people whom educational [reformers 00:51:02] admire the most are not known to anybody outside of education. The level of discourse is [pitiable 00:51:13] . It’s terrible. What you’re calling for is both making things which are implicit-explicit and then the assumption that there’s some kind of audience that’s willing to follow the discussion.
I mean one of the reasons why I [plugged 00:51:31] the American Prospect is that they asked me to do so. It’s an effort. I think NPR is another but they’re essentially invisible in the society. I would love to know that somehow internet is going to make this all relevant but my knowledge of the history of society in general, America in particular doesn’t make me particularly optimistic on that score. It is a question of leadership and of public discourse and it’s never been lower.
Paul Starr:
Seymour.
Dr. Seymour Papert:
I think two points. One of the phenomenon of home schooling where I used to think until recently that homeschoolers or others are very intellectual, these symbolic people or had strong religious reasons for keeping the children out of school. Recently, I’ve been living mostly in rural Maine and I was surprised by how many people like people in the fisherman family keep their children at home.
They don’t talk about school in economic terms. They don’t like school because they don’t like the modern atmosphere. Not that they’re religious. They don’t like the drugs and the corruption and the devaluation of work as a … that that’s prevalent. They see it prevalent in the school.
Also, one person who hadn’t heard of home schooling before said to me she has a daughter of three who’s very bright and she doesn’t want the kid to go to school because she has seen other kids who are very bright before they went to school and aren’t very bright. Now, exactly what very bright meant? One could appreciate and she ended up keeping her kid out of school.
I think it’s hard to get statistics but people say there maybe half a million to a million kids being home schooled. I think that’s growing, that the whole computer presence and so on makes it much easier to do that. It makes it possible for groups of kids or parents to get together in a kind of communal thing which gets to be starting a little small one-room school but whatever. I think that this involvement of parents with education is very uneconomic. I mean it’s not based on economic values but it’s much more spiritual and moral and has to do with personality.
Something else about that, there’s sort of other side of that and that is I think most people never thought twice about how say math is taught or how math should be learned. That was the business of the school teacher. Some learning, and how we learn to talk and you learned maybe values and … but math. I’m just saying this as an example. Math you learn at school.
In the last few years, every parent is now being bombarded with a sales pitch about software that will teach your kid math or anything else. I think parents are being drawn into having to think about what’s the right way, is this a good thing or bad thing, which software would I choose.
These people are being drawn into controversial issues about the nature of learning and education to a greater extent or at any rate, they’re being exposed to influences and in fact I’m narrating my next book at that. I mean this book is going to be written for parents, for families and its theme is … Well, it has a message. It’s to take learning seriously as a family activity and tries to address the fact that parents are being faced with greater choices.
I think that although it isn’t maybe happening and it isn’t getting reflected at the high leadership level of Washington and so on, there are a lot of forces at work that are bringing ordinary people into taking up these issues of education. I think in that is a potential for a lot of interesting things happening and a possibility for doing a lot of good if you can influence it in good directions or give it the kind of ideas or software or whatever it needs to help it go in good direction.
Paul Starr:
Yes.
Speaker 2:
I work for a company that is planning and it usually does make a profit in selling educational software. The message that I would have predicted that I would have heard from the panel is not the message that I heard. It seems like if you were to make a list of goals for educational reform, technology would be at the bottom of the list. Proper building maintenance, books for students, teachers trained in the most effective methods, smaller classrooms, these kinds of things seem to be …
I’m extrapolating out but it seems like technology is very low in the list yet my company is vested in expanding and making a profit out of the hope and hype of technology. That’s not the message that … This is a very isolated message. The hype is much larger than the real need for that.
I’m curious. Is it that there lacks courage to actually be the voice in the wilderness that says, “No, this is really a diversion. We should really be spending more time talking about educational reform in other areas and forget about technology and let’s maybe stick with the technology that we have now until we get up to speed on it”? That may not be such a great idea but … Or is the commercial … The interest in this country is so strong that you just have to ride with the tide and you cannot fight this tidal wave of technology that’s just going to flood schools and we’ll try to make the best of it.”
Mitchel Resnick:
I think one point is it shouldn’t be seen so much as an either or. I think a lot of us see that technology can play a role in facilitating and making easier some of the other types of reforms that we so see as critically important so it’s not a matter of choosing the other types of reforms and the way you think about education and learning or buy in to the technology, but that technology can help us rethink certain issues like some of the points that Howard has written a line about multiple intelligences.
I think some of us feel that technology can play role of supporting new approaches to learning that do a better job of providing multiple avenues of entry and multiple avenues of access to deep ideas or providing new representations of ideas that allow people to connect with those ideas in different ways. It should’nt be seen so much as a matter of either or.
Male:
This morning we … Oh, go ahead.
Sherry Turkle:
Just to follow on that I think that I think that one has to be sensitive to … This morning we were addressed by Congressman [Markey 00:
59:
11] who spoke about parents’ images of hope for their children and how invested parents are in an image that technology will help them, that technology is kind of a mnemonic for aspirations people have for better life for their kids.
One can step back and say, “Wait a minute. First you have to have an idea of how the technology is used. It’s the technology plus all the other things.” I think you have to be and it’s appropriate to be respectful of the role that our image of technology, how we can serve as a mobilizing force for doing other things that we believe in rather than just saying, “Oh, forget that.”
There’s no question that where we are today in American culture, it perhaps is like the moon shot. It’s the kind of thing that can bring people together at least to address the educational problems that we face.
Paul Starr:
Howard.
Howard Gardner:
I think probably more so than anybody else in the panel and even though you may have meant your example as a devil’s advocate, I think it’s actually correct, but it’s totally un-American. In America, we look for technological fixes. There was a panel at the Kennedy school a couple of weeks ago where there were five people who like you make their living off of selling technology to schools and I asked the following question.
I said, “You’re complaining about how terrible American schools are and how you’re going to fix things, but let’s look at Japan, let’s look at Europe, let’s look at the places that are doing well. None of them has the stuff in the schools that you’re talking about. Isn’t there anything you might be able to learn from that?”
I had in mind some of the value questions we’ve talked about and some of the notions that using your mind well as an important criteria. Nobody in the panel skipped a beat except interestingly enough Chris Whittle. Everybody else said, “Well, this is how we’re going to [leap frog 01:
01:
18] because we’re way ahead in technology and therefore we’re going to have people that way.”
Chris Whittle said, “Well, the Japanese do have more days in school and that’s probably something we could learn from.” Of course, that’s part of the Edison Project. I mean it was the speed of the dismissal that there might be anything to be learned from any other place which I thought was very revealing.
Dr. Seymour Papert:
I’d really defend the technology. I really in a certain sense … I mean nobody has criticized technocentric thinking that just putting technology there is going to have any effect so anybody could think that more than I have.
Certainly, Howard Gardner doesn’t because Howard Gardner was quoting experiments in which people ask this incredibly stupid technocentric thinking namely “does technology help children learn” as if just putting the technology there would do something and you could study it.
All those studies that have shown that it didn’t do very much, every one of them is subject to very elementary criticism on the grounds that it wasn’t just technology that was studying. It was a whole context of many other things including some sort of idea that if kids got exposed to 10 hours of anything, that could change their whole way of thinking. Leave aside this bullshit.
Howard Gardner:
[Inaudible 01:02:37]
Dr. Seymour Papert:
I think the point is that an image that really got me going about a lot of the things I’ve been doing is in a school walking past an art class and there were kids that were actually carving soap. It doesn’t matter what they would do. They were making something. Each one is making something different. They really believe that they’re going to produce a product that everybody would like, that would take how the parents would want it and for good reason not just to be nice to the kids but because this was a real beautiful thing they were making.
Then you got the math class and you ask, “Well, would the teacher in the math class like to take home some of that work and pin it up on … Would the parents say, “Please, I would like my kids …” obviously not. In the math class, they were doing crap. I mean they’re filling in little numbers in squares …”
Male:
It’s craft versus crap.
Dr. Seymour Papert:
What?
Male:
It’s craft versus crap.
Dr. Seymour Papert:
You are [inaudible 01:03:37] .
Male:
More alliteration.
Dr. Seymour Papert:
The vision is could you be doing math in the same spirit as you’re making that art where what you’re doing is something that really comes from the heart, from the soul, that’s beautiful. We produce a product that’s worthwhile in itself where you’re being valued for what you’ve made and you can value it and not forgetting a grade and being judged right or wrong.
This is rarely the image. This is the image of the things that Mitch is talking about there and a use of the technology where using this technology as the material, as the medium, it is possible to create things in which principles of mathematics and all sorts of other stuff play the role that aesthetic principles play or they become a different kind of aesthetic principle and it becomes a clay out of which you can make material through which these many dimensions of mind and society and culture and knowledge can be.
That is the vision that makes technology right in the center much more important than the size of the class. I don’t care if the classroom has 2,000 kids in it if those kids are really doing something they’re passionate about. The reason why we have to worry about where the teacher can control 30 kids is that the teacher is controlling them to make them do something and they’re not doing things out of passion. This is the vision of technology that we believe in. We don’t think it will come automatically. We didn’t need a lot of hard work but it’s the only vision that makes sense of it but that’s the driving vision here.
I don’t know what company. Luckily, I don’t know what company but I would say on the whole the so-called educational software being produced by companies and I think with a high correlation, the more they made out of it, the more what I’m going to say is true. It goes in exactly the opposite direction and I think it’s doing a lot or harm and I think it’s creating the opposite vision of what it is to learn something like mathematics not that you could use it to create and express yourself but that you’re going to learn to make the right answer.
I think that creating this image that learning math is learning to quickly [click 01:06:00] on the right place to give the right answer to a problem somebody else sent to you is exactly the opposite of mathematical spirit and this is something reinforcing what was always worst in school.
Yes, I agree with you that it’s crazy that people are thinking about this use of technology as if it were any way in the category of the important issues about education but it’s another vision of technology that I think puts it right in the center and that makes– that puts it in the role of making possible what educators have always dreamed of, that is making it possible to learn everything in a creative, expressive way through experience but we never knew how to do mathematics for example.
I’m taking this as the extreme case of what we’ve never known how to do. That’s why there’s free school progressive schooling founded on many, many rocks. One of which was yes you can do tie-dyeing and maybe you can do creative writing in an unconstrained way but nobody found a way to do mathematics and science in that, sort of, unconstrained way except in the rare circumstance we had that really inspired the teacher and this technology is making it possible for us to extend to these other areas the kind of spirit of the best progressive free schooling method that there ever was. I fact, if that can be done, it’s what makes possible all the other reforms in education that we dream of.
Paul Starr:
Howard.
Howard Gardner:
Actually, much as I would like to take issue with Seymour, I’m not really going to because his vision is very close to mine but I do want to make a framing comment. It’s a comment in that the best is the enemy of the good sense. There’s no question progressive education was done well. It was wonderful but it was very hard to do well.
I think what is today, and particularly I’m sorry for those people who didn’t hear some of the discussion in the afternoon because I thought it was really very good. I think where the day has been useful is we’re beginning to be able to describe better what the resistances are to the kind of vision which Seymour has which I really do share.
The resistance is of a sociological sort which Paul talked about. Resistances of a psychological sort which I’ve touched on and also political and economics kinds of resistances. If we really want to makethis work in the sense of actually having a better education, we’ve got to understand those resistances really well and not just kind of think that they’re going to dissolve because they’ve never dissolve before. There is some reason why schools all over the world have been pretty similar for thousands of years. It isn’t because the teachers were stupid or evil.
Seymour:
It’s because we didn’t have computers for thousands of years.
Male:
Can I follow up with the point …
Sherry Turkle:
Technological determinist alert. Technological …
Male:
Okay. Quick follow-up.
Male:
The point the that Mr. Kapor made which is it’s a diversion that the technology’s diversion try to identify good learning that’s happening without the technology and then try to create technology that will allow that great learning to happen. That’s not happening. What’s happening is before I started making educational technology, I taught in the classroom and I taught teachers how to use technologies.
What happens is before they were buying Apple IIes and they have to learn how to use these things. Now, they’re buying Macintosh because now they have to learn to use a new computer that’s doing the same drill and kill stuff, Dr. Papert that you’re talking about, that is horrendous. It’s still energy and effort is created into doing this and the point was made last night in the debate between the governor and the senator that one would accuse the other of not purchasing enough computers for the schools.
That’s the point that people hear is how many computers are in the schools not what is being done with them. If you can’t create great learning without the computer, there are some examples in math that you can but often in other subject areas, it’s very difficult to do that and the technology is not the answer often but it’s a diversion.
Paul Starr:
Yes.
Speaker 3:
Hello. I’m a student of technology and I’m glad that Howard brought up earlier the historical context to different kinds of debates and cognition because it seems to me that this issue that you’re talking about, educational reform and technology seems to have taken place about 35 years ago with another topic and that is instructional video in schools. That initiative failed for a number of reasons.
I’m listening to a lot of similar arguments that people are talking about or similar problems that people see such as for example just going in full-heartedly with installing wiring without really thinking about the product that’s going over or really even the concept behind what’s going on over the wires.
Those kinds of problems were coming out of the debates probably similar to this one 35 years ago so I’m just wondering how is this reform going to be any different from the failed initiative of 35 years ago and what kind of lessons learned from 35 years ago can be applied today because it seems that there is a historical context that I’m just not hearing in your comments right now.
Paul Starr:
Sherry, Mitch. I’ve seen a number of hands signal they’re interested in responding to this. Probably everybody on the panel.
Sherry Turkle:
All technologies are created equal but some technologies are created more equal than others. There is something about the technologies that are enabled by computation and now I’m including all computer-based technologies and what is thus enabled on the internet today. That has to do with a word that Mitch used in his presentation which was construction. Stressing the values that the Clubhouse does by construction and community.
The fact that you are not being broadcast the smart ideas of the maker of the instructional video but you’re giving an opportunity as Seymour has described of making it, building it constructing it, making it your own in your own way, investing it with your passion with your sense of yourself and how you relate to learning, this is after all a qualitatively different kind of medium to work with.
Now, that doesn’t mean that the pitfalls, the stories, the commercialization, the trivialization, that all of those forces aren’t going to be beaming down on what you do with this material. I think as a first response, and no other people want to make other comments, but the first response to what you’re saying I think it’s important to discriminate cases and to say, I think that here we have, because of the constructionist possibilities, something fundamentally different and more promising to work with.
Mitch Kapor:
Just to add in general or slightly, I mean beware of facile historical comparisons. I mean let us by all means embrace history but let’s do it with some insight and so I think you have to immediately look to a comparison of the affordances of different media that these technologies enable in some systematic way to understand what the differences are.
The captivating thing about the internet not offered here as a panacea but as something to be contemplated is it’s highly decentralized character which encourages participation, which relative to other media has much lower barriers of entry, relative to other media is much more symmetrical in the sense that in video because video has always been difficult to make but easy to send out, you would have many, many recipients for each originator. This isn’t until fairly recently.
The internet and the related technology is much more symmetrical in that it is in general as easy to be a creator as a recipient. You really have to take on the task of understanding the affordances of new media very generally in order to understand how they might play out differently at least where the new potentials are. The distinguishing characteristic of the internet is one, the reason I underscored this is I think it is still not understood amidst at the hype and the hoopla and the rush to commercialize and make fortunes.
Just to close this comment with one data point because I was going to work this in somewhere. There is a whole Wall Street movement to look at new technology companies in education that Smith Barney is now holding conferences for investors where they have companies come and the premise is that given the internet and the products that these companies make, school as we know it is going to be obsolete. It’s all going to be privatized. It’s going to be educational. It would be purchased by consumers and you can get it on the ground floor of the next set of fortunes by investing in the companies that are going to make this happen.
Now, there’s a lot to unpack in that and I’m not going to do it here other than to say that that piece of business among other mistakes it makes is failing to understand the affordances of the technology.
Paul Starr:
Mitchel Resnick.
Mitchel Resnick:
In thinking about computers versus other technologies, I was reminded of a few years ago I remember seeing a headline in the Wall Street Journal that said “Computers Seen Failing as Teaching Tools.” I remember being struck by that because again using the phrase “teaching tools”.
We talk about instructional video. It was explicitly, the main way we can use this as a teaching tool and it didn’t make a big difference. I thought the headline was interesting because as long as the computers were seen as long as the computers were seen as a teaching tool, it was right that it’s going to fail, so it’s hardly surprising in the fact that the Wall Street Journal saw it as a teaching tool that they were looking at.
It was indicative and it reflected the fact that that’s how most of the people out there were seeing it also and that’s why it was failing. And it’s always true when that shift gets made, that as Sherry and Mitch were mentioning, that it has this possibility of not just being seen as a teaching tool like so many other so-called instructional technologies but more as a learning tool, form of expression, a means of expression, new medium of expression, that it has a chance of surviving and making a big difference in education.
Again, it doesn’t mean this necessarily will happen but I think that the core point is to try to get that message out there for people to recognize that there is a different way of saying it because as long as the writer of the Wall Street Journal and all the people out there using the technology are seeing it as a teaching tool it’s like they will go down in the same direction as the instructional videos.
Paul Starr:
Yes. Up here on the left.
Speaker 4:
Can you hear me? Okay. I’m definitely in the sour-puss camp in terms of technology and education. As I’m listening to the arguments here and I’m trying to figure out why that’s the case. I think I’m hearing from the panel … It really is a panel of progressive educator. It’s a panel trying take these ideas that became popular in the early part of this century that children are naturally creative and that instead of schooling them, if you could just unleash their natural creativity and let them do what they are passionate about that they would learn in the best way to examine their own individual intelligences and affordances.
These are the really the ideas that I’m hearing over and over again. I have certain sympathy to them but I think that they’re inadequate to explain passion. I guess I want to hear the panel’s comment, just sort of alternative explanation and why I think that focusing on technologies, even technologies that allow people to create in their own ways won’t do enough and might distract us from what we really need to do.
Because I would argue that no matter who you are and no matter what your intelligence are or natural abilities that you might become good at, human passion comes from other people. Human passion comes from sociability, from being involved in a community of people that value something and consider to be important and therefore inspire one to pursue the certain goals and reward one in subtle ways that as far as I’m concerned can’t be made virtual.
Even we could give everybody the tools for the ultimate expression but I don’t believe that Dr. Papert’s 2,000 student classroom would ever work. Even if every student could express themselves if you were one in 2,000, there would be no source for passion, the fundamental source for passion would be gone. I’m afraid that in concentrating on technology and not focusing on the sorts of issues like how many teachers are there for a student, what kind of relationship do they have and how can that inspire motivation and passion, we really are distracting ourselves.
Dr. Seymour Papert:
I think I must have made … Don’t take it too literally.
Speaker 4:
Yeah.
Dr. Seymour Papert:
I think the point is yes passion comes from all sorts of sources including other people but it’s also killed by being forced to do things that are not meaningful to you. I think there are more children whose passion for knowing and doing things is killed by school and children whose passion of any sort is aroused by it and I think that’s just an obvious fact. I agree but …
Speaker 4:
To what degree will technology affect what’s [inaudible 01:20:54]
Dr. Seymour Papert:
Well, let’s go back to the elemental thing that I think there are kinds of creativity that can be made out of clay and there are kinds of creativity that need bits. Having bits as a medium of creation vastly increases the span of creative activities into which people can enter and focus their passions and express themselves and enter into relationship with other people. That’s ultimately the whole story.
Mitch Kapor:
In this context, I think it’s interesting to look at the recent history of software development first with respect to information retrieval technologies and second, with respect to communication. My distinction is simply when you’re talking to the machine that’s information. When you’re talking to another person even if it’s through the mediation of a computer network, that’s communication.
The short summary is there’s been astonishing development and huge investment in information retrieval technology which is what the World Wide Web is basically about. There’s been pitiful little progress compared to that in the communications arena. The fact is that what people used for their email and my god, there are forums or conferences in bulletin boards from a software designer’s point of view is astonishingly primitive.
I mean it is actually sickening and one of the reasons … I mean just in terms of what people are asked to put up with if they just want to have a many to many conversation. In the sense of it really hasn’t moved significantly in the last 10 years. There’s some investment in it but not a lot.
I think first of all, that’s notable. It’s notable because if you want to inspire people through human contact there’s no reason you can’t do it with technology as long as the software that you have is designed to support communicative interactions of various kind. One to one, one to many, many to many and so on.
The fact is that there’s systematic underinvestment in that. The other point is well why is that? I’m not sure I know the answer to that but I have a couple of speculation. One is that information retrieval applications scale. I mean the basic idea for the World Wide Web is simple and what we’ve seen is in a very short amount of time, you can get tens of millions of people using it.
Because many things happen simply because they’re possible, it’s like water running downhill. These communication-oriented applications, for instance virtual communities, good ones, are hard to do. My first deep experience in cyberspace was on the Well, a conferencing system in Sausalito, California founded by Stewart Brand, the [originator 01:23:52] of Whole Earth Catalog and many other wonderful adventures. Each software was unbelievably primitive and is still, oh, except they have a World Wide Web front end now.
Yet it worked. It provided a deep experience of connected people who are [inaudible 01:24:09] and who came to care about each other, people who were involved with each other’s lives. We worked together, we fought together and we hang out together. There was magic there. Originally, I thought, “Gee, this would be great. This would be all over cyberspace and including in education.”
I think it doesn’t scale well because precisely it requires human facilitation. It was the culture of the Well and the old timers there and the management and the spirit of the place and what people said indeed not the technology that kept it going. You can’t hire a bunch of smart people like a Netscape and have them make software that embodies that. At least we don’t know how to do that and I think it’s a very dim sort of prospect.
If we want to use the technology to facilitate communication, I think it’s possible (a) if we find ways to invest in it and it’s not clear the market really likes that and (b) we absolutely have to focus on the human element of what does it mean to facilitate real interactions in cyberspace that are meaningful and inspirational to people. I think there’s a lot to be learned about that but it is just not getting a lot of attention amidst all the internet hype which is a tragedy.
Sherry Turkle:
I think that’s changing. I think that’s another spin to put on the story of the primitive technology and communications technology which is that people want to talk to each other so badly that they’ll put up with anything which is a different way to tell the tale whereas want information so little that they’ll demand something really fabulous and glitzy as they get it.
I mean I think that the desire to reach out and not inform but to touch someone in some way is enormous and you can see an explosion of it.
Howard Gardner:
Passion is certainly important and agree with Seymour, it comes in all sorts of odd places and ways. It’s hard to engineer. There’s another thing which is very important in education which is our topic today and I’m going to use the word discipline.
One reason why schools have existed for a long time and one reason why there have been even good schools is because they inculcate discipline in two senses. One, willingness to work regularly on something and two, understanding some of the achievements of culture in the past, what it means to do science and understand science, what it means to do history and understand history.
It’s very common in a panel like this to ignore that, even though without knowing the biography of anybody here, I know they’ve all gone through both, even Seymour has gone through both. This reminds us why schools have been set up and why would people have home schooling. If they don’t do those things they’re going to have failed the kids.
There are two people who know about education who we should remember in this context because they made the same point but they made it in the opposite ways. Whitehead said, “First, you need a period of romance or passion then you have to have a period of skill building.” I think Plato has said something at least as profound. He said “In education we have to make people want to do what they have to do and sometimes the passion comes afterwards.”
Paul Starr:
Wow, that last question really touched a nerve and set off some excellent discussion. Up there on the right and then we’ll come back over here on the left.
Speaker 5:
I have a great appreciation for diversity with respect to the panel and also a great respect for the complexity of these issues but there’s one theme that seemed fairly simple that’s ran throughout the day and that is it’s not the technology stupid, it’s what you do with it so I’m wondering if each of you could influence FCC in the next meeting or some other body that would actually make a difference in terms of what is done with technology.
What would you suggest? What sort of sound bite if it could actually be enacted in terms of what students and teachers do with technology. What do you think would make the biggest difference?
Paul and Speaker:
Is that something for the FCC to do? I think there’s a premise there which is if you favor not the FCC then whatever … That’s something that’s legislative [inaudible 01:28:43]
Speaker 5:
Okay. Sorry.
Paul Starr:
It’s something that would make a difference in the school for kids. Who would like to take a shot at that? I don’t see any hands.
Male:
You mean state legislators, state legislatures?
Speaker 5:
Well …
Mitchel Resnick:
[Inaudible 01:28:56] This isn’t an answer to your question but a perspective on it that you’re asking for a centralized solution. I think part of the responses that the way the deep change will come about is in a more decentralized way. Yes, there are centralized things that could get done but probably the more important things are getting certain things out there that will take hold, take root, service, good models and will catch up in a grassroots way.
There are things that I really do believe that central governance can do to help facilitate that happening but it’s more important to think about planting the right seeds and encouraging diversity and encouraging ways for things to spread in a decentralized way.
Speaker 5:
That’s actually more what I mean not necessarily a political answer but it seems to me we are at a time when there is particular listening for new changes and some of them are political and some are pedagogical so it’s more in the broader context of what would make a difference.
Sherry Turkle:
I think it’s the whole general issue of reinvesting in education. One of the reasons that the internet is so hyped is because basically it’s the cheapest thing on the block. People know it’s expensive but compared to the other things that need to be done, it’s inexpensive and I think that I would again, my idea of leveraging the excitement about the technology into really a reconsideration of the whole role as a polity as a community, where is education on the table, where are children in our priorities is what I’d like to see.
Mitch Kapor:
My contribution would be to pose a question that came up for you when you said go to the FCC like he said. Why are we going to the FCC? The reason we’re going to the FCC is we want to be able to go to somebody but here’s the problem. This is very … I’m stereotyping. I’m turning something that’s at least 256 shades of gray into monochrome here.
Coming from the business world which is one of the world’s that I come from in software, we’re used to getting things done. People have ideas. One of the great virtues of the system that we have is that many people who have ideas get a chance to try them out and they’re able to raise capital. They build things. They make things happen sometime when they’re successful. They have a huge impact. It makes a difference.
People in business, and one of the reason it is such a model is that there’s a certain efficacy. People feel good about that. When business people go into and look at the government and regulation and legislation and bureaucracy, they throw up their hands generally in horror because nothing ever gets done.
Now, I said I’m stereotyping. It’s like well-meaning people who can’t figure anything out and can’t take action and can’t make decisions and can’t be accountable. I’m giving you my sort of Ross Perot multiple personality. I don’t usually let this out.
On the other hand, if you look at the brutal efficiency with which business operates in getting things done and its use of instrumental rationality in the service of creating great power for people which they used to dominate and do things which aren’t particularly good for people, there’s something to critique there.
The question is:
Isn’t any kind of marriage of these two possible? How have we gotten into a kind of state of polarization of institutions that you’ve got all the efficacy on one side with no morality and on the other side, you have lots of good intentions and complete inaptitude?
I told you this is only one big key. You’re laughing because you know there’s some truth in it. Solving that, penetrating to the heart of that is very much tied up with restoring civic spirit, making collective investments that people believe in and really getting off the dime as a society that has some wholeness to it. I don’t have the answer, but I don’t even think the question is often raised that people can latch on to.
Paul Starr:
Mitch, I can’t help but note the irony of your contrast whether we’re talking about the internet which was created by the government. Probably it would never have been created in the private sector. The requirements for it were completely distinct and reflected cold war concerns, but in fact, the whole computer science field was all federally funded. This is a scene there where people think of government as being inept but in fact government was there at the beginning and [inaudible 01:34:09] .
Mitch Kapor:
Let’s zoom up 10x on this for a minute. I mean it’s absolutely true that anybody thinks that the government hasn’t had a big role to play it doesn’t understand the history of it but it’s all pre-commercial not mass scale. It’s basic R&D which still makes enormous amount of sense. I’ve been talking about the part of the process which to defend my thesis from sort of when there’s a decent idea that a few of the elite regard has their own private playground how that gets out to have some effect in the democracy as a whole. Sure. I grant you all that happily and willingly but I don’t think that’s what we’re talking about here.
Paul Starr:
Okay.
Dr. Seymour Papert:
Howard has substantiated that thing that we wouldn’t have had it without the government. The fact that the DOD got in and set up often they couldn’t do either [crosstalk 01:35:02] connecting up the computers. It seems to be obvious that it was going to develop anyway. It’s such an obvious [inaudible 01:35:11] they didn’t do very much.
Paul Starr:
Actually, this is a bit of history that I’m sure a lot of people hear now. If you go back to the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, the overwhelming share of investment … I’m not just talking about the internet but the overwhelming share of investment in the development of computer science and computers and computer networks, all these, by huge margins came from the federal government and …
Dr. Seymour Papert:
And Department of Defense, please. Make that distinction.
Paul Starr:
Defense and …
Dr. Seymour Papert:
Not that the rest of the government [was alienated 01:35:41] to it.
Paul Starr:
That’s not so, but the … That’s not so.
Mitch Kapor:
The total dollars were unbelievably small.
Dr. Seymour Papert:
What didn’t come from all of that that’s not good?
Paul Starr:
Actually, there were many opportunities for private business to become involved early and …
Dr. Seymour Papert:
Why should they? The government was putting out millions of dollars.
Paul Starr:
[Inaudible 01:36:01] There was a leadership role played by the public sector. In fact, I think if you go back to that period in the early post-war years, more immediately after World War II, after the Manhattan Project, at a time when the image of government competence was a lot a better, it would be much harder for you to sustain that argument with the automatic sense that that’s right. This is a historical phenomenon. The particular image that people have today …
Dr. Seymour Papert:
[Inaudible 01:36:34] It surprises me that it’s so easily [slips off the tongue 01:36:39] that [not only did it 01:36:40] happen with government investment but it couldn’t have happened or it wouldn’t have happened without it.
Mitch Kapor:
I have to say this one. I’m with Paul. I mean we’ll never know because we can’t …
Paul Starr:
We’ll never know.
Mitch Kapor:
We can’t run it but on the other hand, I don’t see any significant ability or interest of business to make the kinds of long-term investments for the collective good that this represents. I mean the game is just not set up for an IBM or whomever or Microsoft to think about developing public infrastructure. They don’t get rewarded for that. Their executives don’t get bonus for that, the shareholders don’t, so there’s no reason to think that they would unless their incentives were different.
Paul Starr:
Over here on the left.
Speaker 6:
I guess I’m glad Mitch was talking about this because the question I wanted to ask sort of relates. I’ve been struck by this whole discussion about computers and education and how much it’s not really about computers and education. I was struck also by a comment that Mitch made about our computer is going to- that there seems to be this real problem, the key out there in the dark, that we’re taking computers and pounding on a problem but there’s something else that we really want to solve.
Then the whole discussion has been centering around this other thing that we really want to solve that computers may or may not help us with. I’ve been struck also by do we agree on what this other thing that we really want to solve is? There’s this key and there’s also a darkness around it and perhaps this relates to what he was saying about businesses. Businesses get things done. Like, if I was asking will computer help me in air traffic control. Well, I’m clear that the problem I want to solve is I want the airplanes not to hit each other then you can ask will it help not hit each or not.
Maybe you might have some discussion some people want them to not hit each other one way or another way. You’re pretty clear that you can also make decision once you have a system and you want to implement it. The people are going to implement it the way you want, but here, there’s this whole, first of all, what is the problem and second of all, if you guys agree on the problem and put it out in the world, will other people agree on your agreement on the problem and do it the way you want.
I guess it’s an observation sort of a question but I wanted to know whether you have any comments in this observation in your discussions.
Sherry Turkle:
There’s no question that the discussion of computers and education and the schools and the philosophies of to how to use computers for education are giant Rorschach for philosophies of education.
We didn’t allow anybody in the room who really wanted to argue “computers are good for drill and practice, what’s the problem here? Isn’t that obvious kids need to learn a basic skill?” Those people are not … When I said in the room, I meant really people we can’t control over.
Sherry Turkle:
Right. I think it’s interesting that no one has dared to stand and be silenced but …
Paul Starr:
Next question.
Sherry Turkle:
Those people … That is a very important constituency, super important philosophy in terms of basic skills and what school is for, what education is for, and the computer and education is part of the conversation about that model. I think that, as a baseline response to what you’re saying, it is very true that discussing computers and education you first have to narrow the field and talk about what kind of education, what are your educational values and only then can you ask if the computers can help.
I think that what you’ve heard in terms of the kind of vision here, is to say, look, given that we want basic skills but we also want people … I mean that is to say we want people who have skills to get jobs to think of themselves, empowered learners but we also want you know … There’s been a list of I think a laundry list here of the kind of impassioned and excited and both disciplined and impassioned learners that we want. How can computers help us there?
Certainly, you have a giant Rorschach for visions of education as soon as you talk about what the computer can do for you.
Paul Starr:
Up there on the right.
David:
You’ll forgive me if I introduce myself. David [Schwartz 01:41:42] , I’m an unpublished contributor to the American Prospect. I’m a friend of the American Prospect. I have a BA in sociology and anthropology. I do not own a computer so these comments are directed from a kind of veil of ignorance which is something to be said I suppose.
If you care to comment on some of these questions or comments that the applicability of which may or may not apply to education. Any comments on the relationship between attention deficit disorder and the use of computers and calculators? Are computers in education for rich kids alone, is their use based on the assumption that their parents are wealthy? Is disembodied social interaction a problem?
You’ve all probably seen the New Yorker cartoon of the bum sitting on the street with his hat, in front of him a sign saying, “We’ll hack for food.” That’s not meant to reflect on me. I have a job and I actually own a condo so … It is a really great cartoon. Is there a sense of economic unreality associated with the use of the internet?
Dr. Seymour Papert:
Do you have a favorite one among these things? I have to be going to all of that.
David:
No. I’m going to leave that to the members of the panel.
Paul Starr:
How many …?
David:
Just a couple more. I’m sorry. When I was in graduate school, there was talk of the information explosion. What is the relationship between the internet in the information explosion and the inability- people’s reluctance to form opinions in large numbers in the society or ideological positions? Would you care to comment on the juxtaposition between the four major news networks which are all tied up with large corporate entities involving anti-trust and the perhaps over dilution of opinion in the internet and the question of whether speech on the internet is subject to libel?
Dr. Seymour Papert:
Can I make a comment, please?
Paul Starr:
Yes, go ahead.
Dr. Seymour Papert:
I have to make this comment that there seem to be these list of questions and don’t take this a put-down, maybe it’s a put-up. It sounds exactly like reading the journals on educational technology. That is:
People are asking slews of all sorts of questions and have not succeeded in focusing on some central questions that we should really address in the history of real sciences like physics or even mathematics [has been 01:45:08] because at certain times people have rarely been able to find, look, this is the question. If you can really deal with this one, I think this whole
If you judge from the publication and literature you get exactly the impression that you get from this list of questions that the professionals in this area have either not wanted to or not been able to focus down on to the little questions, so if you don’t do that, you can ask endlessly these detailed questions which are important but they’re not good for public discussion. They don’t drive the field.
Paul Starr:
Sherry.
Sherry Turkle:
I agree with Seymour’s comment about that these are not the questions that drive science, but these are exactly the kind of questions that you come up with if what you’re dealing with is the creation of a new culture then everything goes. I think that those kinds of concerns very precisely express the fact that what we’re dealing here is more like the creation of a new cultural field in which our humor, our psychological lives, our sex lives, the way we raise our children.
It’s not just about computers and education. Perhaps part of the problem of containing the discussion is because we’re dealing with an object that really is in the process of restructuring so many aspects of our culture. There are two sides to that point about the fact that it’s not a science and maybe that’s an important something to take way from this conversation that we’re far from a science here.
Howard Gardner:
I do have one bit of useful advice to the questioner. If you really believe that the information age has destroyed the public’s capacity to have opinions, just turn on Talk Radio and listen to it for 24 hours.
Dr. Seymour Papert:
inaudible
Paul Starr:
We are approaching the end of these two hours. I want to recall something that Congressman Ed Markey said earlier today that I was quite struck by. He is working very hard now to get the federal communications commission to approve what he refers to as an e-rate that is an educational rate for access to telecommunications.
The 1996 Telecommunications Act called for affordable connections for schools. It didn’t define it beyond that and Congressman Markey would like to have some kind of basic service, be absolutely free to schools and then have some charge for advance services beyond that and he came partly to discuss exactly where the line should be drawn between the two.
I was quite struck by one aspect of his reasoning about this. He said that it was important to do this to create a sense of possibility in the in the Reveres, the Maldens to set off a debate in school board elections to make this an issue that people talked about so that they could see some possibility for renovating their schools. He saw ways of tying this issue of technology into broader issues even desegregation of the schools and other improvements that might be made.
Essentially his logic, if I understood it, is that this is a way of drawing people into the debate about the future of education. It’s a source of great interest today. It’s an opportunity to make people aware of certain possibilities and to open up their minds and discussion. In that sense, I don’t think it is a diversion. It is one way to get people engaged.
I hope our two hours have served that purpose and I want to thank all the members of our panel they’ve put in a long day here and I greatly appreciate the hard work that they’ve done. I appreciate all of you coming. The articles that they were summarizing and referring to are going to be appearing over the next several months in the American Prospect. We’ll have several of them in the July-August issue and then more later in the year. Thank you very much.