Robert Tinker





Robert Tinker has had a very long career as a leader in uses of Information and Communication Technology in science education.

Tinker has a bachelor's degree in Physics from Swarthmore College, M.S. in Physics and Mathematics from Stanford, and a Ph.D. in experimental low-temperature physics from MIT.

His early work experience included included:


 * Instructor, Stillman College, 1964-1966.
 * Associate, The Commission on College Physics, 1970-1971.
 * Assistant Professor, Amherst College, 1971-1974.
 * Associate Professor, Springfield Technical Community College, Springfield, MA, 1975-1977.
 * Adjunct Professor of Language and Communication, Hampshire College, 1978-1980.
 * Schuman Fellow, Educational Technology Center, Harvard 1986-1987.

He worked as a Chief Scientist at TERC (originally named the Technical Education Research Centers) beginning in 1978. He founded the Concord Consortium in 1994. His work and leadership in these two organizations has made major, lasting contributions to education throughout the world.

Early History
Quoting from Robert Tinker's article, A History of Probeware:


 * When I started my PhD program at Stanford in 1963, I intended to pursue an academic career in experimental physics. The civil rights movement, however, made such an esoteric path seem irrelevant, so I grabbed a MS degree after one year and took a teaching position at Stillman College, an historically black college in Alabama. My two years of teaching there both awakened a life-long interest in education and provided ideal training in education and insights on how to improve science education.




 * Hoping for a combined education and physics PhD, I enrolled at MIT in 1965 on the strength of Jerrold Zacharias’s reputation in physics education (see Goldstein, 1992). In the end, I did a straight physics PhD with John King, a student of Jerrold’s, a master experimentalist, and dedicated educator. His ideas, intellectual generosity, enthusiasm, and willingness to take risks made a lasting impression. John was a national leader in physics education who advocated project-based learning and the importance of a set of sensors that could be used with an oscilloscope. His dream was a shoebox of sensors that students could use to measure almost everything (King, 1962).

Quoting from a 2005 book chapter written by Tinker:


 * Since this is not to be an academic paper, it is important to start by revealing my background, biases, and guides. By reading Martin Gardner, I fell in love with numbers and logic as a kid and so, in 1957, jumped at the chance to program an IBM 650 to generate prime numbers. I then wrote an Algol-like compiler and was so hooked on the technology that I dropped it cold out of fear that it would interfere with my academic work. I had so thoroughly left computers behind that it was only in 1972 when I was safely ensconced in the Amherst College physics department that I saw the first example of an educational application of computers that appealed to me: a planetary motion simulation that Al Bork demonstrated in Chicago using his remote time-share computer in Irvine. I loved the fact that I could explore the effect on planet orbits of different force laws and starting conditions. This was a perfect example of a computer model that could be treated as an experiment that simulated a real system that would not fit in the lab.


 * With the advent of the first microcomputers in 1974, I let myself resume my love affair with computers because they could be used in a science instrumentation course I was teaching. The idea that a digital computer might actually help with scientific measurements — which are inherently analog — was a revelation that I was handed by Greg Edwards, a program officer at the NSF. I clearly remember concluding in 1976 while driving on I-91 to my classes at Springfield Technical Community College, that I could contribute to society through the intersection of science, education, and technology. That led me to a long string of developments in connecting sensors to microcomputers for instructional labs, now known as “probeware” and an important tool for science teaching and learning. But that is a different story.

Microcomputer-Based Laboratory
Much of Tinker's early research and development work was in the field now called Microcomputer-Based Laboratory. Quoting from Robert Tinker's article, A History of Probeware:


 * By 1980, the idea of real-time data acquisition for educational purposes needed a name. I wanted the name to capture not only the technique, but also an open-ended educational approach that would distinguish it from automated labs or drill and practice with sensors. I was inspired by Seymour Papert’s success at that time with Logo, in part because the name incorporated more than a programming language. “Logo” stood for constructivist education and the use of a general software tool to support an educational philosophy. Consciously following his example, I decided to name our approach Microcomputer Based Labs, or MBL for short. By doing this, I hoped to capture not only the idea of real-time data acquisition and display, but also a constructivist approach to using this tool for student exploration and discovery. Inventing the name also provided a way to track the impact of our work as we will see in the following sections.


 * The “microcomputer” in MBL dates the term. It was clearly appropriate in the era of KIMs and similar devices that were such small computers that they deserve the “micro” prefix to distinguish them from the array of more powerful computers then available. Today, desktop computers, although based on microcomputer chips, have shed the prefix. Consequently, the MBL name is outdated and we increasingly use “probeware”, a term invented by Marcia Linn.




 * Through the late 1970s, our MBL work had been funded through a succession of NSF grants to Springfield Technical Community College and TERC, then known as the Technical Education Research Centers. Ronald Reagan took office in January 1981 having run against a federal role in education. He soon managed to eliminate the Education Directorate of the NSF and one of the Department of Education’s Regional Labs. By that fall, our grants ran out and TERC had no federal funding for the first time since its founding in 1965. To keep TERC alive, we went on the road, giving workshops on computers in education throughout the country.


 * We hauled about 40 microcomputers around the US and Canada for these workshops: a mix of Apples, our own S- 100 graphics computers, seven Compucolors, Ataris, Sinclairs, and a dozen TI-99’s that had the first commercial implementation of Logo. Several of us would arrive at Logan airport with a huge pile of boxes containing the computers and materials. In those less stressed days, we could slip the Skycap $5 for each extra box and not have to pay excess baggage fees.


 * Tim Barclay, Dan and Molly Watt, and I were the mainstays of these workshops, but we were assisted by many other early pioneers. We offered 12 different one-day workshops over three days in four parallel sessions. The workshops included language instruction in Logo, BASIC, Pilot (a lesson authoring language from Apple), and Pascal, overviews of applications in math and science, and some popular probeware workshops. We sometimes offered the AAPT MBL workshop using KIM-1 comptuers, but by now we were also using the Apple II and that provided a simpler, less intimidating way of doing probeware. The



TERC
Quoting from Constructing Modern Knowledge 2008:


 * The initial development of probeware for learning based on real-time measurements was performed in his [Robert Tinker's] group. His team at TERC was the first to develop “network science” for dispersed science investigations. The initial result of this work was the National Geographic Society Kids Network, the first curriculum making extensive use of online student collaboration and data sharing.

For more detail see Tinker's document on A History of Probeware.

Concord Consortium
The Concord Consortium is a nonprofit educational research and development organization based in Concord, Massachusetts. It creates and distributes interactive materials that exploit the power of information technologies.

Robert Tinker founded the Concord Consortium in 1994 and served as President of this non-profit organization until the end of 2008. The vision of this organization is captured in the following quote from its Website:


 * We dream of students learning core skills and concepts by using sophisticated data collection, analysis, modeling, and visualization tools. We dream of expanded course curricula that include collaborative work with experts around the world. We dream of students and adults working together locally and worldwide to solve problems.


 * We dream of an educational system that responds to each person's learning needs. The appropriate use of technology can bring us a step closer to realizing this dream.


 * In 1994, he started the Concord Consortium so he could concentrate on applications of technology to improve the quality of education. Dr. Tinker now directs several major research and development projects and a staff of 35. Current research includes work on large-scale tests of online courses for teachers and secondary students, developing a set of technology-based activities for elementary math and science curriculums, educational applications of portable computers, sophisticated simulations, the development of technology-rich materials for sustainable development education, and a scientific study of student assessment using technology. Tinker is a founding member of the Board of Directors of the Concord Consortium.

Here is a list of some of the major programs of the Concord Consortium:


 * Online education for teacher education.
 * The Virtual High School, offering 150 courses.See: http://www.concord.org/courses/cc_e-learning_model.pdf.
 * Metacourses. Online courses in English and Spanish for the designers of virtual learning environments and for the facilitators of collaborative and inquiry-based learning.
 * Teaching science and mathematics. Recently funded projects include the Molecular Workbench, in which students are helped to see the connection between their "macro" world and the micro molecular world. See http://rover.concord.org/.
 * Multimedia. The Seeing Math Telecommunications project will provide over 10,000 teachers with free access to professional development materials.
 * Global education.
 * Open source materials.
 * Probeware.
 * Capacity Through Collaborations. As an example, Concord is a founding member of the NSF Center for Innovation in Learning Technologies,and Concord Consortium operates HighWired.com. This service provides free tool-based software and dissemination services to over 14,000 high school teachers in member schools.
 * Assessment and evaluation. Concord is a founding member of the Center for Assessment and Evaluation of Science Learning, a decentralized, NSF-funded center focused on innovations in evaluation.

Awards and Honors

 * Member of the Board of Directors of: Concord Consortium (chair), TERC, and the Virtual High School.
 * Member of PCAST Committee Panel on Educational Technology
 * Panels at NAS: National Science Education Standards, Technological Literacy.
 * Smithsonian-Siemens Award for Best Applications of Technology in Education.
 * NECC 1999 Lifetime achievement award.
 * Ed*Net Decade of Achievement Award.
 * Technology and Learning Software Award of Excellence for the design of three software packages.
 * American Association of Physics Teachers, distinguished service citation.
 * Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Brandwein Institute, and World Technology Network.
 * Phi Beta Kappa
 * Sigma Xi

Comment by David Moursund 1/25/2009
I first learned about Robert Tinker about the time he started doing workshops around the country. One of his stopping places was Portland, Oregon. I am a native born Oregonian, and have lived here much of my life.) By then, he was well established in his professional career and was making major contributions in the are of Microcomputer-Based Laboratory.

Since then, our face to face and email contacts have been relatively frequent. And, such contacts have always been personally satisfying and intellectually rewarding. He has always been generous with his ideas and time. I admire his both as a person and for the work he has done.

The ideas of MBL fit in well with Tinker's long professional career support of a constructivist theory of education. Students learn by a combination of doing things and by building on their previous knowledge and skills. ICT environments facilitate doing "real" things—attacking real world problems. Like a number of the ICT in education pioneers, Tinker saw this early on and has worked for a very long time to move our educational system in this direction.

My impression is that it isn't students who have resisted moving education in this direction. Rather, it is a very strong status quo support that is provided by many adults.

David Sokoloff is one of my long tme professional colleagues at the Univesity of Oregon. He has been a long time contributor to and supporter of PBL. He has a strong national and international reputation for this work. It has been embarrasing to see the lack of recognition and support that he has received from his own Physics Department colleagues here at the UO.

Some of His early and Recent Publications
Tinker, Robert F. (1984) The decline and fall of the high school science lab ... and why the microcomputer may yet save it from extinction. Electronic Learning, 3(5), 24 and 26.

Tinker, Robert F. (1985) How to turn your computer into a science lab. Classroom Computer Learning, 5(6), 26-29.

Tinker, R. F. (1985). Modeling and MBL: Software tools for science (Report No. TERC-TR-85-4). Cambridge: Technical Education Research Centers, Inc. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED 264 126)

Tinker, R. & Vahey, P. (2002). CILT2000: Ubiquitous Computing—Spanning the Digital Divide. Journal of Science Education and Technology, v11 #3, pp. 301-304. Plenum Publishing, NY.

Pea, R.D., Tinker, R., Linn, M., Means, B., Bransford, J., Roschelle, J., Hsi, S., Brophy, S., & Songer, N. (1999). Toward a learning technologies knowledge network. Educational Technology Research and Development, 47, 19-38.

Soloway, E., Grant, W., Tinker, R., Roschelle, J., Mills, M., Resnick, M., Berg, R., & Eisenberg, M. (1999). Science in the palm of their hands. Communications of the ACM, 42(8), 21-26.

Tinker, R., & Krajcik, J. S. (Eds.). (2001). Portable Technologies: Science Learning in Context. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers.

Xie, Q., & Tinker, R. (2004). Molecular Dynamics Simulations of Chemical Reactions for Use in Education. Journal of Chemical Education.

Tinker, R. (2005). Learning Through Online Collaboration. In G. P. Kearsley (Ed.), Online learning: Personal reflections of the transformation of education (pp. 402-414). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology Publications.