Looking Backward and Forward






 * "If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing." (Benjamin Franklin; American scientist, inventor statesman, printer, philosopher; 1706–1790.)

This Page contains a book chapter written by David Moursund in 1996. The book was being prepared by Dianne Martin and Bob Blomeyer, and was to be published by Falmer. The chapter was to be at the end of the book, an Afterword.

The book was never published. In 2008, Bob Blomeyer indicated via email to David Moursund that it was certainly all right for this book chapter to be published in the IAE-pedia.org Wiki.

The material given below is the 1996 chapter. It is protected against editing by readers. If you want to make comments about this material, use the Discussion page associated with this chapter.

Title and Author
Afterword: Looking Backward and Forward

Dave Moursund, Executive Officer

International Society for Technology in Education

1787 Agate Street

Eugene, Oregon 97403

A Personal Retrospective
I have been actively working in the field of computers in education for more than 30 years. In the summer of 1963 I helped teach a computers and mathematics course for talented and gifted high school students. Even by then, the computer field was sufficiently well established so that some graduates students were doing their doctorate work in computer science, a number of secondary schools were experimenting with computers in their curricula, and the discipline of computer-aided learning was beginning to develop. Minicomputers were challenging the mainframe philosophy, and timeshared computing was emerging as a way to make computers more readily available.

My career as a teacher of teachers began in the summer of 1965, when I taught computer math in a National Science Foundation summer institute for teachers. This was about the time when time-shared BASIC was beginning to become available. For many summers thereafter, I was the director of a NSF summer institute in computers in education for school teachers. During the 1960s, the NSF was supporting a variety of research projects in the field of computer technology in education, such as computer-assisted instruction and curriculum making substantial use of computer tools. Even then—well before microcomputers—it seemed obvious to me that computers should be having a significant impact on the precollege curriculum. For example, it seemed ridiculous to me that high schools were continuing to teach by-hand methods for solving polynomial equations and systems of simultaneous linear equations, when these by-hand methods were no longer being used by engineers and scientists.

My first big insight into using technology in education was for teachers not to waste time teaching things that could be better done using a machine. I felt that they should be using that time to teach more advanced ideas. That didn’t actually happen. You can go into an elementary school today and find superb teachers still teaching children how to do long division! Their answer now is that they teach them how to do it with pencil and paper first, and then how to do it with a calculator. So what that says to me is that just because technology can do something there still exists resistance to make fundamental changes to the curriculum. This resistance seems to be due to the testing system as much as teaching practice. Over the past 15 years, there has been a gradual integration of calculators into the math curriculum that has occurred as the price of calculators has dropped dramatically and their functionality has continued to increase.

Then with the advent of the microcomputers in the late 1970’s, we started using Taylor’s model of tutor, tool, tutee as a way of thinking about how to use this powerful new technology in instruction. At that time I made the analogy between what a book had done for intellectual growth and what I saw that a computer could do. Books were used to store and transmit knowledge from one person to another in a very efficient way. They represented a major step forward in providing knowledge and education to many people who previously were not able to receive that knowledge. Many educators realized that the microcomputer had that same knowledge storing and transmitting capability, only greatly magnified and with a mode of interactivity not possible with books. With the computer literacy movement of the early 1980’s, we worried about how to teach students to program or something comparable to programming as a way, we thought, to make them better problem solvers. My thinking at that time was that here was a machine that could not only replace tedious tasks, like the calculator, but could also expand the student’s ability to conceptualize and solve higher order problems. Again, however, both curriculum and teaching practice were slow to incorporate the changes needed to embrace this new way of integrating technology into the classroom.

During the late 1980’s and early 1990’s the focus shifted to use of spreadsheets, databases, and hypermedia as a way to learn procedural thinking. We can also look at the research on CAI that has been done over the past three decades. There is very strong evidence that in all kinds of situations kids learn on average 30% faster and better in computer-assisted instruction modes. I can imagine that eventually CAI will be standardly available to all students in all grade levels in all kinds of subject matter.

But this improvement in learning is a drop in the bucket relative to the growth of knowledge and the growth of what there is to be learned during the same time period. Whether the totality of knowledge doubles every 10 years, or even 5 years as some have speculated, it is clear that it is increasing very rapidly. The only way for learners to grapple with this tidal wave of information is to embody some sort of intelligence into the tools that people use to deal with knowledge. The materials will get smarter, the interfaces will get better, and more artificial intelligence will be incorporated into the browsers and search engines.

We only have to look at the explosion of the World Wide Web to see that this is going to happen. The Web is additional information that can be accessed. It is communication. It is for groups of people to work together to solve problems. What is fascinating about the Web is that anything you can do using the Web implies that the problem is already solvable using a computer, so we have increased the range of solvable problems on the computer to include connectivity, communication, and information access. It is inevitable that all of this access to and extension of knowledge will happen, even though it seems “far out” to imagine a first grader with a powerful mathematical tool, a powerful science experimentation tool, and a powerful information retrieval tool instead of crayons and fingerpaints.

Regarding preparing teachers to use the technology, I can also see a major shift in thinking has occurred. In both inservice and preservice training, we have shifted from a computer literacy perspective to a computer competency perspective. We have established minimal national standards and guidelines regarding what teachers need to know themselves about the technology in order to be able to teach the students. Unfortunately, we have also realized that such standards are a rapidly moving target for teachers who work long hours just doing their job, with little time provided to them to upgrade their skills and knowledge. While we talk about everyone being lifelong learners now, we still have not changed our educational institutions to accommodate teachers in that mode!

So what I now believe is that in the microcomputer we have something that is far more powerful than a book—it has the capacity to be an extension of the human mind. But in order for that to happen, the fundamental nature of the educational system has to change. Unfortunately there is “cyberspace” time and “education” time. A cyberspace year, that is, the time for a new technology to emerge, might only take two to three months of elapsed time. On the other hand, an education year, that is, the time it takes for an innovation to be implemented in education, might take three or four years of elapsed time. So we need a completely different paradigm for change in education if we are ever to keep up with the rapidly moving technologies around us. The concept that ultimately kids will grow up using very powerful tools and have a tremendous amount of knowledge using the tools is right now only a hope and vision for the future, but one that provides impetus for new paradigms in education.

The Computer as a Tool for Empowerment
The computer is a tool that can empower its user. While that idea has been evident from the time of the first computers, it still has not been well understood by educators. A person and a computer working together is a far more powerful “team” than either working alone. The fields of artificial intelligence and of human-machine interface are making steady progress in educating the computer to play its role on this team. Our educational system needs to place increased emphasis on educating the human component of this team. (A later section of this chapter discusses “Person Plus”—the human and machine team.)

The hardware component of the human-machine team has continued to make very rapid progress during the past few decades. The typical $2,000 microcomputer system of today is considerably more than a hundred times as powerful as the typical $1,000,000 timeshared computer of the 1960s. Such a timeshared system was considered adequate to serve the research, instructional, and administrative needs of a college or university—even one that had a Computer Science Department.

The average student-to-microcomputer ratio in K-12 education in the United States is now under nine students per microcomputer. Even though many of these computers are older models, the actual amount of compute power per student far exceeds that available to most computer science majors in the colleges and universities of the 1960s.

During the past 30 years, a substantial amount of progress has occurred in the educational uses of computers. As indicated in Moursund (1995), we now know a great deal about effective practices for use of computer technology in schools. Schools have invested a great deal of resources on computer hardware, software, connectivity, curriculum development and materials, and staff development. Moreover, some schools have given a great deal of attention to the restructuring and to the staff development needed to effectively make use of the progress that has been occurring in the computer field.

However, the amount of educational implementation progress has been slow relative to the pace of change of the underlying technology. The overall effect on our educational system has been modest. The following diagram is useful in examining the change process.

The boxes labeled 1, 2, and 3 feed into the Research and Development that produces changes in curriculum, instruction, assessment, and policy in the schools.

Box 1: There are a large number of educational researchers who are looking at various aspects of teaching and learning. For example, we know far more about constructivism, cooperative learning, cooperative problem solving, and project-based learning than we did 30 years ago. Box 2: The computer electronics and the telecommunications fields have made very rapid progress over the past 30 years. While quantification of this progress tends to be misleading, in terms of the cost of raw compute power, the gain has been more than a factor of 10,000.

Box 3: Educational researchers have made considerable progress in understanding what works and what does not work in implementing educational change.

Box 4: Researchers and developers produce curriculum materials, teaching methods, products, and services based on the progress occurring in 1, 2, and 3.

Box 5: Teacher training and effective implementation at the individual classroom level have proven to be major stumbling blocks. The amount of time, effort, and support that teachers need to make effective use of computer technology is seldom available.

Notice that 1, 2, and 3 are all driven by large amounts of research and development efforts by people who may have little specific interest in the field of computer technology in education. Also, while 1 and 3 have made significant progress during the past 30 years, this rate of change has been far outstripped by 2. Our educational system has no previous experience in dealing with such a pace of change. To put it into personal perspective, I own three microcomputers—each far more powerful than the third generation mainframe computer that served my entire university 30 years ago.

People doing the work in Box 4 face a formidable challenge. Indeed, since the pace of change in electronic technology has been so rapid, even if all three of three Boxes 1-3 areas ceased to change, it would take a very long time for the R&D people to catch up.

Box 5 is where “the rubber meets the road.” Staff development does not lend itself to mass production techniques. Individual teachers need individual help and support as they learn, revise curriculum, revise their assessment techniques, and work with constantly changing technology. In the introduction to this book, Dr. Rist suggests that the research literature for technology in education is weak. Indeed it is, and it is easy to see why. It is difficult to do research in an emerging, broad-based, rapidly changing field. It is difficult to attract the financial resources and other support needed to do such research—especially on a long-term basis. There have been few sustained research efforts in high-density computer sites, such as the Apple Classroom of Tomorrow sites (Apple Computer, Inc.).

Perhaps more difficult still, however, is to have adequate vision of the future in order to know where to focus one’s research efforts. To take an extreme example, research on the use of 10 character per second (clackity-clack) Teletype machines as computer input and output devices for time-shared mainframe computer-assisted instruction seems far removed from the multimedia, microcomputer-based CAI of today. Quite likely people in the future will laugh at the primitive I/O used in current CAI systems, as they make routine use of virtual realities with voice input.

The Future
I want to comment briefly about three key aspects of the future: digitization of information; distributed intelligence; and learner-centered education.

Digitization of Information
There are a number of distinct advantages that come from digitizing information (Negroponte, 1995). Digitization of information allows both compute power and telecommunications to be brought to bear in accessing, processing, and using the information. Thus, for example, progress in developing more cost effective computer and telecommunications systems, as well as progress in artificial intelligence, contribute to the advantages of digitization of information. A computer (a computer program) can store information about how to accomplish various tasks and various problems—but, in many cases computers and computerized equipment can actually carry out the work.

In thinking about research into the field of computer technology in education, it is a safe assumption that a rapidly increasing proportion of all of the world’s information will be digitized and available through networks. The speed of the networks will steadily increase, so that it will become easier and easier to interact with the information sources.

Distributed Intelligence
The essence of distributed intelligence (Perkins, 1992) is that people and machines working together are more "intelligent" than either alone. When it comes to solving problems and accomplishing tasks, computer and communications technologies are greatly enhancing the capabilities of people.

David Perkins likes to talk about distributed intelligence in terms of Person Plus. It is a person plus the tools (reading, writing, arithmetic, computers, telecommunications, etc.) that address problems. Often it is a team of Person Plus individuals, perhaps supported by sophisticated groupware and telecommunications, that address problems. Some of the ideas underlying Person Plus are given in the following diagram.

This diagram is intended to emphasize that there are three rapidly improving types of changes going on—and all contribute to the capabilities of Person Plus. Note that the term “person” includes both the student and the teacher. It is important that teachers be lifelong students. 1. The researchers and other information developers throughout the world are making substantial progress in developing new information.

2. The hardware and software capabilities of computer systems are continuing their rapid improvement. Progress in artificial intelligence is adding to the overall capabilities of computer systems. Much has been made about the relatively slow progress of the field of artificial intelligence, relative to the promises and speculations of its leaders. Such criticisms tend to overlook the steady progress that has occurred in Expert systems, voice input systems, spelling checkers, and more mundane applications.

To give a specific example, there is a huge amount of mathematical knowledge build into the various mathematics software systems—systems that can solve most of the types of problems that students study up through the first two or three years of college mathematics. Such software can be used to make significant changes in the very nature of mathematics instruction and learning.

It is not just mathematics that is making such progress. Each academic discipline is developing its own collected body of knowledge in the form of databases, algorithms, heuristics, and other tools specifically designed to help the practitioners and researchers in the discipline. This steady progress can be viewed as the development of a type of machine intelligence within the domain.

3. The information highways and information superhighways are providing rapidly improving connectivity among the computers, computerized machines and instruments, and people of the world. Among other things, this is making it increasingly easy and productive for teams of people with members distributed around the world to work together to solve problems and accomplish tasks that are beyond the scope of a single individual. The new result is that Person Plus is getting a lot more "intelligent" or "smart." It is a safe assumption that this trend will continue far into the future.

Person Plus represents a major challenge both to our educational system and to our educational research system. It is a far bigger challenge than issues such as what happens when students in math classes are provides with calculators, when students in writing classes are provided with word processors, or when students in a journalism class are provided with desktop publishing facilities.

Learner-Centered Education
At the current time, most of the education throughout the world is subject matter oriented. Students study individual disciplines such as anthropology, biology, chemistry, and so on. It is still generally accepted that much of education should focus on the “basics” such as reading, writing, and arithmetic.

However, change is afoot. Norman and Spohrer (in press) summarize key ideas of Learner-Centered Education in an introductory article for an issue of the Communications of the ACM that focuses on this topic. The various researchers featured in this issue of CACM explore ways in which the information technologies empower the individual and facilitate improvements in project-based learning. The authors argue that there will be a substantial shift toward students, individually and in groups, working on significant, “authentic” problems over extensive time periods. These projects are often problem-based and cut across many disciplines. Although there is a substantial amount of case study literature on project-based learning, there is relatively little solid research in this area. The need for additional research is clear.

Summary
I have worked in the field of computer technology in education for more than 30 years. The past three decades have seen significant progress in the theory and practice of this field. However, the progress has been small relative to what lies ahead. The field is still in its infancy—in some sense, it is just beginning to crawl.

Some of the computer education research that has been done in the past has been very good. It has contributed to both the research foundations and to the work of practitioners. Some of the chapters in this book will likely emerge as “classics,” to be referred to by students and researchers for many years to come. This is because they portray important roles of teachers and k-12 students as part of classroom technology systems. The future will bring steadily increasing amounts of digitized information, connectivity to access the information, and compute power to help process the information. The problems that people will be expected to solve will increasingly require Person Plus.

However, this future presents major challenges to researchers. Person Plus is a rapidly moving target. It is particularly difficult to define research topics that have both lasting value and current relevance to practitioners.

Author
David Moursund