I believe that we (a state, a nation, a world) are at a wondrous moment in history. It is easy to look 50 or 100 years down the road and say "there will be no more television, no more radio, no more books and magazines--it will all be computerized" but to achieve that reality (and it is a reality) we need to figure out what the next steps are and then take them.
In 50 or 100 years (hopefully in 10), computers will speak to each other at lightening speed. It will not matter if someone is in Timbuktu or Sacramento. Communication will be instantaneous and cheap.
To build this world, we have to recognize the fundamental concepts of computerized interaction. We have to realize that it has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with people. The technology will become as unimportant as the technology of paper is today. What about paper? No one cares how it's made. No one cares if you use 25% rag or recycled paper. Sure, they might be able to notice, but no one really cares. Acid-free paper in books is only important to a select few collectors. No one really cares if words are written with a dot-matrix or a laser printer, or even a typewriter.
Within a few decades, the same will be true for all communications technology. No school will ever have to purchase 'media' in the future, in the form of diskettes or CD-ROMS or videotapes or filmstrips--or pencils or paper, for that matter. The only thing they will have to purchase is the knowledge itself. And as I will try to explain, knowledge doesn't have to cost a lot. Something, but not a lot.
If we look at what is happening today, we see technology taking over in many areas. Some people think that 3D graphics, flying logos, and colorful games are the key to education. But in fact, it's interaction that makes products work. Only a thinking, psuedo-creative, interactive program will bridge the gap between today's video version of a film-strip (which is an animated version of a book) and the ideal robotic teacher we think we all would like to see but will probably never be a reality.
The key is interaction. Responding to a student. Going at their pace. Answering their questions. I envision, for example, a hundred thousand teachers around the world ready to answer 10 million students' questions around the world via the Internet. Or a million students in California working through the Internet with 10,000 California teachers. It is not a depersonalization of the experience! Quite the contrary--to make it work, we need to make it more personal.
Example:
I contacted CNN a few weeks ago to complain about a news report that should have mentioned Space Debris. I received a response from a real person, with a real email address. This meant that I would be able to continue the correspondence. Had I gotten a form letter back, any further comments I wanted to make would have had to start from scratch. CNN understands the personal nature of information.
We have to recognize that computer technology should make for a more personal educational experience, not a less personal one. When we recognize that fact, we will be on the right road to success.
Interaction with an intelligent computer program is one step in a fully interactive electronic educational experience. For example The Animated Software Company has been creating animation for about 12 years. Nearly all of the animations can be sped up or slowed down (using a form of fuzzy logic) by the student, so that they can set it to the speed they need to understand the concept, whether it's a beating heart, a pump, a horse gait, or whatever. With the Internet if a student still doesn't understand, he can simply email the author with a click of a button, and two things will happen. First, the author will learn what parts of their program students are having trouble with and will be able to improve the product instantly for everyone. Second, the student will get the answer he needs and be able to move forward in the educational experience.
We are not talking about animation for the sake of enticing the student into learning. Many products today misunderstand, and think that the student must be 'tricked' into learning. But the fact of the matter is, learning is fun! An animated cartoon character used to introduce each topic is a mere distraction, because getting the actual knowledge is the exciting part, and takes all the brain-power any of us can muster! An animation of a real thing is a good educational device, as a way to show things that are too fast, too slow, too small, too big, or too expensive. But animation for the sake of tricking the student into learning is a waste of everyone's time.
Right now, there are thousands of great teachers out there, teachers who have spent as much as 50 years or more learning how to teach a single subject. These people are the key to the future. It's NOT about technology. Rather, it's an understanding that the technology is just a means to an end, and soon that means will be commonplace.
We need to capture (digitize) these teachers and place them into interactive educational programs, where each student can learn from the best, and can ask questions which will be answered by real people. Even if the first level is answered by smart machines, some questions will need to filter up to real living humans and we must allow for this in our software.
Right now, the way it works is, every student has an ideal pace they can learn a particular item at. Some will be fast, some will be slow. The teacher (or film strip or video or most computer programs) has no choice but to accommodate the pace that the most students will benefit from. I would estimate that as much as 80% of the students could learn at a faster pace than the information is presented at. But in order to accommodate the majority of students, the teacher, film strip etc. has no choice but to go as a certain (slow) pace.
If we could eliminate this requirement, I'll bet that most students could learn much faster. By the fifth or sixth grade, probably, significant differences will appear in the amount of material each student can cover. Therefore, in a highly computerized world where each student gets most of their information via the Internet, grade levels will become blurred, unless we want to hold the best students back. A bright, fast-learning student should be able to learn in high school what slower--but still above average--students are learning in graduate school. There is no reason not to expect and welcome this trend.
If you look at educational software right now, it is often hampered. It is weak. Programs do not explore the far reaches of capabilities because it's too expensive to develop, release, market and ship a product. Look at, for example, the so-called 'animated' dictionaries that have come out over the past five years. These products are schlock! I have more animation in my CD-ROM ALL ABOUT PUMPS tutorial than other companies have in an entire dictionary! And every animation is an educational experience that helps the student understand the inner workings of the pump! Not one animated cartoon character in the entire PUMPS tutorial! If a dictionary had the depth for each word that I have for the single word PUMP, it would fill 1000 CD-ROMS.
Could anyone ship a product like that at a profit? I doubt it, but perhaps through the Internet it could be created and distributed electronically, at a profit, for almost no money per viewer. Of course, it has to be really, really good.
Grays Anatomy, for example, is really, really good. A couple of years ago I had the opportunity to ask Bill Gates, the head of Microsoft, a question. I asked him when he thought the Operating System technology and the hardware technology would settle down so that us software developers could develop 'classic' programs that would stay on the market for decades, so that we could plan to make back the development costs of our products over a much longer period than the current 'flash in the pan' that products need to be, to be successful.
He didn't think that would be possible any time soon, what with 'voice recognition' and other hot stuff coming along soon. I don't think he 'gets' it.
I didn't have the chance to express that while I was asking the question, I had a tutorial about the human heart that had been on the market for about 10 years--totally unheard-of in the software industry. What makes the program work is the interaction. Anyone who goes through our heart tutorial will understand how their heart functions because we combine text, animation, graphics, and user interaction into a complete educational experience. This program, now some 12 years old, was glowingly reviewed in 1996 in PUMPS AND SYSTEMS MAGAZINE. Can any other software company make that claim? What do we do different?
Interaction. Our software is smart, and it is designed strictly with the educational experience in mind. How will this translate to the Internet?
I believe that tools need to be developed so that authors can create educational software that will continue to teach and to impress for a long time. Is there really a need for new educational material about how a DC motor works, or a 4-stroke piston engine, once a really good program has been written? Of course not: These things don't change! Which is not to say that educational software developers will ever run out of topics, but educational software on numerous old topics need not be rebuilt every few years if it's done well enough to begin with.
As a child, I had only two or three teachers who I thought were spectacular. Nearly every student thought these teachers were spectacular, and they were. These are the ones we will seek for our educational products, but beyond that, we will need to teach them how to combine what they do with the new teaching tools. For example my father taught statistics for nearly 50 years and is now a Professor Emeritus at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, certainly a respected title at a respected institution.
He wrote a book on statistics which we are translating to the Internet. It will have interactive lessons where the student can see the effects of changing sampling sizes and so on, and it will have probably 1000 or more interlinks between 100 'chapters'. In a book he wrote nearly 20 years ago there were about a dozen chapters and of course, no interlinks. We will take his basic work and implement it on the Web so that students can find what they need and learn what they need, 24 hours a day from anywhere in the world. What had been a wonderful book, will become the basis of a vast educational web experience tailored to a huge and varied audience. For people who just need to learn about Standard Deviation there will be a glossary so they can go right to it. For people who want to practice there will be computerized lessons where they plug in formulas and such. For people who want to go from start to finish there will be a track for them, and for people who want to supplement a course they are taking, there will be several ways to get at the information they need quickly.
As jobs change almost daily in the work-a-day world, new skills are constantly being demanded. Many times the best person to hire for a job is not the expensive person with 10 years experience in something similar--it's the student fresh out of school who knows all the latest techniques and methodologies. It's just a bonus that they are usually cheaper, too.
We have to ask ourselves: What will the world be like in 50 years? And then look at technology and ask: What's missing? What's missing is not the flash. It's the interaction. If it were the flash, then a TV show could be the greatest educational experience, but we know that the student must learn to think for themselves if the educational experience is to have any value at all. They must recognize for themselves that it's not the education we give them that matters, it's the ability to get education themselves that matters.
We can't teach them all the skills they'll need to survive, and prosper, and help society grow. In fact, most of what we teach is historic and essentially useless, or is just an example of what is really a very complicated situation. U.S. History is important to learn, but few of us can retain more than a few percent of what we are taught. How many state capitols can the average person name, who at one point in their schooling could recite them all? But how many people, once they learn the joy of learning, cannot learn to operate the latest machinery or software? Schools must teach students how to learn, and what to learn. It's far more important than any fact they could ever teach.
We believe that all these facts mean that a new business model for companies who create educational software needs to be designed, where money is not made directly from the distribution of the material because that distribution is essentially free. If some other method can be found to fund the creation of the material, it does not need to matter whether one or one million students use it, as far as the cost of goods sold goes. The costs are essentially the same regardless of the size of the distribution. However, to encourage investment in the development of educational products, the investor must believe that people will use the product once it is created. Then they will be willing, we think, to be associated with an educational product and to help fund it's development. Their payback might take the form of something like a Public Broadcasting System "sponsored by..." statement, or a logo in a banner on the screen, and it would be a valuable mark.
Right now, every student walks to school in sneakers that advertise the brand of sneaker. Students are targets of advertising of all sorts. It's a fact of life and it's not intrinsically a bad thing if it doesn't waste the student's time. During the three hours of educational television that has recently been mandated by the federal government for each T.V. station, you can be sure there will be lots of commercials. We don't believe that that much of an interruption is necessary for the advertiser to get their money's worth for having funded the educational development process.
As lifelong learning becomes more and more the norm, more and more students are adults who are perfectly capable of making informed decisions about a product. But even at a young age, there is little harm in presenting company brand names and products to them, as long as it does not slow the educational process down any significant amount and as long as the process is done honestly and fairly and the advertiser does not have editorial control over the product.
For example, if you are teaching about how the heart works, there is no intrinsic harm, I think, in having that tutorial sponsored by a blood pressure cuff manufacturer, or by makers of heart rate monitors. Conversely, makers of heart rate monitors would most want to advertise to people who are interested in how their heart works.
If securing all other sources of funding fails, of course these products still need to be created and perhaps the State or Federal government or the World Bank or something would need to contribute. But one way or another the educational material must be developed! Before turning to those sources for funding, every effort must be made to convince business that education is vital, and that the association with educational products is a healthy and profitable one. We think it can be done, and we are looking for synergistic relationships with world industry leaders who can view the big picture--the need for educational Internet products--and the localized picture--the benefits to their companies of association with popular educational Internet products.
Table of Contents
The Animated Software Company
http://www.animatedsoftware.com
rhoffman@animatedsoftware.com
First placed online September 18th, 1996.
Last modified March 27th, 1997.
Webwiz: Russell D. Hoffman
Copyright (c) Russell D. Hoffman