What is educational computing?
Integrating computers and other information technology into educational curriculums. This involves both learning about computers and information technology, and using them as a tool to learn other traditional subjects.
What is important? That is, what should educators think about when considering integration information technology into educational curriculums?
Recall the purpose of education: to learn how to think creatively, critically, and abstractly, solve problems, work with people, and adapt to new technology.
Empirically verifying whether or not using information technology would actually be useful for a particular task. For example, to help with dyslexic students.
To understand that information technology will become increasingly prevalent in today's economy, and therefore a facility and understanding of information technology is essential.
Technical socialization: students should become very comfortable with current technology and be able to adapt to new technology.
Marshal McLuhan said: “Whoever invented water, it wasn’t a fish”, because the fish, living in water, cannot see the water, or its color (in the figures shown, pink symbolized status quo, and blue symbolized new ways of thinking). An analogy can be made between the way we try to solve problems and the way an ant explores a surface: the ant explores the world, described as a pink surface, when it suddenly bumps into a blue spot, depicting an insight, or a discovery. If the insight is scientific, the reaction is to laugh (“HAAA HAAA”). (This reaction of laughter could also mean that we are getting Nature’s inside jokes…) If the insight is artistic, then the reaction is of awe (“AAAH”). This kind of insights or “thinking out of the box” are necessary in scientific endeavors like molecular science (an example was given on the enzyme’s function as a catalytic agent), where the scales and proportions of phenomena are outside our normal world dimensions. Other examples are: the number of cells in our body is astronomical; all atoms in our body get replaced at least every seven years (an analogy was made with the internet, whose components have been replaced at least once since its creation). Having an insight will cause the ant the either get squashed or being “raised to a new level”. (As an aside, an observation was made on the importance of knowing general scientific facts and concepts, something that is lacking even in students on their final phases of their formal studies.)
The talk explores insights and ideas that have revolutionized computer usage, systems design, and educational computing:
1962: Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad
Sketchpad was the first program that allowed the user to create graphical images directly on the computer screen. A video was shown of how Sketchpad worked: a mechanical component was drawn using a graphical environment. When drawing the component, although lines were not drawn perpendicularly, they could be later specified as perpendicular and the system would automatically redraw them to satisfy that constraint. A drawing could be specified as a master drawing, and later copied and modified. When asked how could he invent and integrate so many concepts as were needed to program Sketchpad, Sutherland replied “I didn’t know it was hard!” He wouldn’t get frustrated because of bad displays available to him at that time, but would instead ask himself “what else can this do?”
When he arrived at Utah for his studies, Alan Kay was given a task. The tradition was that newcomers should do a chore that senior students did not want to do. For Alan Kay, it involved installing the language Algol in a computer. Alan Kay could solve the problem only with an insight: the language to be installed was not Algol but Simula! This made him realize that correct ways of thinking can make things a hundred times easier than with standard thinking. In a sense, this is like the idea of “being raised to a new level” explained before when describing the ant’s task.
1965: Doug Engelbart’s NLS
His idea was: “If you want to help people, help groups of people working together.” A video was shown of his system NLS, a shared-screen collaboration system incorporating the first mouse, and hyperlinks.
NLS was used by 20 people at a time, and ran on only 192K, comparable to today’s systems running on 500MHz processors. The reason that this was possible is that programming used to be done carefully, attending to response times closely. Also, there was a sense of program authorship, something that does not exist today. Contrary to these ideas, the Internet has been developed in a highly distributed environment, without considering response times very carefully.
1964: The RAND Tablet
A video of the RAND tablet was shown, a pen-based input device that cost $18,000 to manufacture, being mostly hand made. The RAND tablet was used with GRAIL, a gesture recognizer. A video was shown where the RAND tablet was used to draw flow charts.
1962: Wes Clark’s LINC
A video of LINC (Laboratory Instrument Computer) was shown, considered the first personal computer. LINC had 2 kilobytes of RAM. Only 2,000 were made.
1967: The Flex Machine
The Flex Machine was shown, a precursor of the Dynabook, a precursor to the personal computer. The Dynabook was programmed using Smalltalk, an object-oriented language incorporating the notions of classes and objects.
1968: Seymour Papert’s LOGO
An idea behind LOGO was “should the computer program the kid, or should the kid program the computer”? Children can be taught skills and concepts that will be later used to understand more complicated ideas and schemes. For example, when describing a circle, one could give the children the formula x^2 + y^2 = r^2, or alternatively teach him to construct a circle with LOGO as an incremental correction of a goal. A simile was made with teaching the concept of (m/n) x (p/q) = (m x p) x (n x q) as opposed to (m/n) / (p/q) = (n/m) x (p/q). The first way involves iconic thinking as opposed to a more abstract and elaborate thought process.
Using Icons in Graphical Interfaces
A contrast was made between Piaget’s three stages of Doing -> Images -> Symbols where each stage begins as the previous ends, against Bruner’s “mentalities” concept where all stages are simultaneously active throughout the person’s development, and emphasized in turn. Piaget made an experiment where the contents of a bottle were poured into a tall glass, and the contents of an identical bottle were poured in a glass with the same volume but less height. Children were asked whether one glass contained more liquid than the other. They usually responded erroneously that the taller glass contained more liquid. Bruner made a refinement of the experiment where he placed a cardboard in front of the glasses so the children could not see the glasses. When asked the same question, the response was usually correct, that both glasses held the same amount of liquid. This leads to a “multiple mental centers” description of the mind, with separate kinesthetic, iconic and symbolic ways of thinking about the world.
The idea behind icons is that “doing with images makes symbols”. Icons are usually misunderstood as being intrinsically comprehensible, but they should be seen as simply “more memorable than words”. For example, people can recognize movies more than 20 years after seeing them after only some seconds of watching them again. This is the kind of power that iconic depictions are intended to exploit.
Today’s computer systems should incorporate the guidelines mentioned in this talk.