Lecture 16

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Human-Centered Computing
 and
Rethinking Learning and Education

Gerhard Fischer, Hal Eden, and Holger Dick — Fall Semester 2010

gerhard@colorado.edu; haleden@colorado.edu; holger.dick@gmail.com;  

November 1, 2010

paper: “Learning Webs” in llich, I. (1971) Deschooling Society, Harper and Row, New York. http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Illich/Deschooling/chap6.html

Rethinking Learning and Education

• school learning ? lifelong learning

• unaided individual human mind ? distributed intelligence

• reflective practitioner ? reflective community

• “gift-wrapping” and ? socio-technical environments

“techno-determinism”

• consumers ? active contributors (meta-design)

• learning when the answer ? learning when no one knows

is known the answer (social creativity)

How the World Has Changed

Old Model: Learn in School what is Needed in Life

school life

Problem with the Old Model in Today’s World
—
Coverage and Obsolescence

school life

What's Wrong with the Universities of Today

• lecture dominated — emphasizing passive knowledge absorption instead of active knowledge construction

• curriculum dominated — little room for authentic, self-directed learning activities

• students solve given problems — they do not learn to frame problems

• problems in school have right or wrong answers — problem in the real world are wicked, ill-defined, ill-structured

• closed book exams — ignoring distributed cognition

• little emphasis on collaborative learning and communication skills — working together is regarded as “cheating”

Co-Evolution: Beyond “Technology-Driven Developments” and “Gift-Wrapping”

Stuck in “Giftwrapping” or
“Technology-Driven Developments”

“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently
that which should not be done at all.” — Peter Drucker

• “Giftwrapping”

• using technology as an add-on to existing practices ? instead of fundamentally rethinking what education should and could be about in the future
• “distance learning is different from classroom learning at a distance”
• Classroom Response Systems (? "Clickers")  

• Technology-Driven Developments

• “all schools on the Internet” ? necessary, but not sufficient

Technology-Driven Developments

Clickers = Gift-Wrapping?

Clickers

• what are Clickers?

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4A62QyAUHM&feature=related

• The Research ? Do clickers help students learn in the classroom?

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxKHXyVtVIA
• example: Clickers in the Science Classroom

• claim:

• http://www.engaging-technologies.com/clicker-research.html
• classroom clickers are a technology that does something teachers have wanted to do for many years - engage their students. We strongly feel that this technology will be around for a very long time because it changes the dynamics of the classroom!

Innovations

• digital divide: OLPC (=one laptop per child) = $100 computer

• OpenCourseware (OCW), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

• http://ocw.mit.edu/ ? 2000 courses
• MIT is putting t all its course content, undergraduate and graduate, into Web-based format (as an institutional commitment)
• the OCW website will be open and freely available to the world
• MIT will commit to OCW as a permanent, sustainable activity

• iTunes U

• http://www.apple.com/education/itunes-u/ ? 350,000 free lectures, videos, films, and other resources
• “learn anything, anytime, anywhere” ? an innovative way to get educational content into the hands of students
• value added:
• simple to use (via iTune)
• powerful and accessible learning tool for students with disabilities

An Example from MIT OCW Offerings

Teaching Real-World Programming

• how things are:

• in undergraduate computer-science classes, homework assignments are usually to write programs, and students are graded on whether the programs do what they’re supposed to
• teaching assistants look over the students’ code and flag a few obvious errors, but they rarely have the time coach the students on writing clear and concise code

• in the real world:

• code clarity is as important as software performance
• large software projects can involve hundreds of programmers ? testing, revising and updating software may require people to review code that they did not write
• if the code isn’t intelligible, engineers can waste a huge amount of time just figuring out how an existing program does what it does (also: design rationale research)

• how things could / should be:

• in the innovative course “Teaching Real-World Programming”, students meet for regular “code reviews” with senior programmers from Boston-area companies

Challenges Created by MIT’s OpenCourseware
—
 Core Competencies of Residential Research Universities

• commoditizing the ‘content’ sharpens the focus on the substantive values of residential education: personal attention from faculty and participation in learning and research communities

• move away from large passive lectures towards active learning environments

• look beyond the simplicities of information to the complexities of learning, knowledge, judgment, communities, and organizations

• emphasize “learning to be” (in addition to “learning about”)

Michael Eisenberg: “University vs. YouTube — Redefining the Role of Physically Situated Education in the Internet Age”

• claims:

• 
  
  • the role of the university -- the physical setting, the place that students actually attend -- is about to undergo seismic changes due to the presence of web-based phenomena such as iTunes U, Instructables, and YouTube
  • at issue is the meaning of physically-situated higher education when challenged by a vast menu of easily accessible, high quality, low cost (or free) web-based instructional materials.

• theme for reflection:

• 
  
  • the ways in which physical setting can be put to educational use (often by means of novel technologies)
  • the way in which classroom instruction and university-level courses might evolve in response to their web-based analogues.
  • what residential university life can and should look like in the medium-term future.

Some Alternatives Scenarios to Classroom Learning based on Human-Centered Computing

• grounding of these approaches in:

I hear and I forget

I see and I remember

I do and I understand

• Agentsheets + LegoMindstorms + Projects + Play + Design + Communication ? short movie (2 min)

• Squeak: teaching and understanding gravity ?  short movie (8 min)

Learning Webs

<< llich, I. (1971) Deschooling Society — written 20 years before the WWW>>

• to conceive a different style of learning (complementing / replacing learning in schools) ? a fact: people are learning many things outside of schools

• Illich’s objectives:
  we can depend on self-motivated learning instead of employing teachers
  • we can bribe or compel students to find the time and the will to learn
  • we can provide learners with new links to the world instead of continuing to funnel all educational programs through the teacher

• use of advanced technology to support "learning webs"
  • “The operation of a peer-matching network would be simple. The user would identify himself by name and address and describe the activity for which he sought a peer. A computer would send him back the names and addresses of all those who had inserted the same description. It is amazing that such a simple utility has never been used on a broad scale for publicly valued activity.”

Criteria for a Good Educational System

• provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at any time in their lives

• empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them

• furnish all who want to present an issue with the opportunity to make their challenge known

Four Approaches

• reference services to educational objects — which facilitate access to things or processes used for formal learning

• skill exchange — permit persons to list their skills, the conditions under which they are willing to serve as models for others who want to learn these skills, and the addresses at which they can be reached

• peer-matching — a communications network which permits persons to describe the learning activity in which they wish to engage, in the hope of finding a partner for the inquiry

• reference services to educators-at-large — he addresses and self-descriptions of professionals, paraprofessionals, and free-lancers, along with conditions of access to their services

Distributed Cognition

• between:

• 
  
  • human beings
  • humans and things (computational artifacts)

• advantage of humans:

• 
  
  • shared understanding
  • background knowledge

• advantage of things (Illich):

“a thing is available at the bidding of the user - or could be - whereas persons formally become a skill resource only when they consent to do so, and they can also restrict time, place, and methods as they choose.”

? the “Nobel Prize Winner / Distant Learning” fallacy

Existing Software Components for Learning and Using SketchUp

Existing Software Components for Learning and Using SketchUp

Video Tutorials: New to Google SketchUp

Part 1 - Concepts (3:08)

http://sketchup.google.com/intl/en/training/videos/new_to_gsu.html

A great starter video for anyone trying Google SketchUp

Web 2.0: Social Production and Mass Collaboration

• source: Tim O’Reilly “What is Web 2.0 — Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software”
  http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html

Web 1.0 Web 2.0

Britannica Online ? Wikipedia

personal website ? blogging

publishing ? participation

content management systems ? wikis

scheduled software releases ? continuous improvements

individual contributions ? collective intelligence

• claim: the participatory web (= Web 2.0) will fundamentally changing learning, teaching, and education by supporting cultures of participation based on meta-design

Many Open Interesting Questions and Research Issues

• what are the cultural implications as more and more people publish?

• is there a limit to how many people will publish?

• quality and trust
• open source software versus commercial software

• “if there are enough eye balls, all bugs are shallow”

• Wikipedia versus Encyclopedia Britannica

• http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7070/full/438900a.html

• South Korea's stem cell scandal ? the results were published in Science and Nature (two of the most carefully reviewed journals)