Interesting thoughts. I have been considering attending Squeakfest in Chicago at the end of August 2004. A couple of teachers at my local school board attended last year. Some of you may have had the opportunity to learn with Sholom and Sebastian.
I don't have any sense of what you (hosts) are putting together to present for the event. Are you focusing on Squeak, etoys, etc technically speaking? Or are these kinds of matters going to be considered? For example, I'd be curious to discuss them with Alan, Seymour Papert and Jerome Bruner. Maybe some others would be interested in volunteering their attendance. Like an inter-generational thing. Whatever.....
I don't think it's so easy to make a common leap into the virtual--and its potential--without sharing some things in the "real". Relatedly, I am on my way to purchasing a web cam. Do any of you have one? Seymour suggested it when he was here in Toronto with Alan last winter, as a response to my comment that sitting at a computer for a long time is a lonely exercise often for someone like me. We could have webfests....
Just think, Alan, back to something you said recently, one day it will be possible for a person to curl up with a good electronic multi-media interactive library on a rainy (snowy) day. That sounds wonderful!!!
I would be interested in your response to my thinking/comments on Squeakfest and webcasting among us.
Sheine
P. S. Kim, we have distance issues in Canada as well so individual learning--with built-in support and encouragemen--is very attractive.
-----Original Message----- From: squeakland-bounces@squeakland.org [SMTP:squeakland-bounces@squeakland.org] On Behalf Of Kim Rose Sent: Monday, April 12, 2004 12:54 PM To: Gary Fisher; squeakland@squeakland.org Subject: Re: [Squeakland] Computer as Tutor
Hi, folks -
I'd like to throw this out, too -- what about kids that don't have access to a teacher with knowledge in the requisite area? I am thinking about children in rural areas, for example, those whom we know in Japan that might only be able to see a human teacher face to face a couple of times a month. If we can augment that person-to-person experience with a computer-to-person experience I think that would be of extreme benefit.
Our research team has been thinking about how we can build "tutor-type" aspects into the Etoy system (perhaps a helpful character to give a newcomer a "tour" of the system), etc. While these ideas are still primarily in a design stage (as the only "help" etoys have now are balloons which we find are not widely read) I am a deep believer in how online/insystem tutoring "tools' can be of great value.
We shouldn't forget that the Squeakland community is involved in a variety of learning envirornments, not only "traditional classrooms" with 1 teacher to many students.
I have had many experiences where the computer has played the role of a great "amplifier" to my learning. Perhaps I've started an investigtion/learning process with a "teacher" or group of colleagues (think book club) and then, on my own, have turned to "computer" for more...really I am turning to is using "computer" to find "community" or others interested in learning what I want to learn more about. "Computer" enables that wonderfully.
The smarter we make the tools, the more they can help us delve more deeply into ideas and thought. -- Kim
At 4:38 PM -0400 4/10/04, Gary Fisher wrote:
Greetings, Alan!
I happily concede that certainly at the most fundamental "flash card"
level
a computer tutor would be fairly trivial to set up yet potentially quite effective. With etoys it could even quite easily be made fun. The same
is
true of your "musical basics" example, and could be (and likely has been) extended to everything from bird identification to basic anatomy. On
these
matters we're on the same wavelength (of course, I'm riding in the wake
of a
wave you and others created).
Further, you're exactly right that a good book beats a bad educator, once one is able to appreciate the former, though a GOOD educator will greatly enhance the student's understanding of even bad books.
Again in agreement, you can't get rid of the dedicated educator, and it
is
that possibility -- the automation of education -- that concerns me most. Technology used to enhance learning and multiply the effect of good
teachers
is the achievable ideal, but the reality has often been focused instead
on
cutting costs, on replacing the pastry chef with a cookie cutter, to use
a
metaphor. That would be tragic.
All the best,
Gary
----- Original Message ----- From: "Alan Kay" Alan.Kay@squeakland.org To: "Gary Fisher" squeakland@zchs.org; squeakland@squeakland.org Sent: Saturday, April 10, 2004 2:19 PM Subject: Re: [Squeakland] Computer as Tutor
Hi Gary --
Where is the furrowed brow or the cheer for comprehension in a printed book? I don't think you can get rid of the dedicated educator (and I don't want to), but I learned a very large part of what I think about from reading well written and not so well written papers and books. And, I would also say that a good book beats the average not-so-good and not-so-dedicated educator hands down if one has gotten fluent in reading and learning from prose.
So, I think there is a very important role for much better computer tutors than we now have. For example, today one could really do such an intermediary for playing a musical instrument -- especially for classical music. An interesting setup would be to see one's human teacher about once a week and be able to practice all week with one's "practice helper". The state of the art is high for computers being able to flexibly listen to music, to follow the human player's changes of tempo, to note various kinds of phrasing, etc., and would be especially useful for practicing chamber music where the computer takes the other parts in a flexible manner. Of course, this would not at all replace playing the piece with human players -- computers don't and won't feel music (at least not in my lifetime) -- but musicians use metronomes quite a bit of the time when they are practicing, and a flexible computer rendition of the other parts beats a metronome any time.
The reason this works for music (especially classical music) is that many (but not all) of the important goals can be characterized well enough for the computer to notice what is going on, and also quite a bit of what it means to be flexible about these goals also can be characterized. Once you decide to use it for practice and not performance, you've found a sweet spot where most of the computer involvement is overwhelmingly positive.
We can constrast this with programming (which is a bit more like creative writing). There have been several computer tutors for teaching programming, and even the best one's I've seen feel crushingly oppressive (basically like a bad teacher with Skinner box approach to teaching). In one of the earliest etoy classes with 20 children, in one of their "figure this problem out for yourself" sessions (creating a road and a car that will drive down the center of it) we got at least 7 distinct workable solutions to this, 2 of them extremely elegant. Now, it's easy in this case to imagine a computer tutor that could watch to see if the car did indeed stay on the road, but right now, giving good advice about what the children actually did do (instead of trying to get them to do a mythical "standard good solution" (which I hate)) is beyond what anyone knows how to do with a computer tutor.
But there is one area in which a really great job can be done, and this is on some "nugget of goodness" (especially in the beginnings of learning) in which "everything is known". For example, the "Drive a Car" project is an excellent way to start learning etoys. There are about 30+ things that are learned, there are quite a variety of routes, and there are lots of known snarls that beginners need help with. Years ago there was a tutor for positional notation subtraction that really worked extremely well, and this was because the designers made a net of every possible route the kids could take and every possible bug they could encounter. This works on a 15-30 minute project that is deemed important, but is much too much work and much more difficult in other ways for even a weeks or months long set of ideas.
So one of the things that I think would be interesting to do, and that would help people all over, would be to simply do such a brute force but nicely flexible job on "the first experience with etoys". Most people finding this stuff on the net don't have your "dedicated educator"s to ask for help, so a computer tutor that was "pretty darn good" just to get people well started would be a tremendous aid all over the world.
Cheers,
Alan
At 11:40 AM -0400 4/10/04, Gary Fisher wrote:
Alan & all;
A draft of the paper cited can be found at
http://www.lists.pdx.edu/waoe-views/current/att-0016/Blowing_learning_to
_bi
ts.doc.
"The computer as tutor" was a hot topic when I was in college during
the
late '60s and early 1970s, and I was peripherally involved in the development of several experimental "learning laboratories" at the
time.
Sadly, "the powers that be" on these projects universally adopted the hopeless "programmed learning" concept which replaces pedagogy with a
dreary
form of mechanized pedantry.
Though it could be done much better now (and could have been done
much
better then as well) I lack the imagination to see how genuine
understanding
can be imparted to a child by a tutor unable to discern the furrowed
brow,
or to cheer the sudden gleam of comprehension. I'm sure computers
have a
proper place in education, but not absent a dedicated educator.
Gary Fisher
----- Original Message ----- From: "Alan Kay" Alan.Kay@squeakland.org To: "Doug Wolfgram" doug@gfx.com; squeakland@squeakland.org Sent: Saturday, April 10, 2004 11:17 AM Subject: Re: [Squeakland] Computer as Tutor
Hi Doug --
Al Bork is very well known in this area going all the way back to
the
60s. There is a great old book called "The Computer as Tool,
Tutor,
and Tutee" which contains seminal papers by Bork, Papert, and
others.
I couldn't find "Blowing Learning to Bits" on Amazon.
One of the original ideas about all this stuff back in the 60s was that some form of AI would develop enough to allow the computer to "understand" enough of a subject to be able to gently correct and steer. This just didn't happen. Some of the near misses (many done
at
CMU) are quite interesting. Plato (at the U of Illinois) was a
huge
system in the 60s and 70s that did a kind of tutorial on many subjects. It's worth studying, but it never got up to what Seymour and I thought would be at all reasonable.
There have been some proposals for making a tutorial interface for the Squeak Etoys that use a number of techniques to handle the detecting and gentle correction of errors. I'm hoping to get at
least
one of these started towards the end of the year.
It would be great to hear from people on this list just what "the computer as tutor" means to them.
Cheers,
Alan
At 10:56 PM -0700 4/9/04, Doug Wolfgram wrote:
I was recently introduced to Alfred Bork's papers on 'Computer as Tutor' and am getting very interested in his work. He is
professor
emeritus at UCI (U of Cal Irvine) and is starting a company to
build
large scale educational systems spanning preschool through adult education. I don't want to misstate his goals here, but if
anyone
else has heard of his book, 'Blowing Learning to Bits', I'd love
to
hear about it.
I believe that Squeak is the perfect environment for having the 'Computer as Tutor'. Are there ay specific papers on this
subject,
even if by another name? Are any of you working on projects where you could stand back and say "yes, we designed this because we
saw
the computer as the tutor?" I don't believe that Dr. Bork wants
to
replace teachers in any way, he is just focused on that
'additional'
teacher in our lives, technology.
Cheers!
D
"If you're not in e-business ... you're not in business.." _________________________________________
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