[Squeakland] Computer as Tutor

[Alan Kay]

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
>
>
>_________________________________________
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>"If you're not in e-business ... you're not in business.."
>_________________________________________
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>Doug Wolfgram
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