Apprendre au future (Learning in the Future)

Ben Howell Davis

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from Savoir Faire Savoir: L'apprentissage de l'action en entreprise by Bob Aubrey avec Bruno Tlliette, InterEditions, Paris, 1990, (pp.239-241)

Translated by David Hogarth, MIT Information Systems.

One of the significant experiences in this area is Project Athena, created in 1983 by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a donation of $50 million from IBM and from Digital Equipment Corporation. In 1985, at the heart of this project, the "Visual Computing Group" was established to create a pedagogic architecture permitting the integration of sound and pictures. This latest project was motivated by the idea that new techniques bring with them new creative visual representations of knowledge. In the same manner the telescope - in permitting us to get new images - has fundamentally changed our concept of the universe. Note that modern education has a poverty of visual representations. The faculty of MIT was thus encouraged to work with this group to create teaching "packages." One of these "packages", committed to the teaching of French, recounts the story of a young man who is apartment searching in Paris after his girlfriend has thrown him out. (A la rencontre de Philippe by Gilberte Furstenberg.) A videodisc shows a map of the neighborhood with pictures of various apartments for rent, the floor plan of each apartment, and directions for reaching each of them. The student follows the directions and asks various passersby for assistance in finding his way. If the student doesn't understand what is said, he can click his mouse in a window to see the written text. If a word is foreign to him, he can click on that word: he then sees the word's definition and synonyms which are brought out of a comprehensive dictionary; he also hears a precise pronunciation of the word. The student visits the apartments, chooses the one which he prefers, negotiates with the landlord, etc. He can navigate through this story however he wishes, stopping and seeking supplementary information, making choices which alter the outcome of the story. Making all of this possible requires a large amount of information and complex programming to tie it all together, but the interface with the user is quite simple and natural.

The utilization of such a technology forces an adjustment in the relationship between the professor and the students. The professor sets forth the information in a form that he thinks will be easily assimilated by the students.

But often these students come back to the professor with the comment, "I didn't like the manner in which you presented the material; I have changed the presentation." They revise the "packages" created by their professors and, to show that they have understood and assimilated the subject matter, request grading of their "recitations." According to Ben Davis, who, it should be noted, was an art professor before taking over the Visual Computing Group at MIT, the dynamic is quite like that of art.:

"When I was an art professor, I was confronted with the problem of grading students who brought a creative work to me. I came upon self-evaluation; the judgment essentially graded what I conceived to be the "quality of their interest" in what they were doing. I had no problem, except in the case of a student who had done a poor job and knew it. If I also thought that the work was poor, and in the interchange it took a great deal of time to make the student admit it, I gave the student a poor grade, not for the work but for the lack of integrity. To be a professor comprised confronting the student with what he was doing. In the case of a student who was interested and showed a degree of mastery of the topic, my role conisisted of finding the best means of learning for the student. It is this role which we are applying to the multimedia teaching projects; conversely, the first role always requires a professor.

"In the multimedia world, we establish borders within which the student can find his own way. The best professors continue to think up means of making their material more interesting ... and they are constantly discovering the means by which their students learn. A good educator should presume that everything is interesting and that, if he is unable to teach, it is because he is unable to make the subject matter interesting. At the extreme, this techology makes a professor less of an artisan and more of an artist: in their structured "packages" they must have a mastery of their media - in the same way that a cinematographer creates films with such a variety of people as comedians, stage hands, and musicians - and they attempt to reach the perspective of their students in creating moments of inspiration."

[by Ben Davis, from an interview with the author in Boston on 6 February 1990]

Teaching thus becomes allied to art in the souble sense of artistic creation and technique: The course becomes, inasmuch as it is a personalized presentation of information turning on the inspiration of discovery, a multimedia work, with the result that the relationship between professor and student becmes a subtle and profound "knowing how to make understood."

From this, a new question is raised. These technological advances certainly make possible an improvement in the productivity of instruction. Learning will be richer, more flexible, and more personalized. But will the technology actually have a resulting improvement in the accomplishment of the student? It's the old question of the presumed identity of the end and the means used to reach it. For, as is often the case, they are truly rare who work on the means and question themselves at the same time about the objective of education. Furthermore, as education is coming to a crisis of efficacy (without our actually having yet identified it as such), teachers and the taught risk losing within themselves the sense of the finality of their learning efforts.