The teacher of the
future is a history teacher.
Further, for the sake of this discussion, the history that will need to be
taught is the history of information technology.
Because of the enormous amount of fragmented information created by contemporary
media (TV, radio, computer networks) it is becoming increasingly difficult to
teach the young why it is important to be able to read, write, and think with
focused clarity. Indeed, the mediums of TV, radio, and computers were created
by people with the abilities of literacy, not by people with media-fragmented
attention spans.
In order to filter the enormous amount of information that students will be
encountering inside and outside of school because of the coming use of
multimedia computer networks, the teacher must act as a filter, a perspective
provider. The simplest way to provide that perspective in a curriculum context
is teach where information sys tems came from: The history of technology, the
history of science, the history of mathematics, the history of language, the
history of art, the history of history (including the history of the
"future"!).
In other words, whatever the subject being taught, a teacher in the future
will have to give students a sense of the evolution of that subject in order to
provide a reason for thinking in a continuous, non-fragmented way.
Until recently, computer networks have been havens of literacy. They have
been primarily text-based and actually encourage liter acy because the main
means of communication has been words. This condition is quickly passing.
Computer network research is moving quickly toward a multimedia condition. This
means that digital imagery (moving pictures, sound, graphics) will become the
major influence on these networks. The "information superhigh way" so
often discussed by American politicians and technologists will be a drive-in
movie, not a drive in library as we have known it. It will be a global maze of
information that will be an exact digital replica of the current media condition
of television, radio, and print, only it will exist in a united medium of
digital data. This resource will flow into the home, the business, and the
school.
The Structure of Complexity
The typical educational/business model. Will be a new world of electronic
education that will complicate the future of teaching.
Basically, central servers will be created by business and academia to be
repositories for authored information with the intent to use it for
"distance learning" over networks. These systems will required
systems maintenance and constant systems research in order to keep them
operating. These functions might be supported by corpo rate research, academic
research, or some combination.
The consumer, the learner, will be subscribing to the services pro vided
either from academia or business depending on whether the information is for
job training or general knowledge. They will be able to take the course at
computer centers, at work, or at home.Tuition will be more like a subscription
fee paid to a pub lisher.
The publisher will produce material from authors (teachers) that has been
created in a multimedia form by electronic curriculum design teams. These teams
will be contractors for multimedia pub lishers. The publishers will be media
conglomerates like Time Warner or Ted Turner.
Other strategies for production of educational materials for distance
learning will be consortiums of academic institutions and corpora tions. These
consortiums will support "media laboratories" that produce new
technological innovations and explore educational strategies.
These models already exist in places like the Open University in London, the
Universidad de Educacion a Distancia in Madrid, at MIT and various U.S.
colleges and universities that utilize their departments of continuing
education as distance learning models.
A Strange New World
The benefits in terms of access to information are overwhelming. The
potential for new ideas and a renaissance in world-wide educa tion are
enormous. But the question still remains as to whether teachers are merely
"content providers" or whether they have a much larger, much more
critical role to play in the future.
Not only will teachers have to make this electronic educational sys tem
understandable and responsible, but they will have to create an approach to
learning that puts this new world into a context. Teach ers will have to teach
the process of education as well as the history of their subject.
Neil Postman in his latest book Technopoly say it this way:
I am referring
to the idea that to become educated means to become aware of the origins and
growth of knowledge and knowledge systems; to be familiar with the intellectual
and creative processes by which the best that has been thought and said has
been produced; to learn how to participate, even if as a listener, in what
Robert Maynard Hutchins once called The Great Conversation, which is merely a
different metaphor for what is meant by the ascent of humanity...In other
words, it is an education that stresses history, the sci entific mode of
thinking, the disciplined use of language, a wide-ranging knowledge of the arts
and religion, and conti nuity of human enterprise. It is education as an
excellent corrective to the anti-historical, information-saturated,
technology-loving character of Technopoly.
In my first teaching job in a small art college I asked a
colleague who was a well know physics professor to come to my video class. He
was to tell my students what the physics of television was in order for them to
more completely understand the medium as an artistic tool. In the process of
explaining how electronic images where processed by a camera which was looking
at light he men tioned the name of a physics particle called a Quark. I asked
him where this name came from and he replied that it was a word made up by
James Joyce in his book "Finnigan's Wake". He said that physicists
often took names from literature or made them up to describe phenomena. For me
it was a revelation. I had thought that names like Quark came from physics!
That physics actually had its own language derived from centuries of scientific
linguistic history. Quark had come from the mind of James Joyce! I now
understood that physics was human, not science.
This was a classic example of a student creating a bad model of how a
discipline was actually constructed. I had imagined that physics had a history
but that it was a purely scientific history that did not have any relation to
any other discipline. That physicists were somehow only mathematicians who liked
theories. Perhaps if I had had a physics teacher like my colleague when I was
student I wouldn't have so badly misunderstood science. Teachers like him are
rare.
MIT
Another teacher like this was Doc Edgerton at MIT.
At the MIT Center for Educational Computing Initiatives work is being done
on multimedia computing technologies for education. One of the more relevant
multimedia applications is a CD-ROM based project for middle school students on
an MIT Professor, Harold `Doc' Edgerton. Doc Edgerton was an engineer,
inventor, photographer, and teacher. He was the man who perfected the elec
tronic strobe for flash photography and filmmaking.
The images that his technology helped to create are actually visual
histories of events that the human eye cannot see. He employed these
technologies to his teaching of engineering and science but in a larger sense
he taught students that understanding how events occur was central to being
able to think clearly.
By creating this multimedia application of his life and work as a history of
technology we are able to provide a model of a teacher who used futuristic
technology to inspire students to become researchers. Our hope is that by using
multimedia technology to show how Edgerton accomplished this we will be
employing the computer tools of the future to teach a history of creative,
coherent learning.
The intent of the Edgerton project has many facets. Funded by the Edgerton
Foundation, the work consists of cataloging the vast num ber of Edgerton
related materials in a digital database at the MIT Museum, creating an
interactive multimedia exhibition on the life and work of Edgerton for the
George Eastman House Exhibition to open in November, and an interactive
multimedia application for 5- 8th graders on Edgerton as a scientist, inventor,
artist, and teacher. The creation of the digital Edgerton museum as a resource
for the MIT Museum has the same spirit as the Edgerton images. The data will be
network accessible as a resource for creative thought and productivity at MIT
as well as other museums and institutions.
A difficult design strategy is being attempted to accommodate museum
interests (both technical and aesthetic), museum education interests, college
level educational experiences, middle school sci ence curriculum, not to
mention the representation of Edgerton as scientist, artist, inventor, teacher,
philosopher, and celebrity. The single framing of the strobe films, the ability
for the user to feel like they were taking the pictures themselves, the
enormous technical archives that lie behind the images and the apparatus he
used, the adventures with Jacque Cousteau, the Lock Ness monster search, the
aerial strobing of Normandy villages before the WW II invasion (imagine a
villager waking up to those unearthly white lights) -- in short it seemed that
interactive multimedia was the only medium capable of representing the meaning
of his life's work.
Basically this project is an "extended biography" -- the life of a
sin gle individual can be used as an example and a stimulus for interac tive
experience with a "life's work." In the case of Doc Edgerton, his
life's work was the creation and demonstration of technologies that allowed
ordinary events to be viewed and examined in extraor dinary ways. This work is
especially relevant for young students as they search for meaning in
educational experience and begin to dis cover what their own "life's
work" might be. The study of science and engineering is especially useful
in this context as it provides a window into the examination of everyday
experience as phenom ena by using technology, mathematics, and theory as tools
of explo ration. The products of Edgerton's inquiries also happen to be like
art, providing an even richer set of experiences.
Already though, the digitization of images from Edgerton's work has raised
issues in the use of them for K-12 education. The most famous image of a bullet
passing through an apple has suddenly emerged as symbolic of violence in
schools. The reference of the teacher's apple being blasted has caused
educators some concern. How to use the image in the digital education package
is an inter esting problem. Edgerton used to refer to it as "how we make
apple sauce at MIT". The innocence of the experiment has since become
sinister. This was never an issue until the image appeared in a digi tal form
inside a digital multimedia application for a contemporary fifth grader.
The task of the material and the teacher is to provide a context for that
image. To make it useful as an illustration of seeing time, rather than a
literal image of violence. By providing historical perspective and context, the
teacher in the information age creates a situation where the student is at the
center of learning rather than the passive receiver of knowledge. The student
becomes a researcher into how ideas are created, how they are used, and how
they are rewarded.
Even more powerful technologies like virtual reality remove all physical
constraints to knowledge access and knowledge construc tion. One can literally
fly through fields of video, text, and graphics as if there were no gravity.
The dreams of philosophers are coming true. These technologies are powerful. As
networks become more and more sophisticated the ability to have simulations of
direct experience will become more and more common. What begins as an amusement
will certainly become a model for new education classrooms that do not exist
anywhere accept inside a computer. The concept of tele-learning, to learn at a
distance, will become a standard feature of life-long education.
Will this make anyone happy?
During a press conference after his first year as President of the United
States, John Kennedy was asked if he was happy being the President. "I
define happiness as the Greeks did", Kennedy said. "They believed
that happiness was to be fully engaged along lines of excellence."
The teacher of the future is a teacher fully engaged along lines of
excellence. The only way to be happy in the information age with its constantly
changing technologies and information overload is to be fully engaged in an
active understanding of the problem. To be interested in making sense of new
and difficult time will require a measure of involvement in new technologies
and a measure of involvement in providing a context for them.
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