Teaching technology

Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple, joining Angus King last week in a public appearance to celebrate the launching of the laptop initiative, emphasized a use of the technology that was scarcely mentioned in the many debates. The iBook is a great instrument for making movies! I am sure most people would think of this use as very secondary to the greater purpose of learning the curriculum (which does not include movie making) or acquiring “more serious” computer skills. But you get a different perspective if you think of making movies as a step toward mastery of the media that will become increasingly dominant in the new century.

We take it as obvious that mastery of the written medium includes writing as well as reading … producing as well as consuming. If we want our kids to be masters of (and not slaves to) the new media we must be sure that they have the equivalent for these media of the skills of writing. And if we want them to experience school as a bridge to the future rather than a chain to the past we must give the media that represent the future at least equal time.

This shift won’t be brought about simply by putting computers in schools. For the computers to be used in the way suggested by Jobs’ remarks we must also break the mindset shared by parents as much as by the makers of curriculum who see the written media (pencil, chalk, printing) as the only media that really count. As a little step in this direction I find that it is often effective to think about people who are classified as “dyslexic” but still manage to do well intellectually.

Peter had the makings of a sensitive artist from the very earliest age: He loved music, dancing and above all stories; he had a precociously developed sense of beauty. Many like him find it hard to submit to the process of learning to write. They have a high sense of doing things that are meaningfully expressive – initial steps towards writing are not. They have a high sense of making things that are beautiful – their first clumsy letters are not. When the situation is aggravated by even a slight degree of organic dyslexia the stage is set for disaster. Of course a sensitive and skilled teacher can often guide the child past the danger. In Peter’s case the process went wrong. He came to hate first writing, then school and finally himself as well, being persuaded by then that he was “dumb.”

Some simple technology came to the rescue. His mother took him out of school and set things up for him to listen to stories on tape. A year later he had exhausted the local library and had developed a vocabulary and ability to discuss plot and character far beyond his “age level.” With this growing maturity he was able to participate with an older brother and a friend in using a digital camera and iMovie to make a short movie in which he played the star role. The reception of the movie by family and friends led to more maturity and the capacity at age eight to make a decision to go back to school and learn to read and write as well as his dyslexia allows. Can we say that this is a “child who has been left behind?”

When I was an active professor at MIT I knew a graduate student who was so dyslexic that it would take him an hour to puzzle out the meaning of a printed page. How he got to MIT is intriguing. At elementary school, he says, nobody (including himself) noticed that he had any special difficulty with reading. He just didn’t do well at anything, but was allowed through by “social promotion.” As he put it: “They thought I was ‘dumb’ but I didn’t care.” At high school he began to care. He soon realized that the source of the problem had something to do with reading. Attempts to read better didn’t get very far, so he developed strategies for using cafeteria conversations to get information from star students without giving away his own ignorance! The punch line is that he is convinced that in addition to cleverness at manipulating his lunch partners he was developing a far more important kind of cleverness which he described as “figuring out the essentials of situations.”

Eventually he acquired a reputation as a brilliant thinker that enabled him to get glowing recommendations and admission to college despite low “verbal” test scores. In college he had access to a computerized reading machine designed for blind people and all that remained was to find the right career path to turn his unique set of abilities to advantage. Last I heard of him he was making a lot of money in a dot com company.

Seymour Papert may be contacted at Papert@midmaine.com.