Personal learning creates excitement among teachers

The high point of my week was participating in a “retreat” with about 80 teachers who are playing a leading role in preparing for the laptops that will be in the seventh-grade classes in September. Perhaps the high point of the high point was hearing from one of them who was due for retirement this year and had planned to go home to care for her 83-year-old mother. The mother sensed her excitement and urged her to follow it: These laptops, she said, are something you have been waiting for all your life. The daughter did not need more encouragement. She will be with her seventh-grade class in September and one of many hundreds of teachers who have been given a new sense of excitement about their work by this empowering initiative.

As I listened to the story I reflected on the many sides of what the laptops could mean. I knew that I was in the presence of an excellent teacher who would do a great job with or without laptops. What could this technology add? For me the most important new benefit would come if her students could be given the feeling I got from her and her colleagues at the retreat of being with people for whom learning had becoming so exciting they couldn’t wait to share it. I have seldom been with a group of people so manifestly “rarin’ to go and rarin’ to learn.” One could feel the atmosphere thick with desire to learn, desire to think, desire to explore new directions. If these teachers convey these feelings to their students, the laptops will already have more than paid for themselves.

Nobody who felt the mood of these teachers could ever again countenance the tired old argument that computers depersonalize learning. In fact the boot is on the other foot. The best personalization of learning I can imagine is for the teacher to show her excitement as a learner by doing some learning with the students. The least personalized learning is doing the same old math exercises that are manifestly of no more interest to the teacher than to the victim. Computers don’t necessarily make the depersonalized kind any better and often make it worse. However the blame does not lie on the computer. It lies on the impersonal and repetitive content. Learning is already thoroughly depersonalized when a teacher comes knowing it all and teaches the well-oiled curriculum she already knows so perfectly that she has no need to learn. She may do a great presentation. It might be very good for the students. But it is not personalized learning. So what is?

One way for the computer to allow greater personalization of learning is by allowing teacher and student to explore new areas where neither has been before. They really can learn together, each making a different contribution. The kids bring freshness and their special kind of enthusiasm. The teacher brings maturity and skill as a learner and a perspective on where the learning will lead – in the development of values as well as of knowledge. This goes against the idea that someone in Augusta or D.C. can legislate which scraps of knowledge everyone should have. It might mean that one kid learns biology by studying lobsters and his brother learns by studying snakes. But if the important learning goal is the Big Ideas of biology (and the Big Ideas of how to go about learning) there is no harm in this diversity of knowledge – and as preparation for a democratic society a lot of good.

But diversity of knowing poses a danger. I have seen many young (and old) people flit from site to site on the WWW without experiencing the hard fun of digging into the Big Ideas or mastering complex skills. In fact developing a “grass-hopper mind” from misuse of computers is far more to be feared than “depersonalization” (or even, dare I say it, exposure to “inappropriate content.”) Developing antidotes to superficiality may be the core art of the teacher of the future. Right now my preferred prophylactic is the challenge of using knowledge to make something that has to work and can be tested against the resistance of reality. For example students could be learning ideas in mathematics and social studies and computer programming by conducting a poll to predict the outcome of the town selectman election using their own software both for the poll itself and for a mathematical investigation to determine how large a sample is really needed. Similar skills and ideas could be used in studying lobsters by making a simulation in which hypotheses are tested about how lobsters feed, breed and get caught.

Thus the computer allows a solution to the problem it poses: the excitement of personal learning can be combined with rigorous checks by achieving a better balance than the traditional paper-based classroom can provide between instruction (whether from a teacher or a website) and construction.

Seymour Papert is professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Distinguished Computer Scientist at the University of Maine and a member of Maine Learning Technology Task Force. He may be contacted at Papert@midmaine.com.