Subject: Comments on Ania's "Toward a Complete Learning Environment"
From: Smith, Donald S (Donald.S.Smith@usa.xerox.com)
Date: Mon 03 Apr 2000 - 19:23:28 MEST
Date: Mon, 03 Apr 2000 13:23:28 -0400 From: "Smith, Donald S" <Donald.S.Smith@usa.xerox.com> Subject: Comments on Ania's "Toward a Complete Learning Environment"
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An increase in the use of technologies to develop and deliver education and
training seem inevitable given the amazing capacities of the computer.
However, expanding use of technologies brings business into the educational
equation as never before. As I see it, the challenge of utilizing new
technologies for education and training is to take advantage of the
innovations that result from competition without placing students in the
learning relationship as a commodity.
The business of business is to produce products that will sell for a profit.
Designing and manufacturing revenue producing products is to walk a
tightrope between consumers desires and designing and manufacturing products
that minimally satisfy those desires at the least possible cost. Therefore,
quality is not the best that can be done but rather the least that one can
get away with and still keep customers. That's why training design has so
readily adapted and stubbornly holds to behaviorist models. The behaviorist
model allows the quantification of learning. Tasks are discretely
identified, curriculum supports the tasks and criterion testing confirms
quality. The student then is a widget at the end of the assembly line whose
quality can be easily measured.
So we have dangers on two fronts with the growth of technology in education.
First it turns education into a profit enterprise and second it utilizes
technologies that are, oh so easily, adapted to the quantification of the
learning process. However, this is balanced by the opportunities for
innovation that competition brings and the potential that computers may
someday duplicate or even improve on the cognitive type learning that
happens when good teachers interact with students.
That's why the questions that Ania's paper imply to me are so important.
How can we keep the criterion for successful education out of the hands of
business and in the service of the public good, while still realizing the
advantages of competition. How can we assure that technology will serve the
wider interests of learners as opposed to simply implanting processes and
"facts" in their heads?
Don Smith
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