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LUDDITES AND LAGGARDS

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Contributed by: Dave Hughes on 11/26/2007

LUDDITES AND LAGGARDS

This morning National Public Radio had a piece on a Kansas School District giving 5,000 laptops to all the High School Students, especially in "that impoverished school district." You can listen to it directly at

http://www.npr.org/templates/player/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=16572460&m=16572174

Hurrah!

But as typical of such knee-jerk news "reports" where the media feels it has to find some critics of otherwise good news, NPR found a Stanford Professor of Education, Dr. Larry Cuban who argues huge "computers alone won't change schools" and won't improve test scores "for at least three years" and even then will require "huge investments in tech support and staff development."

Where the hell has he been the last 20 - not three - years? Since he is emeritus, that means he was "educationally professoring" at least that long ago, while I was successfully pioneering K-12 education using far more primitive, pre-Internet computers and connections, rather than laptops, for rural one-room schools in Montana (1985) , then later across the poor San Luis Valley by the earliest versions of, pre wi-fi, unlicensed wireless (1995).

Sure, computers in and of themselves do not suddenly make kids better educated any more than chisels on stone tablets, or chalk on slate blackboards did 200+ years ago, or when students first were handed pencils and blank paper that could be cheaply manufactured, before that.

But there are a huge number of factors which makes the use of computers, and especially the ability of kids to use computers - laptop or no - at home, a revolution in education - at all levels, and far beyond all technological inventions of the past. And they can help educate young people from the time a tot can tap out his own name on a PC keyboard And I am not just talking about raising test scores.

I will count the ways. But first I want to know why Professor Cuban, from prestigious Stanford, who presumably spent the bulk of his professional career both researching education, teaching, and graduating teachers - from the bachelors level through doctorate - never got them educated on how to teach with computers after it became clear - by 1985, 8 years after the Apple computer came out and school after school snatched them up for classrooms while Apple not only almost gave them away. That was 22 years ago!

The very day in 1977 when I fired up my first "microcomputer" - a primitive Model 1 Radio Shack - and ran a text program called "Electric Pencil" (coded by a writer yet) I said out loud "Backspace and blot out is a revolution in the English language".

And then the day, a few months later, I connected up my first - acoustic yet - modem that only could transfer 300 words a minute over phone lines - and connected up to the first personal subscription communications service in the world - the Source - exchanging text messages with others online, I said "Personal computer communications will be a revolution in human communications AND education!"

Now I knew something about "education." For having been a 23-year career Army officer before retiring 4 years before the first personal computer ever was sold, I knew that the Army was, for most of the time, a big school. Everyone spends their time learning and teaching while preparing for war. Its called "training" but large parts of it are education in every sense of the word. Teaching and learning. And for part of that career time - 3 years to be exact way back in the '50s - I taught academic English to cadets at West Point. I knew what it took to get cadets who were better athletes and soldiers than scholars to write a coherent paragraph using pencils and paper, and rarely for a few of them, a portable typewriter.It is askill they would have to use all the rest of their professional lives. Online or off.

I also knew that one learns how to write - by not only learning simple rules of grammar and spelling from teachers starting in the 2d grade, but writing first drafts - then rewriting and rewriting and rewriting. Which for many students, AND adults, had always been a time consuming pain when it had to be done on paper, with pencil. Or even later, with typewriters, with the time it would take to hunt and peck out compositions much less revise them.

Instantly it was obvious to me that the simplest text processor on the most primitive personal computer- with the ability to backspace and blot out like magic on the screen, not paper - would eventually relieve all of mankind from the drudgery of first putting down, THEN revising, their scribbles. And teachers could then insist on student's revising, rewriting, their work until they got it right. Education.

I saw the value of that up close and personal when I watched my youngest son - in the 9th grade then - who had mild dyslexia - he hated to read or write - start to use my first Radio Shack computer, that text program, and my clunky early generation dot matrix printer for his school writing assignments.

I could tell he felt more comfortable with the perfectly formed letters on the screen than his own miserable handwriting, which he couldn't himself always reread. And the printed papers he produced were readable - even including his spelling errors. Clearly if kids could write legibly, and rewrite rapidly, even on a home computer, including with cut and paste, they could, over time and with a teacher reviewng, commenting on, and grading their work they could earn to write well.

I contended then, and still do, I could teach a group of school students - from the 3rd grade through college - how to write better, if they all had access to a personal computer, than an identical group of students who had only pencils and paper and a teacher "teaching" by traditional methods. Both groups taking the same total time in hours before the 'teacher' and doing their "homework."

But kids are kids, and will rush through their homework, one time, if their teacher lets them just do that. Just because my kid could write badly faster didn't make his work any better, at first.

One morning I came down from our rooms before he did and saw he had left his school assignment on the table. I glanced at it, like an English Prof I had been, I trashed it with big red 'S' s through all his myriad misspellings. He came downstairs, was going to have to gulp down his breakfast and make the bus in about 15 minutes. He was horrified at what I had done to the paper he would have to hand in. Which he had dashed off the night before.

I handed him a dictionary, told him to go over to the Electronic Cottage, load up his work, correct the misspellings and print it out again, quickly! I did not correct the spelling mistakes. He had to look 'em all up, or stop and think and correct misstypings he made in his haste the night before. He skipped breakfast, rushed to the cottage, spent about 10 minutes correcting his errors on the screen, with backspace and blot out reprinting his paper in less than one minute, rushed out the door, caught the bus in time, and got a "B!" It was the first time his WRITING got a decent score.

He got the Lesson. Reread. Recheck. Revise until you get it right. And use the computer tools to aid you. Soon afterwards I got our first Spell Checking program. Which, even though some people say is a crutch, I have found, with repeated use has improved MY spelling, even at my age and considerable education, as I catch errors and see the right one repeatedly.

Then as I taught a course - with computers - that a local College asked me to do, where modem communications to a central server could link the students to me, and over which they could send me their work, I discovered another truth.

I could review, correct, and mark, as well as grade, more student submissions per hour of MY time, than I ever could when students, including West Point cadets, turned in their assignments on paper 30 years before. More importantly I could, a run their 'papers' rapidly through not only a spell checker, but ever more sophisticated grammar checkers - for sentence fragments, punctuation, and the like. And having that underbrush out of the way spend MORE time commenting on their composition, organization, effectiveness of expression. The HIGHER order of learning how to write.

That was also the beginning, for me, of distance learning, which I knew would not just be duplicating what one does in a classroom - speak enmasse, assign work, and later grade their "papers" - online, but would lead to very different ways of teaching and learning.

I even calculated the differential in communicating by speech at 120 words a minute, versus reading at least at 300 words per minute online, and writing, at maybe 30 words per minute. With controlled experiments with real students, some of them teachers, others adults wanting to learn how effectively to use their computers and modems, I discovered that the optimum class size for an online class, was 10, during which 1 hour online real time sessions (punctuated by face-to-face meetings, and totally asynchronous assignments, that all 10 could be "speaking" (writing) and reading what everyone else was writing at the same times. 10 times more time-effective than had all 10 been in a classroom at one time during which only ONE, either a student, or I as teacher, could "speak" at once!

That's Education for the Information Age in my book.

THEN, I started getting serious with seeing how personal computers, software, telecommunications could not only be used by teachers, but also permit students to learn by themselves with computers as tools of learning. They could even transform with telecommunications the very nature of teaching and learning. I decided to start with the fundamental subject of English. For along with Math, it is one of the two most fundamental subject areas all educated Americans must master to succeed in an ever more complex and advanced society. Student proficiency in both of which subjects were slipping in schools all across the country, as the television generation was reading and writing less and less. American kids were becoming ever less educated, in spite of the billions being spent on education, all the teacher's unions, and all the Schools of Education in every state.

But I went further. I noticed that the very fundamental way people using computers connected up with other people remotely read and wrote - on screens - was different from the way they read and write on paper. I even noticed that the MOTION of ASCII Characters (you know what ASCII is, don't you computer users?) on the CRT subtly conveys "meaning" beyond the fixed meaning of the characters - our Latin based alphabet.

As a matter of fact I began to realize that there is now emerging a form of English - which I call "Electronic English" that will become as different from text-writing-on-paper as written forms of English differ from speech. In oral English the sounds and rhythms give English meaning that is not conveyed by writing on surfaces,

In fact reading ever since man trained/educated his brain to decode markings on FIXED surfaces, by moving the eye over the text , whether on stones, tablets, or paper - in the case of English, upper left to lower right, there had to be punctuation marks, like comas, question marks, exclamation points - to emulate what the voice can do. (you don't 'say' comma - you just pause).

Now it is possible for text on computer CRT's to be, by the processor and an 'Electronic English' program to 'pause' - or blink, or flash, or swell up, change color, or shrink down, dynamically. In fact, taken to the extreme, one could fix his eye on the middle of the screen, and let the text come at you in a Digital Stream - the text moving as you control its speed, rather than move your eye over the text in little jerks, and taking in the 'meaning' in lumps - that is both from the skill of the writer and the education of the reader.

That is nearly being done by young people holding their wireless hand held PDAs, whose screens are too small to display a page, or even half a page - which demands 80 characters wide and 24 lines deep to 'resemble' text on paper. And THAT has led to shorthand IM texting, real time and as messages. Totally different from reading or writing on paper. While educators decry the bad English, the truncated words, the invented spellings, the electronic shorthand. Yet kids now equipped with iPods and using school or home computers are seeing English on split screens, with scrolling text, smilies, all in order to COMMUNICATE effectively - which, after all is THE POINT in communicating at all.

But where are the Teachers taught as educators by Professor Cuban both learning THEMSELVES and learning how to TEACH Electronic English? Style, syntax, effective versus non effective Ipod speech. Where are the master writers and artists in Electronic English, whose compositions are studied by students like they have to study written Shakespeare?

Twenty years ago I was teaching, for university credit "Electronic English" not only to younger students and older professionals, but to TEACHERS, who, for all their having learned computers - even programming in Basic, really didn't know what ASCII was, which, because they didn't, why, a composition written on an Apple word processor often looked totally scrambled when accessed by a Windows PC user online. Even when they composed it word by word by hitting the same ABC keys on their keyboard, as the Windows user running a Dell had.

If I had my way, no student would be able to graduate from high school before passing a test on ASCII, - the acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange - what it is, why is it important, and able to write down from memory the alphanumeric characters or control characters for the first 128 binary positions of the 256 bit stream AND their Hex equivalent. For that is THE digital 'alphabet' that every personal computer in the world has to have arrayed on its keyboard, and has to be used to communicate to the screen of any other computer, and thus the person at the other end who can 'read' English. It is as important as a kid having to learn the English alphabet, and be able to write it down the characters for each 'letter', even before being able to read well!

So where has Professor Cuban been?

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Dave Hughes

Colorado Springs , CO

Dave Hughes has posted 78 stories and 87 comments since joining on 3/1/2007. Dave Hughes 's average story rating is 4.9.

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