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Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!rutgers!mtune!codas!killer!elg
From: elg@killer.UUCP (Eric Green)
Newsgroups: comp.ai,comp.edu,comp.cog-eng
Subject: Re: Becoming CAI literate
Message-ID: <3316@killer.UUCP>
Date: 15 Feb 88 06:27:15 GMT
References: <776@zippy.eecs.umich.edu>
Organization: Bayou Telecommunications
Lines: 40

in article <776@zippy.eecs.umich.edu>, dwt@zippy.eecs.umich.edu (David West) says:
>>Computers are accurate, infinitely patient, and highly interactive.
>>In this regard, they surpass classroom teachers.  
> Well, yes, but the things computers are best at teaching humans are,
> by and large, things that humans used to  have to do only because they 
> didn't have computers.   Why train humans to emulate machines if
> you have adequate machines?

Not to mention that while computers may be infinitely patient, students
certainly aren't. 

After fairly rigorous research last fall in the major education journals, I
came to a number of conclusions. First, teachers generally don't know what
computers are or can do... images of huge rooms with whirring tape drives and
white-smocked supplicants still are the image of computers for most teachers
(as it is for the vast majority of the American people). I got a laugh out of
a teacher who didn't know the difference between a terminal program and a
modem. I got an even bigger laugh out of Education Digest actually printing
the hair-brained article! (wherein the teacher discovers how to dump text from
one Commodore 64 computer in his school, to another computer at another
school). 

And second, when teachers do discover computers, inevitably it's used to
inflict the three-B's of educational software upon unsuspecting students --
that is, software that's Boring, Banal, and just plain BAD. 

Come on, now, hasn't ANYBODY learned that there's more to intelligence than
the filling station motif of learning? Pavlov's dogs and Skinner's rats are
rats and dogs, fer cryin' out loud, not HUMANS! Hair-brained things such as
multiplication drills in an age of $5 calculators are just plain silly.... I
know that in grade school, I, at least, would have been FASCINATED to know WHY
the multiplication algorithm worked. After all, it obviously did work... if I
added up four 22's, I came to the same answer as 4*22... but nobody could tell
me why. 

---
Eric Lee Green  elg@usl.CSNET     Asimov Cocktail,n., A verbal bomb
{cbosgd,ihnp4}!killer!elg              detonated by the mention of any
Snail Mail P.O. Box 92191              subject, resulting in an explosion
Lafayette, LA 70509                    of at least 5,000 words.