The Technological Trigger: Fostering Educational Revolution

The Technological Trigger: Fostering Educational RevolutionAuthor(s): Howard LevineSource: Journal of Science Education and Technology, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Sep., 1995), pp. 245-254Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40188506 .

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Journal of Science Education and Technology, Vol 4t No. 3, 1995

The Technological Trigger: Fostering Educational Revolution

Howard Levine1'2

While we live in an Information Society, information technology has barely penetrated the classroom. Not only does it make no sense for every aspect of our lives save education to be enriched by appropriate technologies (e.g., computers, video discs, interactive systems), this technology has the potential to trigger an educational revolution much in the way that the Gutenberg press triggered a revolution 500 years ago. Technology alone cannot fix our ailing educational system. Yet it can be the thin edge of the wedge in giving us the capacity to provide an educational experience that stimulates the student (and the teacher), opens myriad worlds of information, and conforms to what we believe to be best teaching and learning practices. KEY WORDS: Technology; computers; interactive multimedia.

A CAUTIONARY FABLE FOR OUR TIME

The Htraeling exhibit was a favorite stop at the Intergalactic Zoological Museum and Petting Zoo. The planet itself, Htrae, embodied an extremely rich and diverse environment extending from towering mountains to deep ocean caverns and from seem- ingly barren deserts to lush jungles teeming with all manner of flora and fauna. Given its modest size, a mere 25,000 miles in circumference, all visitors agreed that Htrae was the prettiest and most interesting planet in the collection.

Even though the visitors came initially to mar- vel at Htrae's beauty, it was really the Htraeling civilization-a wonderfully complex melange composed of hundreds of nations and thousands of distinct lan- guages and cultures- that fascinated them. Of spe- cial interest was the active and industrious nature of this society. Unlike most societies in the Intergalac- tic Zoological Museum (IZM), the Htraelings didn't

simply accept their natural environment; they inter- acted with it, attempted to learn all about it, and even sought to modify it. It was really this social force of understanding and change that distin- guished the Htraelings from the other civilizations on exhibit. The quest for knowledge and progress seemed to be universal Htraeling virtues.

The Htraeling were assisted in the pursuit of such virtuous goals by their obvious love for tools and technology. In fact, visitors to the IZM learned that the Htraelings were the descendants of an aptly named ancient race Homo habilis (the human tools users), but the modern Htraeling's notion of "tool" and "technology" was far advanced from that of his ancient ancestor. No longer were tools just simple artifacts like levers and pulleys that could amplify animal energy. Htraeling tools had even far surpassed the breakthroughs of the Indus- trial Revolution. What began as an economic revolution focusing on production - and machines concerned with steam and power and energy- had transformed itself into a societal revolution centered on knowledge, information, and communication.

Modern Htraeling society was currently in the midst of this social revolution, known to all as the

1 Department of Mathematics, California College of Arts and Crafts, 5212 Broadway, Oakland, California 94618.

Correspondence should be directed to Howard Levine, Depart- ment of Mathematics, California College of Arts and Crafts, 5212 Broadway, Oakland, California 94618.

245

1059-0145/95A»0(WKM5$07^0A) O 1995 Plenum Publishing Corporation



246 Levine

Information Revolution. Its most advanced technologies-computers, video, satellites- were all dedicated to the production and transmission of information. Knowledge, and the tools used to help create it, were viewed as the greatest source of both progress and power. In fact, so great was the Htraeling love of tools, and so powerful were those tools, that exhibit visitors came to understand that Htraeling society had entered into a symbiotic relationship with its technology: initially the society shaped its tools and thereafter the tools helped to shape the society.

As much as the visitors were delighted by the Htraeling exhibition, they were also saddened and perplexed by the paradox of Htraeling education: How could a society that obviously put a premium on knowledge and its vast interconnections embrace a static, disciplinary-focused educational system? How could a society that employed many different types of information and symbol systems (video, text, audio, graphics) allow their educational system to be dominated by a single, typographic informational paradigm? How could a society that utilized many different methods for communicating this knowledge trust an educational delivery system that solely relied on teachers to tell students what they needed to know? How could a society that had developed so much exquisite technology for the development and communication of knowledge be satisfied with a classroom in which chalk, blackboard, and textbook were state-of-the-art tools? And finally, how could a society that was being shaped by its information technology fail to see the essential educational role for that technology? The visitors to the Htraeling exhibition had no answers to these questions, but they feared that any society in which education was so distanced from the central cultural, informational, and technological trend must inevitably decline.

THE NEED FOR EDUCATIONAL REVOLUTION

Like the Htraelings, we Earthlings are also in the midst of an Information Revolution: video pic- tures are sent instantaneously around the world, for a few dollars the phone company allows us to listen in on the astronauts' conversations from space, powerful computers have replaced typewriters on most office desks, interactive television systems are being test marketed, electronic computer bulletin boards

are referred to as communities. The list, often to our amazement and delight, is without end.

Yet also like the Htraelings, we Earthlings are failing to incorporate this revolution into our educational system: Classrooms appear much as they did 50 or 150 years ago. The curriculum is still composed of discrete subjects (language arts, mathematics, history) that are taught at discrete times and in discrete units. Tfeachers still stand in front of 30 or 40 students of wildly differing abilities and preparation levels and try to command the attention of all. Although this is a generation raised on Sesame Street and MTV, McGuffey's Eclectic Reader (or its successor) dominates as the chief conveyor of information. Again, but this time sadly, the list is without end.

Unfortunately, we are already experiencing the disastrous results that the visitors to the Htrael- ing exhibit predicted: Declining SAT scores, incredibly high dropout rates, lack of international competitiveness, poor preparation for the world of work, and a general dissatisfaction among all -

teachers, students, parents, society. These data tell only half the story. Like all truly revolutionary technologies, we started out to shape information technology- multi/mega media- and it is now shaping us. Without our knowledge, and certainly without our consent, multi/mega media is presiding over the most important cultural revolution since the invention of writing- a transformation from a world dominated by logic and language into a world dominated by the symbol. As we come to realize that the distinctive feature of human beings is our generalized symbol-making ability, our reliance on the written word is diminishing, and we are embracing new modes of thinking, knowledge, and communication.

We now understand these truths: Ideas are constantly in flux. Knowledge is fluid and connected to every other bit of knowledge. Multiple symbol types can help us represent and think about this knowledge. Technology provides many tools for ma- nipulating these different symbols. Yet until education joins the larger Information Revolution, until we revolutionize how we think about teaching and learning, reconceptualize the knowledge students need to learn, and rethink the role technology must play in the educational process, we will have no an- tidote to protect us from repeating the Htraeling mistake.



The Technological Trigger 247

The revolution we are calling for is not the first in the annals of education. It may only be the most important. We generally think of Gutenberg's sup- posedly serendipitous connection between the mechanism of a wine press and the function of a signet ring as leading to movable type and the first Information Revolution, but the link between technology and education was also at work more than 500 years ago. Spurred on by the possibility of in- expensive texts, the Gutenberg press led to the decline of the millennia-old, apprenticeship/tutor, one-on-one model of education.

Of course, such a fundamental societal change is neither very easy nor very quick. In an important work, Robert McClintock (personal communication) explains the five, interrelated strategies that sprang from the Gutenberg invention and, over the course of centuries, eventually made mass schooling for all a practical reality:

1. Education was routinized: This required a stable site (the school and classroom), a stable time (the school day broken into fixed instructional periods), and a stable curriculum (learning fractured into a series of measured lessons).

2. Group education was introduced: This required methods for holding many atten- tions, dealing with diverse skill levels, and, as a result, fostering competition among the students.

3. Textbooks were created: The routinized nature of education now required a standard method of presenting the same information to everyone.

4. Teaching became a profession: Managing groups of students required new skills far different than those at work in the mas- ter/apprentice relationship.

5. Mass education was seen as a social good: Society was required to devote sufficient resources for mass schooling in order to at- tain ends such as material progress, social improvement, and political cohesion.

While education has undergone many reform movements during the past 500 years, these five features of the system have remained stable. One major reason, perhaps the major reason, for this stability is that schools and society have shared the dominant information technology and symbol system- books and text. Tfcxtbooks seemed an adequate method of

preparing students for a world of work dominated by ledgers and manuals and directories. Tfextbooks seemed an adequate method of preparing students for a world view dominated by canons such as "there is but one truth," and "authority is never to be ques- tioned." We now know that textbooks are not an adequate preparation for today's world of work, and we should know that they are also an inadequate preparation for a world that is "multiperspectival": multicultural, multidisciplinary, multisensory, mul- tithinking.

The Information Revolution, embodied by interactive multimedia, has invaded the work place and it is rapidly enlarging and enriching our world view. It will also certainly, eventually, change our educational system. The real challenge is to plan for that revolution, to nurture it, to monitor and guide it. Robert McClintock (personal communication) gives us some suggestions about just how to do that:

1. Education must be customized: The new technology creates numerous options for flexibility in scheduling.

2. Individualized learning becomes possible: Student interest and motivation replaces teacher-dominated classrooms. Individual and group projects replace the traditional competitive learning.

3. Interactive multimedia are created: Stu- dents are able to create their own learning paths through a rich knowledge space that is neither wedded to presorted disciplines nor prescriptive ideas of appropriate grade level.

4. Teaching is reconceptualized: With the emphasis on learner individuality, teachers are freed from routinized, text-based learning strategies. This allows them to adopt new teaching/learning models and to participate in the learning process themselves.

5. Education becomes a desirable end in itself: While education remains useful for at- taining social ends, interactive multimedia dissolves the distinction between education and entertainment. Lifelong learning becomes a reality.

McClintock's argument, persuasive as it may be, is just one possible future vision. Other visions of a more interesting, more egalitarian, more effec- tive educational system are encouraged. The lesson



248 Levine

Next stop was one of the computer learning centers. I needed to review integration before I had the guts to try the calculus Mastery Quiz. Still couldn't quite understand limits. Good thing Mr. Newton was around. Funny, his lectures never made any sense but he's really good at answering questions. Got my 90% plus mastery score and the three learning points.

Now for some "entertaining education," Mr. Bond's history presentation. Each day from 10:00 A.M. until 2:00 P.M. there are four one-hour presentations given by faculty and guests on a wide variety of topics. Some are better than others, but Bond is always first rate. Mr. Bond's specialty is Af- rican-American history, and his usual spellbinding performance is further enhanced by his use of the multimedia system to present dramatic readings of Dr. Martin Luther King's "Letter from the Bir- mingham Jail." Mr. Bond also used the system to simulate a debate about the importance of this document through videotaped interviews with An- drew Young, Jimmy Carter, Coretta Scott King, and other civil rights leaders. The debate got pretty hot and heavy, and Paul, Tracy, and I continued it on our way to lunch. Chalk up another three points.

Then it's off to join Mr. Strasberg, the drama teacher, and three others at the CAD-CAM system; our goal is to design the set for the school's up- coming production of Hamlet. As a starting point, we used the multimedia system to display sets from some of the most famous productions of the play. Then we utilized the computer's CAD-CAM abilities to help us solve the set problems for our own school's stage. Two more points. Computer modeling is always an interesting experience.

Final stop is with Ms. Cather, my creative writing mentor. After finishing my assignment at home last night, I electronically mailed it to her worksta- tion and requested this appointment. Much to my relief, Ms. Cather is delighted with "my sense of humor and ironic wit" in portraying the incredibly dull classroom existence of a student in the 1960s. After suggesting some structural changes she rec- ommends that I submit it to a statewide writing competition. I also get nine out of ten possible points.

This educational vision revolutionizes the teaching/learning structure and environment: Stu- dents and teachers are no longer tethered to desks as if knowledge could only be acquired while sitting in an uncomfortable chair and staring straight ahead at a blackboard. Students become largely responsi- ble for their own education and are able to enter the knowledge environment at their own points of interest and at their own level of proficiency. Cur- ricula are freed from the tyranny of the text; multiple media resources are recognized as being equally valuable. Tfeachers no longer need be viewed as sole

of the Htraelings is clear: If we are to have any future at all, we must use technology to help trigger a revolution in our system of education.

STUDENT-CENTERED TEACHING AND LEARNING: REVOLUTION IN THE CLASSROOM

It matters little if you graduated from high school in 1904 or 1994, your recollections are a pass- ably accurate representation of today's classroom and today's teaching and learning methods. As a sort of thought experiment, just close your eyes and visu- alize a day in your life as a high school sophomore: Classrooms with 30 or 40 desks arranged in rows all facing in the same direction- toward the teacher. The teacher (acting as a surrogate for the Board of Education), not the students, determines what will be studied (a subject like math or English), when it will be studied (for 50 minutes, or until the bell rings), and how it will be studied (by presenting the textbook material and doing the problems at chap- ter's end). Everybody moves in lockstep whether they are bored, confused, or interested.

Contrast this teacher-centered, subject-de- pendent, low-tech approach to teaching and learning with a peek at the diary of Geny, a high school sophomore in 1999, and remember, we already have the means to turn this vision into a reality.

October 12 Was running late but still had time to stop at

the Learning Plan Center in order to "negotiate** my learning contract for the day. Computer recom- mended three different plans of action for the day, and I combined the best features of each.

Need 60 learning points this week, only have 23 and it's already Wednesday. First stop is the peer tutoring center to meet Megan. She's having trouble mastering some natural science concepts, and I*m Ms. Wizard. She spent all of our last ses- sion complaining that she wasn't a "science" person, but I know that she loves to visit the zoo. Here's my plan: We'll use the interactive, multimedia computer system, and call up the San Diego Zoo learning materials. Then we'll navigate through that information environment looking for data about the types of plants and animals that are in the zoo's collection. Once we have collected about 50 "specimens," I'll help Megan use a data-base program to create a bio- logical taxonomy capable of categorizing flora and fauna. For my efforts I earn five learning points, but I think I also figured out something important about learning: Teaching is a very good way to learn.




purveyors of the truth. They are freed to adopt a variety of different roles: facilitator, mentor, media- tor, colearner. Successful educational revolution must engage students by allowing them the freedom to be at the center of their own learning experiences, and it must free teachers by allowing them to make the best use of their knowledge-enabling skills.

In a society that values personal freedom and '

responsibility, any revolution that results in such a customization of the educational space-time frame- work as well as allowing for individual learner flexibility has much to recommend it. Fortunately, it is also good educational practice; it will help to make learning more efficient and enjoyable.

Under the old, text-based model of instruction, learners were often viewed as "clean slates" on which new information was to be inscribed, or as "empty vessels" into which fresh knowledge would be poured. If the slate happened to be not quite clean, or the vessel happened to be not quite empty, the role of instruction was to root out any "incorrect" information so that it might be replaced by the approved, accurate information. This model put a premium on passive learners and forceful teachers who would deliver predigested bits of the truth.

Today, as the result of thousands of studies about the way people learn, we know that the clean slate and empty vessel metaphors are not accurate. All learners, especially children, take an active role in constructing their own understanding. Far from being empty vessels, we all bring facts, hypotheses, theories, values, and guesses to any learning situ- ation. TSvo hundred years ago, Immanuel Kant paved the way for modern learning theory by observing that concepts without percepts were blind, percepts without concepts were empty. A modern educational cor- relate is that knowledge begets knowledge: The ability to construct new knowledge is a function of both the amount and quality of knowledge at one's disposal as well as one's reasoning and other intellectual abilities. Multimedia recognizes these dual needs by providing "cognitive bootstrapping" for the construction of knowledge and the development of intellectual skills.

Just as important as acquiring new knowledge is the ability to apply it outside the classroom. In traditional instruction, information is generally pre- sented in encapsulated formats, and it is largely left up to the students to generate any possible connec- tions between what they have "learned" and how

they might use that knowledge. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, there is ample evidence to suggest that students who are quite adept at regurgitating memorized information rarely retrieve that same information when confronted with novel conditions that warrant its application.

Interactive multimedia encourages contextual learning; students acquire knowledge, skills, and at- titudes within the context of solving real problems. In a recent paper, "Cognitive Apprenticeship," Col- lins et al (1989) explain the benefits of such an approach:

A critical element in fostering learning is to have students cany out tasks and solve problems in an environment that reflects the multiple uses to which their knowledge will be put in the future. Situated learning serves several different purposes. First, students come to understand the purposes or uses of the knowledge they are learning. Second, they learn by actively using knowledge rather than passively receiving it. Third, they learn in the different conditions under which their knowledge can be applied. Fourth, learning in multiple contexts in- duces the abstraction of knowledge, so that students acquire knowledge in a dual form, both tied to the contexts of its uses and independent of any particu- lar context. This unbinding of knowledge from a specific context fosters its transfer to new problems and new domains."

Traditional teaching-learning strategies em- phasize individual achievement (each student is graded independently), competition, tool-free study (calculators, computers, and other everyday tools are frowned upon as intellectual crutches), sequential curricula, and textbooks. Interactive multimedia is much more like the world in which we must apply our learning: a premium may be put on team performance, the proper use of tools is critical to achievement, problems may be attacked at many levels, and multiple informational resources are used. Perhaps most importantly, multimedia focuses on practical activities and meaningful objectives. Such goals are the least we should expect of any classroom revolution.

NAVIGATING THROUGH KNOWLEDGE SPACE: REVOLUTION IN THE CURRICULUM

The intergalactic museum metaphor has a dou- bly powerful message for the revolution that must change school curricula: First, it impresses upon us the incredible richness and interconnectedness of all



250 Levine

that is worth knowing. Knowledge is a seamless web, a space through which inquiring minds navigate without rules, or maybe they make up their own rules as they proceed. Standard disciplinary boundaries only impede this journey. The best museums already know this; the national tragedy is that schools do not.

The second message of the museum metaphor is that information takes multiple forms. Every good museum employs a vast array of informational resources: recordings, photographs, artifacts, film and video, interactive exhibits, do- cents, catalogs. Yet, today's schools rely on texts much as schools did centuries ago. The multidisciplinary nature of knowledge demands that the tools we use to journey through it- interactive multimedia computers and video- be no less excit- ing and challenging than that knowledge itself.

How much is there to know? How much can any one individual claim to know? It is often written, perhaps apocryphally, that the Dutch humanist Erasmus, who died in 1536, was the last human being to know all the important knowledge of his time. Compare such a claim with today's "knowledge space": The Smithsonian Institution, only one cluster of museums, albeit the "nation's attic," houses more than 150,000,000 objects and the rate of acquisition is ever increasing. A recent paper es- timated that it would take 22 centuries to read the annual biomedical research literature, or, if one was in a hurry, a mere seven centuries to do the same with the chemical literature. No library has the space or resources to catalog, let alone house, the hundreds of thousands of books, periodicals, jour- nals, and reports that are published each year. Far from being Erasmuses, it is no wonder that it is often said about today's experts that they know more and more about less and less. The great paradox is that this "knowledge explosion" threatens us with a concomitant "ignorance explosion." While the Information Revolution and its large number of knowledge workers are producing a vast and grow- ing pool of vital, useful information, we are fast reaching the human limits of our ability to absorb and apply it. Cognitive scientists point out that while information is expanding exponentially, the human rate of knowledge acquisition remains rather steady. The result is a possible ignorance explosion: Like the experts, each of us will understand less and less about our ever-expanding knowledge

space. The ratio of what we know to what is known will be ever decreasing.

In order to avoid this ignorance explosion, in order to continue to benefit from these expanding frontiers of knowledge, we must devise new methods for conceptualizing and interpreting knowledge. We must create new techniques and new technologies to significantly augment the skills we use to convert data into information and to transform information into knowledge. We need to become as interested in the human processing of knowledge as we are in that knowledge itself. Fundamentally, we must first understand the nature of knowledge in the modern world. Tb a great extent, what we mean by knowledge today is dramatically different than what a con- temporary of Gutenberg meant. Writing at midcentury in Frontiers of Knowledge, the historian Lynn White (1956) explained part of this difference by arguing that four majors "canons of culture" had changed:

1. Since the days of the Greeks, our thinking has been framed within the canon of the Occident. This has led to the unchallenged assumption that Western culture is the pin- nacle of civilization.

lAThe new canon is the canon of the globe. We are coming to realize that all cultures are equally valuable, that each culture has the ability to influence all others, and that in an age of instantaneous communication we must understand many cultures.

2. From the Greeks we also inherited the canon of logic and language. This canon holds that logic and language are perfected instruments of intellectual analysis and expression and that anyone who has mastered them is well equipped to be a critical thinker.

2B.The new canon is the canon of symbols. It recognizes that the distinctive thing about human beings is our generalized symbol- making ability and it encourages a diverse, multisymboled approach to thinking and expression.

3. The Greeks also gave us the canon of rationality-the notion that reason is the su- preme human attribute, that questions have singular, unique answers, and that anything less than rationality should be deplored as subhuman.




3A.We now understand and appreciate the canon of the unconscious- the idea that feelings, emotions, and even thought processes occur without our attending to them, that knowledge is much more open ended than our intellectual ancestors believed, and that it is often precisely how we deal with these qualities that best reflect our hu- manness.

4. For 2000 years we have worked within the canon of a hierarchy of knowledge values- we have had the conviction that certain types of human study (subjects) are more worthy of study and reverence. This was ultimately codified in the medieval trivium and quadrivium, a curricular concept that still dominates.

4A/Ibday's world requires a canon that reflects a spectrum of knowledge values. Problems arise knowing nothing of disciplinary boundaries, and it is foolish of us to pre- sume that answers to those problems must be found within medieval boundaries. Our egalitarian society must be reflected in an equality of ideas.

These shifting canons of culture, shifts in our very perception of ourselves and our world, have obvious implications for what we know and how we know. Furthermore, since knowledge and learning are large parts of the educational enterprise, any change in our epistemology requires a similar change in school curriculum. White's four canons provide a rough road map for just such a curricular revolution.

The canon of the globe requires a multicultural curriculum. It is not just simply that our society is multicultural, multiethnic, and multiracial. Nor is it simply a case of communication and transportation technology shrinking the globe and exposing each of us to other cultures. The bald truth is that other cultures have always had much to offer; it has only been our [all of us] ethnocentric blinders that prevented us from seeing and appreciating this. The new curriculum must use multicultural materials, must present issues from multicultural perspectives, and must encourage multicultural syntheses to problems.

The canon of the symbol requires a multimedia curriculum. Real-world problems in professions as disparate as architecture and dance, medicine and history are solved by modeling (thinking) in a variety

of media. Most importantly, and most obviously, human beings are "designed" for multimedia- our five senses respond to a myriad of sensual stimuli. The new curriculum must employ multimedia materials as a means of presenting information, and it must foster a multimedia thinking process for solving problems and expressing their solutions.

The canon of the unconscious requires an interactive curriculum. Twentieth century luminaries like Kurt Godel, Werner Heisenberg, and Jacques Derrida have taught us much about this mercurial entity we call knowledge: It is rarely, if ever, fixed and unchanging. Many problems admit of multiple solutions. There is no simple concept of mechanical causality, the world is a much more complex place. We human beings by interacting with this complex world, change it, change ourselves, and in so doing alter the kinds of things we may know about both. In sum, there is precious little worth knowing that may be dispensed by authority and accepted without question. The new curriculum must be interactive in order to allow students the opportunity to become learners; acting and reacting with the universe is the only path to knowledge.

The canon of the spectrum of knowledge values requires a multidisciplinary curriculum. Just as a system of roads makes it easy to reach some des- tinations and impossible to get to others, our disciplinary categories (language, mathematics, history) impose a similar ordering on our knowledge space: Some concepts (the Federalist papers, the Big Bang theory) are easy to reach because they have a disciplinary home. Others (the concept of freedom, which plays a role in language, mathematics, and history) are difficult to locate because they are multidisciplinary or even adisciplinary. Increasingly, however, we need to reach locations in that knowledge space (for solutions to problems such as crime, cancer, education) for which the traditional disciplines are a poor road system. The new curriculum must be multidisciplinary because student's inter- ests do not come in preformed disciplinary packets and because the universe does not present itself to us as a medieval, monastic course of study.

Multicultural. Multimedia. Interactive. Mul- tidisciplinary. These words currently describe museums' approaches to education rather than the curriculum used in our classrooms, but if we are to avoid the ignorance explosion, if we are to learn how to work smarter, we must infuse these concepts into a new curriculum. Twenty-first century knowledge



252 Levine

cannot be effectively taught with a 16th-century world view.

THINKING TOOLS: REVOLUTION IN THE TECHNOLOGY

The technology of the Information Revolu- tion-computers, television, video discs, compact discs, satellites, digitization- has invaded every aspect of our lives save one, the classroom. Tb be sure, thousands of classrooms now have computers sitting quietly in the corner, but all too often they are sel- dom used or used only to perform pedestrian func- tions such as drill and practice. By way of contrast, the Information Revolution is important precisely because it increases our options, enriches our learning environment, indeed, even amplifies our ability to think. It is these uses of technology that must come into the classroom if we are to have a true educational revolution.

The Information Revolution is ultimately based on two other revolutions, one technical, the other societal. The great technical achievement of the 20th century is the creation of tools that give us the ability to treat information as a fungible entity: As all our technology- TY CDs, VDs, computers- moves to a digital standard, all information becomes "one." It is now possible to treat video, text, audio, and graphics as merely different forms of the same thing- information. This technical achievement means we now have the power to move freely through our information environment, to assemble and transmit any message, to think about any message, and perhaps most importantly, to use our technology to improve that thinking.

The societal revolution is also well docu- mented. Twenty years ago, a now famous study, The Information Economy by Marc Uri Porat (1977) first reported that more than half of our nation's gross national product was accounted for by information activities; over half of all jobs involve the processing of information. We no longer argue whether we are undergoing an Information Revolution; instead, ar- guments center about what that revolution really means. If we now understand that the Gutenberg press was the technological trigger that fostered the educational revolution from agricultural to industrial society, are there reasons for believing that interactive multimedia can serve the same catalytic role by fostering an educational revolution and thereby situ-

ating education squarely within the information society?

In order to understand why the answer to this question is a definite "yes," one must first understand the many ways that information technology may be used in education. Writing at about the same time as The Information Economy, MIT's J- C R. Licklider (1979) observed ten different, distinct approaches:

1. Computer conducted drill and practice- using the computer to help the student acquire basic skills.

2. Computer assisted instruction (CAI)- using the computer to present a "programmed" learning set.

3. Computer managed instruction (CMI)- employing the computer to select instructional topics and materials, schedule presentations, administer tests, and maintain records.

4. Fully computerized instruction- the com- plete automation of the instructional function.

5. Use of computers in solving problems- in- tegrating the computer into instruction so that it becomes a tool to meet other educational needs.

6. Use of the computer and programming concepts to foster discovery and organiza- tion of ideas- interacting with the computer presents new approaches to thinking and new ways to deal with information. Computer modeling allows for careful simulation of complex processes, and computer graphics encourages visual thinking and non-language-based problem solving.

7. Learning in an information technology- based environment that gives the student broad scope for initiative- a truly interactive, information-dense learning environment should encourage student exploration.

8. Practice in an information technology- based environment that stimulates a real world task- using interactive multimedia to break down the artificial distinction between school and work.

9. Learning by teaching human students in an information technology-based environment-teachers are freed from the repeti- tive lessons of test-based instruction, are free to adopt a series of knowledge facili-




tator roles, and become active learners themselves.

10. Learning by teaching computers -programming and the creation of expert knowledge systems encourages a new way of thinking and organizing knowledge.

Far from being a smooth continuum, this list is actually Janus-faced. Options 1-4 look backward toward the old paradigm of teacher-centered, text- based classroom learning. Information technology is simply a new tool to help educators meet old goals a bit more effectively and efficiently. While the literature points to a few successes, this so-called revolution died aborning in the 1980s.

Options 5-10 look forward to the new paradigm of student-centered, multimedia-based, interactive learning. They employ information technologies to grant students new learning options, to provide a learning environment of unparalleled richness, and to encourage new ways of thinking. In- stead of simply using computers to convey factual knowledge, the educational revolution is transforma- tive-it changes the student's attitude about thinking and learning. In other words, information technology will do for education precisely what it has done for the larger society-revolutionize its very structure.

INFORMATION LITERACY

Literacy- the command of the knowledge and skills required to thrive in a specified environment- is a key educational concept. Yet too often literacy is viewed narrowly, almost as if it were just another subject. Computer literacy, cultural literacy, and sci- entific literacy all vie for classroom time along with traditional disciplines such as language arts and mathematics, but this conception misses the entire point. Far from being a specific discipline, literacy is a whole complex of knowledge, skills, and atti- tudes that individuals bring to their world, and it is this literacy that makes much of learning possible. For 500 years that literacy has focused on the printed word. As a consequence, learning has tended to be passive, unidimensional, and text based.

Today, we constantly navigate through a multidisciplinary, multicultural, multimedia informational space. As a result, education's first goal must be the production of information literates. Further-

more, it should be clear that this goal simply cannot be met by an educational system in which the teacher is the sole dispenser of knowledge, the curriculum is wedded to the text book, and technology is odd man out

Literacy is such an important concept because it transcends the methods we use to gather information and goes directly to the ways in which we process that information. Literacy is the visible edge of our cognitive style. In "Square Books and Round Books: Cognitive Implications of Hypertext," Carlson (1990) explains how our reliance on books has shaped the way we view and understand the world, "McLuhan's typographic man is the passive recipient of prefabricated 'method/ or standardized patterns for perceiving reality .... Paper text (or flat text) provides only two dimensions of information processing: linear and hierarchical .... The current notion of course delivery is based on flat text in square books, supplemented by lectures and hands-on experience- all of which have the disad- vantage of both de-skilling users and processing individuals in batch mode."

McLuhan's (1962) typographic literacy puts a premium on five aspects of interpreting the world: Logical consistency, universality and abstraction, "correct" explanations, singular points of view, and narrative development from cause to effect. The point is not that these are bad or wrong; the point is that there are other methods for interpreting the world that deserve our consideration. A generalized symbolic literacy focuses on: contrast as opposed to consistency, an emphasis on the concrete and specific, competing explanations of events, multiple points of view, and showing rather than telling. In- formation literacy is broad enough to encompass both paradigms.

There can be no doubt that learning with interactive multimedia is a vastly different experience than reading a book, and there should be no doubt that successfully navigating through the vast information space of multi/mega media requires a new set of literacy skills. Writing more than 2000 years ago, Plato already sensed the limitations of text: "A terrible thing about writing, Phaedrus, is this, and here, in truth, it is like painting. I mean, the crea- tions of the painter stand like living creatures, but if you ask them anything, they maintain a solemn silence. And so it is with writings; you might think they spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you put a question with a wish for information on a point



254 Levine

in what is said, there is one, only one, invariable re- ply."

It is not that writing is so terrible, it is just that it is so limited. What began simply as a means of expression has, over the last 2000 years, come to put severe limits on the way we think. Interactive multimedia frees us from those limits of expression, and in so doing it will inevitably free us from text-based limits on thought. The new information literacy teaches us to put a premium on multiple interpre- tations, competing explanations, the interconnectedness of knowledge, and a diversity in expressing our thoughts and ideas. Success in the Information Age demands nothing less.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Early drafts of this work benefitted enormously from the suggestions of Alphonse Buccino, Michael Hale, Glen Hoptman, Robert McClintock, and Tbm Reeves.

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The Technological Trigger: Fostering Educational Revolution