September 21, 2016 at 12:07Alan Kay: The future of “reading” depends on the future of “learning difficult to understand things”
- Transfer
"A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points"
- Alan Kay
Alan Kay is a tough guy, we congratulated him on Habra with a birthday .
I recall the merits of Alan.
We decided to translate his most conceptual article and then bam, it turns out that in the original article there is no piece of text. We wrote to Viewpoints Research Institute, saying that you have a typo. Kim Rose answered us , explained everything, corrected and blessed.
Thank you for translating Yana Shchekotova, for supporting the publication - Edison (which specializes in automation of asphalt plants and developing payment systems and terminals ).
The future of reading depends on the future study of things that are difficult to understand (Alan Kay).
We are engaged in “reading” when we interpret the meanings of certain phenomena. We read the terrain, traces, sky and clouds, faces, body language, art objects, books, films and television, sounds, smells and touches, the process of external objects performing certain actions, etc.
Here, we are most interested in a cursory reading of the anthropogenic phenomenon called “writing”: natural languages, mathematics, music, old and new computer means of interaction, including the user interface, and other systems that seek to capture, transmit and, most importantly, explain the main ideas.
Different representations of the “same thought” contain only a part of this thought and a condition for its “reading”. For example, reading the news in prose, poetry and on TV - all this gives a different impression. Marshall McLuhan once said that "you can argue about many things behind a stained window, but democracy is not one of them." He had in mind both a dirty window and television (our modern less pleasant equivalent).
Socrates once spoke about writing like this: "Writing eliminates the need to remember." It's like a prosthesis on a healthy limb, leading to its death. On the other hand, if you perceive new technologies as an amplifier that increasesand multiplies what we already have, and do not replace it, then we have the opportunity to use writing for its ability to overcome space and time, as well as effectiveness and the desire to maintain a demonstrative form, which is not applicable in oral speech.
And we can still learn to remember everything we read! In other words, writing is not the best substitute for memories used in the process of thinking - it is too inefficient - but it is a great way to cover different areas of knowledge and have more food for thought.
Plato must have appreciated the irony of the situation, because his beloved teacher complained about this means of transmitting information, and he perfectly used it to convey the thoughts and character of Socrates' personality.
The idea came up: there wasn’t enough Socrates at all, but Plato could copy Plato’s persuasive recreation of Socrates so that the printed editions of his Dialogues, with the help of more mediocre teachers, could influence the whole continent and potentially enrich every reader.
A similar question arises: what part of great thinking and great thinkers can be fixed with the help of a personal computer and the ubiquitous global network, and also what it takes to learn how to read and write them.
In each century, it was noted that, in general, it was more difficult for most people to learn to read and write than to learn their natural language, which is a bit surprising given the correspondence of speaking skills and one-to-one writing. We will return to this issue a bit later. Now we would like to know if these difficulties are inconvenient, or if mastering these skills could be useful. In other words, taking into account the abundance of technology, we need to figure out whether “ease of use” (corresponds to our current capabilities) is a blessing, or sometimes it is a trap (allows us to remain ourselves or reduces our significance).
To read and write fluently, you need to master new and hone existing skills as we change in the process. Anthropological studies of society show that a literate society thinks differently than that where only spoken language is used. Those. a competent society is not a “society with a developed oral speech and writing system”, but a new ecosystem of ideas and thinking.
McLuhan noted that what we have to turn into in order to use them easily plays the most important role in communications .
The more differences the means of communication have and the more complex it is, the less attractive or even noticeable it becomes. Another McLuhan idea is that the new means of communication, which were generally able to take root, first used the contents of older and more well-known media. For example, it was important that the printed version of the Gutenberg Bible was similar to the Bible, but at the same time would look like a copy of a manuscript made by hand. Over time, if a new media tool showed its potential, then they began to actively use it. The true purpose of the press was not to imitate a handwritten Bible, but to initiate new disputes about science and politics after 150 years. This is what forever changed Europe, and then America.
Рассмотрим американскую систему, которая была сформирована и поддерживала свое существование только за счет письменности и чтения. Книга Тома Пейна (Tom Paine) «Здравый смысл» была аргументом против здравомыслия, проявляемого в день, когда «Монархия казалась чем-то естественным». Наоборот, он утверждал, что «нам нужно сформировать свою систему управления». В газетах 13 колоний приводились доводы за и против конституции. Аргументы «за» были приведены в издании «Записки федералиста» («The Federalist Papers»), а аргументы «против» — в «Записках антифедералиста» («AntiFederalist Papers»).
The form of government was supposed to be republican (and here we recall Plato again), but its “defenders” had to be elected and, more importantly, rejected by the entire population. This meant that the people of America should reason similarly to the defenders of this form of government. Thomas Jefferson said:
“I do not know a safer way to maintain the maximum power of society than the people themselves; and if you think that they are not sufficiently educated in the implementation of the management process with a high level of distinction, then the best solution is not to deprive them of this, but to educate them. ” This is beyond the scope of “stained windows”!
Reading skills among the population needed to familiarize themselves with these kinds of ideas in their original form are under attack. Rating 1The U.S. Department of Education's adult ability to read well enough to understand these arguments found that in 1992 only 15% of people had the right skill, and in 2003 this figure dropped to 13% (and such a drop was a real and not an error of error ) This is not enough to support the original idea.
But what do these numbers really mean? America is a country of complex mixes of representatives of different cultures, many of them are still developing. More informative statistics during the study of the same Ministry of Education show what percentage of graduates after 4 years of college have the necessary skills. In 1992, this figure was 40%. This is amazing. How did the remaining 60% manage to get a diploma, even if they could not read at the “professional” level? By 2003, this number slipped to 31%, which is even more surprising.
In any situation, reading structured prose works could be forgotten. It is difficult to find and reflect all the causes of such changes. The simplest of them is that in the 19th century, people constantly read and wrote if they needed to go beyond space and time. As Neil Postman noted, there were no competitors. Those. when it was time to read or write something, and it was extremely important, then, as it turned out, an impressive number of people possessed such skills. 140 years after the invention of the telephone, many technologies have appeared that allow our deep addiction to oral communication to spread through electronic devices through time and space. Short news and sharing information about the world and someone else's acquaintances no longer requires strong writing and reading skills.
На тему «почему чтению и письму научиться сложнее», чем какому-либо естественному языку, написана куча замечательных книг. Самая лучшая из недавних — это «Пруст и кальмар» («Proust and the Squid»)2 выдающегося нейрофизиолога и эксперта по чтению Марианны Вульф. В ней представлен хороший исторический обзор систем письменности, некоторые последние открытия из области изучения мозга о навыке чтения и способности обучаться, а также основные принципы обучения чтению для большинства населения, которым не посчастливилось быть предварительно «подключенным» к процессу изучения этих навыков.
By the way, the reason why we can quickly learn a natural language, having been in linguistic traditions since childhood, and other animals, and even primates, cannot do this, lies in our brain, which, although plastic in every sense, is still not is a blank piece of paper, and contains structures organized by our genes that help us learn our language. But, despite this, this process does not proceed in one day, it needs years.
It is strange enough that even the very idea of writing was not so obvious to representatives of our family for 200,000 years of life on this planet. As far as we know, this process is only about 5000 years old, and what should have been the easiest way to organize writing, namely the creation of characters based on speech sounds and the very “recording of these sounds”, originated less than 3,000 years ago.
Why? Due to the effective processes that we need for speech, our physiological experience consists of directly recognizing by ear and expressing meaning directly, and does not boil down to collecting, at first, sounds, then morphemes, words and parts of speech. But this is also the experience that we get after how they learned to read fluently, or mastered any other skill: the components of the skill are grouped by the so-called direct perception and giving meaning.
It took much more time to come to other “strong ideas”. For example, mathematical systems based on abstractions, assumptions, inferences, and conclusions were discovered in Greece after the alphabet was invented, and perhaps partly because of this. The Greeks had several real scientists: Archimedes, Aristarchus, Eratosthenes, etc. But still, as far as we know, they did not have a “Science” as such. We do not know all the details of the Alexandrian era and the processes taking place in its stunning library, where, as expected, the specialists in mathematics and sciences tried to test each other's ideas using methods that could be called scientific.
For us, “modern science” appeared in the 17th century, and its qualitatively different methods of thinking about the world, about what confirmation, knowledge, proof, and even “truth”, transformed our world quickly and on a completely different level.
The advent of science has changed what has already been written and read, and also affected the awareness of what it is to read fluently and write quickly. For example, one of the most important books written in the entire history of mankind about important discoveries and conjectures is considered the “ Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy”Newton’s. To read it, you need to not only easily recognize letters, but also be able to read graphics and know the math. Theoretically, a modern "literate" person should be able to read this book, but, as Ch.P. Snow (CP Snow) in his essay “Two Cultures” 3 , which is what literacy is meant for, was not widely spread even among university professors.
Большинство из тех 13% американцев, которым под силу прочесть «Здравый смысл» Тома Пэйна, не могут прочесть книги, аналогичные «Математическим принципам» (или даже более простые, но с изложением научного характера). Это означает, что реальный процент потенциальных избирателей в США, способных справиться с проблемами, свойственными нашей эпохе, в действительности составляет всего лишь несколько процентов от взрослого населения.
Еще одна впечатляющая перспектива развития мира, в котором мы живем, появилась в XX веке. И имя ей Системы. Проще говоря, мы, люди, вплетены в четыре крупные системы систем: вселенная, социальные системы, системы технологий и мы сами: «Системы, в которых мы живем, и системы, которыми мы являемся».
Such a view of complexity has its own properties, forecasts, a set of concepts, dynamics, theories and principles. Many of the most important problems of the 21st century can be studied productively through the prism of system organization and dynamics.
In most systems, there are complex interactions between their parts that are difficult to understand with our limited minds, even with the help of modern mathematics. For example, many important natural systems (such as climate, epidemics), society (the beginning of the 1920s in Germany, the modern Middle East or the USA), technology (Chernobyl), and our bodies (the circulatory system or the system for regulating blood glucose levels) they can probably remain stable for many years, but then they suddenly turn into states that have a negative effect and are quite dangerous for us.
Today, many of these life systems can be disassembled and made more predictable. At the end of the 20th century, such systems moved into the category of more conceivable objects, because a tool for processing complex dynamic interactions was invented in the middle of the 20th century. And it was called a computer.
Some children have already begun to "competently understand the systems." For example, a 10-year-old child can draw a small red typewriter in Etoys 4 and write a script that would make it move in a circle.
You can make a copy with a similar behavior, and repaint the machine in blue. To see if the blue and red cars collided, and when this condition is fulfilled, repainting the blue car into red, even a child can write a small program. It can be assumed that the blue machine is a healthy person, and the red one is a sick person.
You can create thousands of tiny blue cars and just one red one, and then run the program to run to observe the nature of the spread of the epidemic. The percentage of infected can be calculated and displayed graphically during the execution of the program.
You can take a settlement with a different number of inhabitants. The fewer people, the more "village" will be discharged, and the longer it will take for the infection to spread. Children are fascinated by such inconstancy of “good luck”. And yet, all the villagers die. Rapidly spreading infections are like typhoid fever, and slowly spreading infections are like AIDS. And it will be seen that typhoid fever is visible to everyone, and AIDS will fall out of sight until it is too late.
The child created a model 5leading to the answer to the question of why it is extremely important to pay attention to incurable fatal diseases, and it does not matter how it looks from the side of a sane person. Millions, perhaps even billions, of adults, do not have these answers, and they die because of their absence. A child can post the results of emulation on the Internet, on a YouTube-like site for children's projects, and other children can download them, think over these results, make changes, etc.
From the point of view of this work, we have now revealed a whole new set of ideas that we need to study and think not only from the point of view of science, but also from the point of view of systems, and we have also added a new powerful and different tool for working with information - dynamic tool for creative thoughts 7, in addition to reading and writing skills that we need to learn.
What do children need to know in order to “write” their own emulator of the spread of the epidemic, and what should they learn in order to be able to “read” the results of this emulation and the results of similar projects of other children? And how can we help them learn new things? Can a computer by itself provide assistance, and not just be a wonderful new "box for creating the dynamics of various processes"?
You can consider a computer as a development of mathematics - it introduces new ways of creating models of various objects of our world, on which we want to concentrate. But we can also objectively believe that a computer is a qualitatively new way of understanding the many types of complexity (this is just how comprehensive the idea is that it constructs its own world).
As Frank Smith 6 noted , all “literacy” originates in ideas that we perceive as quite important and put our efforts into them, and also want to share them and our thoughts with others (and, what’s also important, get feedback) . This gave birth to writing systems, and then to the processes of teaching reading and writing, which is very intertwined с такими идеями. Появились грамотность и литература.
В какой-то момент достаточное количество новых идей, сдерживающих текущую систему мысли, перерастет в новое мыслительное пространство и, зачастую, приходится придумывать новые виды систем представления информации, ведущих к переосмыслению понятий грамотности и литературы.
Это подводит нас к главной идее данной работы: большое будущее «чтения» зависит от будущего «обучения сложным для понимания вещам».
Большинство из придуманных «масштабных идей», таких как математика, наука, равные права, системы, музыкальные структуры, такие как гармония и контрапункт, и прочее, пришлось изобрестиbecause they are not so explicitly embedded in our genetically engineered brains. We can study them to some extent, because we are able to create structures that are a bit like biological brains from internal images based on languages and the ability to manipulate them. For example, we have no connections for the concept of change , for which calculus was invented, but we are pretty good at artificial calculus systems, and we can beat the great geniuses of antiquity in these areas.
In many ways, the main reason for creating a structured educational process is to help people learn things that are difficult to understand . But many current educational systems misunderstand the real state of affairs of "learning a new". Simply put, we are practically blind, deaf, paralyzed and dumb. McLuhan, as always, spoke well on this subject: "Until I believe, I will not see." In other words, the new is by the definition of “something that has not yet been encountered before,” and if we are able to comprehend it, we will achieve this because our mind has learned to see, hear and touch. And we will not be able to state it beautifully for many reasons. As head teacher Tim Gallway 7 said : “One of the big problems with standard education is that the main parts of the body and mind that should be involved in the learning process do not understand English!”
There is a perception limit on the number of elements, for example, according to George Miller 8this is a number from the range of 7 ± 2 elements. When we begin to learn something new, our images are still very weak, and it’s easy to confuse us. The process of creating, combining and growing blocks of information should be regulated with caution.
Pavese Cesare once said: "To know the world, you must first create it," which implies both mental and, in most cases, physical labor. The great composer of the 20th century, Paul Hindemith, called the connection between music and man "creation." Those. what, on the whole, actually happens in art and learning, is not just “laboratory rat reflexes”, but the creation in the mind of our own version of what we are trying to learn and do.
If we consider the last two paragraphs together, we can see how some difficulties arise in teaching and teaching. We have a lot of problems with this “ something ”, and also we need to somehow manage to come up with versions for “something” that have not even become this “something”, but which are needed to get to the bottom of “ something ". To learn things that are difficult to understand, this can turn out to be a long and often painful and damp process, even when the optional overcoming of difficulties has been removed from experience. These difficulties have not yet been eliminated, and they can spend many hours, and most often thousands of hours, to create internal parallel working mental “agents” that will manifest themselves as components of our nervous system when a need arises to develop a skill.
Moreover, each of us has our own predisposition to a certain subject, depending both on the genetic level and on life experience. Someone needs quite a bit of help, someone needs a little more, and someone needs a lot of help in various aspects. Someone will be very motivated, and someone will not show even the slightest interest.
Объединив эти два вывода, несложно придумать как минимум 15-25 «типов» учеников, с которыми придется столкнуться в образовательном процессе. Несмотря на это, у большинства образовательных систем всего лишь один учебный план для всех. Отчасти это происходит вследствие невежества, но по большей части это последствия взаимодействия традиции и экономики: традиции, когда для каждого предмета свой учитель множество дней подряд, и экономической ситуации с ее доводами за «темпы повышения экономического роста за счет роста объема производства».
If you look at the situation from a different angle, for the most part in music and sports education predominantly individual training with an expert once or twice a week, a large amount of individual work, group work, where the main “practice” takes place, and a lot of years of hard work . This leads to good results, as most students really have difficulty trying to understand the weekly explanations of the experts, which may suit them according to their capabilities, style or rhythm, or maybe not. In general, it would be much better if they spend several hours each day on self-study, and meet with an expert to test knowledge and get feedback, and practice several times a week.
Only a few universities use this approach in academic studies, sometimes called the "tutorial system" (a system of training by attaching students to individual consultants). In the UK, such universities include Oxford and Cambridge.
This principle of “more than one-on-one training, but with weekly peer review and feedback” is quite important.
And again, briefly distracting ourselves to consider this thought: “The future of studying things that are difficult to understand depends on the students' desire to spend a huge number of hours, or even years, to become a professional in this business”
Here one could add: “... And also from the ability and desire of society to motivate students in various ways so that they would like to invest their efforts in this pile of hours. ”
According to experts, it would be very sad to take tennis lessons and not have a professional tennis player to play together (or even the opportunity to play). Or take piano lessons from a teacher who doesn’t play, or who won’t play with students. But first of all, how can they evaluate the student’s current knowledge in reality? What kind of motivation was laid in it, if the specialist himself clearly does not love this activity enough to burn with a desire to do it? But, of course, in the traditional education system this happens all the time.
Compared with many official educational processes, for a large number of subjects it is preferable to use the method of Socrates from the book, which changed the western train of thought. This at least happens one on one, at a pace convenient for the student, using a type of writing that changes our thinking. But, ultimately, this does not give enough feedback about the work, and often there is not enough practice that could really help the student master things that are difficult to understand. Something more is needed.
What about Socrates in the computer? Here you need something more substantial than the book counterpart, because the computer is an active participant, and he can recognize the behavior of students: where their eyes are directed, how much they are interested, the presence of doubt and the degree of confidence, etc.
But what can be done now? And what is the future scope and limit of the computer as a “superbook,” “a dynamic book,” such as Dynabook ! 9.10 , because both of them are meta-level information transmission tools that can contain characteristics and other similar tools, especially those that cannot exist without a computer, as well as a detailed guide that will help students learn difficult to understand things?
It was difficult to find answers to questions regarding social motivation, charisma of teachers and other things for almost six centuries, until a printed book appeared. There are many reasons why a person may want to learn to read, and then read in order to learn. But we cannot attribute any intrinsic properties to such means of disseminating information as a book or computer when we declare that their very existence will induce everyone to study what they need , and not just to satisfy their desires . An essential part of the importance of education in any society is to make people strive for what they need.. You can turn to the history of books and see some compromises, including the warning story about Madame Bovary, and there will be no doubt that most of this will be applied when using a computer as a means of recording, reading and disseminating information.
These tasks are quite complex. We can argue about what computers should do in addition to their basic functions of storing and displaying pictures of the past.
Many of the ideas of modern authors about what a personal computer can and should be like formed in the 60s after reading about learning environments managed by students. This topic was covered in the works of Maria Montessori 11, the patron saint of this direction, who wrote at the beginning of the 20th century, O.K. Moore (OK Moore) in the early 60s, and Seymour Papert (Seymour Papert) a few years later.
Montessori was a genius of a special type, which cannot be described in three words. Working with children as a doctor with extensive knowledge in the field of psychology and anthropology, she established an in-depth relationship between how children's behavior is determined by their genetic heritage in the process of learning their native language and culture from their environment, and came to the conclusion that schools can It would be organized in this way: “We live in the 20th century, and for children, the environment at home, in schools, is more like the 10th century. What would happen if we embodied the progressive ideas of our time in an environment where children would grow naturally? ” Some of her ideas about the environment are presented in the form of physical objects in Montessori classes, in particular, these are special toys developed by her for children, who experienced side effects from in-depth learning through the game. Other ideas were based on the treatment of children, and on what actions are expected from them, as well as how they interact. It worked just awesome! Children willingly plunged into the process, imbued with the ideas and spirit of this new educational project.
Psychologist O.K. Moore, while studying at Yale in the early 60s, 12 was also interested in somewhat similar ideas. He determined the characteristics of the reacting medium, which:
He called such an environment: " self-contained , if you engage in the environment for his own sake, and not for the sake of rewards or evading punishment, which has no direct connection with the activity itself 13 ". By “discovery” he meant “discovery conducted under unobtrusive supervision” in the sense in which Montessori, Vygostky 14 , Bruner 15 and Peypert 16 understood it : (that is, to admit that it is extremely difficult for people to generate good ideas from scratch— hence the need for forms of management - but this is best known when the student makes efforts to independently create the final connections - hence the need for the process of discovery).
Moore directed his efforts to thinking and creatingA self-responsive, responsive environment that helps children learn to read through writing. He wanted to use the child’s craving for action in the creation process along with a sense of beauty and the desire for learning to build his own forms. This is not so easy, because, for example, to learn their native language, children need to talk a lot.
In the early 60's, Moore developed a “talking typewriter,” which responded to what young children were typing (at first it was a room with a Selectric typewriter, and next to a room with a student who had a microphone, and he could watch the child’s actions and respond to them). There was nothing but a typewriter in the room, and this was an important plan to make (based on our current knowledge, there is no need to explain why this point is critical!). Conductors to such an environment were the children themselves, not adults.
Written by a first grader
We went to Boston, and when we went we had to stop to have dinner. We stayed with friends. When we got to the place, it was already 10 o’clock in the evening, it was already high time to go to bed. We woke up mom. I mostly watched TV. Dad watched it with me, and mom talked to Ally Friss. When dad did not watch TV, he talked with Uncle Al. It was fun!
Written by a preschooler
. Everything is fine with mom. Plaster was removed from her leg. Now she can take me to school. I'm glad of that.
Written by kindergartener
Pam, you could someday become a nanny. But, when you are a (sic) nanny, you cannot scream like you do now.
One interesting rule of the environment is that children can leave at any time, but then they will not be able to return until the next day (this is very similar to one of Montessori’s principles for choosing a toy).
The extended curriculum that Moore developed was rich and comprehensive, and also covered most aspects of language learning, including the ability to read and write. The key moment was how the “typewriter” responded to their actions in order to encourage them to start writing words that they knew. Children have a strong desire to createsomething and they loved to read the words and sentences written by them. This turned into a desire to read everything. Many of the ideas presented here have followed the same course as the latest assumptions of modern reading teaching experts such as Wulf.
The “real” thing for these 4 and 5-year-olds was the work of reporters in the newspaper, where it was necessary to write stories about what, in their opinion, would result in interesting news. Newspaper editors were first graders. As you might think, the results were impressive. (It’s worth imagining how these little children in the early 60s managed with a mimeograph and hectograph with the participation of adults!)
Moore's prophetic ideas were too far ahead of the computer technology of the time. But today they sound more sensible and sensible than ever. The best of them are based on how to use students' mental abilities and incentives to develop deep internal motivation for a large number of hours of training and practice. (Some of these ideas were used in the original PARC GUI - and we really wanted to get closer to the “instantly responsive”, and not just the “responsive” interface, but we still did not have the right level of understanding how to do this)
Since then, the ideas They tried to implement Mura several times, for example, in the mid-80s, when IBM carried out extensive work in the “Write to Read” project with the advent of PC 17, which was a great success, but still was a rather expensive undertaking in most respects.
Today, a real "talking typewriter" with auxiliary tools for choosing the topic of discussion "requires a lot of research effort, similar to those that led to the invention of the PC and the Internet in the 70s. Moore's approach consisted entirely of exemplary ideas that can be used today, but there are still too many dependencies. Instead, let's think of these ideas as part of a larger system that is necessary in order to bring PC capabilities closer to its most important development points.
The mathematician Seymour Papert, together with the children's psychologist Piaget, created a programming language for children that embodies advanced mathematical principles in a form that fits well in children's heads. The way to program the cars from the previous epidemic example is based on Papert's ideas. Children studied complex mathematical laws, independently performing mathematical actions by writing programs that were considered "real mathematics into which the computer breathed life." And again, a new future was invented for reading and writing (and reading through writing).
Which brings us to yet another important point: the future of learning things that are difficult to understand is the future.learning how to create hard-to-do things . In other words, the future of "reading" depends on the future of "writing."
A critical and provocative approach to this situation is that many of these processes of teaching reading and writing are quite applicable in teaching mathematics, music, computer design, and even scientific and engineering activities (the latter is “even” introduced because children who conduct research and engineering in the real world are faced with much more complex perception problems than those whose world of interests is fully represented in the computer environment). For example, what is our child doing now, sitting in a corner with white powder and dark liquid. Is it baking soda and vinegar or something else? Etc.
This is the true essence of personal computers and highly portable personal devices such as Dynabook in particular. Although part of the design itself and the convenience for people relate to the physical form and sensations of the device, 95% of the Dynabook design is based on the wealth of services that this device can provide to its owner, and above all, it is an interface that promotes learning, and not only reacts to actions user. That’s why the author answered questions about various consumer devices “Is this (for example, iPad) not Dynabook?” like this: “No. It has more performance than you could imagine in 1968, but it still lacks the basic functionality and user guide. ”
We looked at the past and present of the “learning to read” and “write” environments using technology. What are the real chances of moving to the next level of introduction of active teaching and learning in computer technology? For example, suppose we gained a lot of experience helping people learn a subject, using people as teachers and trainers, and we would like to create a computer environment that could do everything possible, but without the participation of experts. Then we restrict ourselves to those subjects whose objects of study can be fully represented in a computer environment, such as reading and writing, mathematics, computer use, and programming. We strive to create a computer assistant in cognitive activity, which will be better than a complete absence of a teacher, better than a bad teacher,
At a minimum, we need:
It is easy to understand why this was considered a very difficult task over the past 50-odd years. But progress has occurred on many points.
Of course, the presence of components does not bring us any closer to a simple way to create the whole picture, especially when the combination is very complex and has many connections. However, in some cases it is easy to see how some particles help others. For example, a good working model of a human sound vision of the world and reasoning can be used to increase the necessary degree of understanding of what the student is doing, saying, asking what he needs. The reasoning block, as in the CYC 13 system , can rephrase ambiguous questions from students into 3-4 simple questions and ask to clarify which one was meant 20 .
Many successful tutors modeled human teachers, but this method turned out to be quite expensive and had some spontaneity such as, for example, systems based on the ACT-R architecture of Anderson, Koedinger 12 , and others. Carefully designed Acuitus 21 systemsrecently provided reports with impressive results. The operation of these systems is mainly based on reference situations with thousands of manually generated events, and is quite expensive. However, for objects of the bulk of consumers, such as reading in the early stages, grade 3 arithmetic, grade 9 algebra, elementary programming courses, etc., costs can be attributed to a whole nation of students. This is worth doing, because, having achieved the appropriate dynamics and good user experience, we will discover what we need to bring to mind, and can lead to more compact, more automated ways to create such systems. Despite the subsequent long-term prospects, the government hates investing in such learning curves.
As you ponder these problems, it’s important to understand that among all the necessary inventions that contributed to the successful development of personal computers, the key to a billion users was the graphical user interface, which is practical, often pleasant, and now completely invisible in the gap between two very different from each other by the world of people and the world that is hidden inside the computer.
Since in the 60-70s, the ARPA / PARC research community created a responsive graphical interface, the user interface style and developments on this topic, in fact, have not really advanced. Even a seeming interface middleman like Siri, for the most part, is a simple extension of the user search and notification system, which has been part of the responsive interface for several decades.
The technique of people communicating with computers turned out to be quite promising, almost universal, and relatively easy to use. But she has not yet shown all her capabilities and, more importantly, much needs to be done in this area.
The next qualitative transformation in the user interface of the environment will be: a teacher for each student - user interfaces that can significantly help end users to master new ideas and whole subjects.
In addition to the obvious simple advantages of such an advance, there is also the opportunity to present to the public new inventions that do not have to (a) follow the beaten path for many decades, or (b) strive for the least common denominator between education and mental abilities. Part of a new idea, whether it’s an application or how it’s easier to work at a computer, may be a “recommendation to the user interface” on how to help the end user learn new ideas.
This means that the real computer revolution has not yet occurred .
And also that we will miss this if we do not learn to think outside the scope of the present, which was created by several inventions 40 years ago. One way to do this is to “cross out the present” and try to go beyond what we think we want to think about and what we really need . And only after that we will be able to understand the future potential of technologies in the context of the main traditions of writing and printing to strengthen our best natural parameters and help ourselves to go beyond the limits of the genetic cell towards a brighter fate.
- Alan Kay
Alan Kay is a tough guy, we congratulated him on Habra with a birthday .
I recall the merits of Alan.
- He worked in the legendary Xerox PARC, Atari, Apple, Disney, HP.
- He proposed the concept of Dynabook (in 1968), which determined the conceptual basis for a laptop, tablet computer and e-book.
- One of the “founding fathers” of object-oriented programming (SmallTalk, 1969).
- He participated in the creation of the first personal computer Xerox Alto (1973).
- The initiator of the useful movement "Every child on a laptop."
- In 2001, he founded the Viewpoints Research Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to children, learning, and cutting-edge software development.
- In 2006, he challenged the industry - he announced the possibility of creating an operating system with a graphical interface of 20,000 lines of code.
- In 2016, joined Y Combinator .
We decided to translate his most conceptual article and then bam, it turns out that in the original article there is no piece of text. We wrote to Viewpoints Research Institute, saying that you have a typo. Kim Rose answered us , explained everything, corrected and blessed.
Thank you for translating Yana Shchekotova, for supporting the publication - Edison (which specializes in automation of asphalt plants and developing payment systems and terminals ).
Kim Rose answer
Hello back!
Thank you for contacting us regarding your translation of Alan Kay's essay, "The future of reading ...."
We are very sorry to learn there is an error in the document, but very happy you have found it. When I looked to see the problem, I found (on a text version I had of the paper) that the graphic is overlaying the text there and has cut out one sentence, as you discovered.
The sentence following "The percent infected can be gathered and shown dynamically", should read, "Different sized populations can be tried. The smaller the population the more sparse the“ village ”and the longer it will take for infections to happen. (The "Lage" is part of "village".)
We are happy to know Alan's ideas will be shared by a wider group of non-English reading people and we thank you for your time to translate this essay.
If you have further questions, please do not hesitate to contact me again.
Regards,
Kim Rose
Viewpoints Research Institute
Thank you for contacting us regarding your translation of Alan Kay's essay, "The future of reading ...."
We are very sorry to learn there is an error in the document, but very happy you have found it. When I looked to see the problem, I found (on a text version I had of the paper) that the graphic is overlaying the text there and has cut out one sentence, as you discovered.
The sentence following "The percent infected can be gathered and shown dynamically", should read, "Different sized populations can be tried. The smaller the population the more sparse the“ village ”and the longer it will take for infections to happen. (The "Lage" is part of "village".)
We are happy to know Alan's ideas will be shared by a wider group of non-English reading people and we thank you for your time to translate this essay.
If you have further questions, please do not hesitate to contact me again.
Regards,
Kim Rose
Viewpoints Research Institute
The future of reading depends on the future study of things that are difficult to understand (Alan Kay).
We are engaged in “reading” when we interpret the meanings of certain phenomena. We read the terrain, traces, sky and clouds, faces, body language, art objects, books, films and television, sounds, smells and touches, the process of external objects performing certain actions, etc.
Here, we are most interested in a cursory reading of the anthropogenic phenomenon called “writing”: natural languages, mathematics, music, old and new computer means of interaction, including the user interface, and other systems that seek to capture, transmit and, most importantly, explain the main ideas.
Different representations of the “same thought” contain only a part of this thought and a condition for its “reading”. For example, reading the news in prose, poetry and on TV - all this gives a different impression. Marshall McLuhan once said that "you can argue about many things behind a stained window, but democracy is not one of them." He had in mind both a dirty window and television (our modern less pleasant equivalent).
Socrates once spoke about writing like this: "Writing eliminates the need to remember." It's like a prosthesis on a healthy limb, leading to its death. On the other hand, if you perceive new technologies as an amplifier that increasesand multiplies what we already have, and do not replace it, then we have the opportunity to use writing for its ability to overcome space and time, as well as effectiveness and the desire to maintain a demonstrative form, which is not applicable in oral speech.
And we can still learn to remember everything we read! In other words, writing is not the best substitute for memories used in the process of thinking - it is too inefficient - but it is a great way to cover different areas of knowledge and have more food for thought.
Plato must have appreciated the irony of the situation, because his beloved teacher complained about this means of transmitting information, and he perfectly used it to convey the thoughts and character of Socrates' personality.
The idea came up: there wasn’t enough Socrates at all, but Plato could copy Plato’s persuasive recreation of Socrates so that the printed editions of his Dialogues, with the help of more mediocre teachers, could influence the whole continent and potentially enrich every reader.
A similar question arises: what part of great thinking and great thinkers can be fixed with the help of a personal computer and the ubiquitous global network, and also what it takes to learn how to read and write them.
In each century, it was noted that, in general, it was more difficult for most people to learn to read and write than to learn their natural language, which is a bit surprising given the correspondence of speaking skills and one-to-one writing. We will return to this issue a bit later. Now we would like to know if these difficulties are inconvenient, or if mastering these skills could be useful. In other words, taking into account the abundance of technology, we need to figure out whether “ease of use” (corresponds to our current capabilities) is a blessing, or sometimes it is a trap (allows us to remain ourselves or reduces our significance).
To read and write fluently, you need to master new and hone existing skills as we change in the process. Anthropological studies of society show that a literate society thinks differently than that where only spoken language is used. Those. a competent society is not a “society with a developed oral speech and writing system”, but a new ecosystem of ideas and thinking.
McLuhan noted that what we have to turn into in order to use them easily plays the most important role in communications .
The more differences the means of communication have and the more complex it is, the less attractive or even noticeable it becomes. Another McLuhan idea is that the new means of communication, which were generally able to take root, first used the contents of older and more well-known media. For example, it was important that the printed version of the Gutenberg Bible was similar to the Bible, but at the same time would look like a copy of a manuscript made by hand. Over time, if a new media tool showed its potential, then they began to actively use it. The true purpose of the press was not to imitate a handwritten Bible, but to initiate new disputes about science and politics after 150 years. This is what forever changed Europe, and then America.
Рассмотрим американскую систему, которая была сформирована и поддерживала свое существование только за счет письменности и чтения. Книга Тома Пейна (Tom Paine) «Здравый смысл» была аргументом против здравомыслия, проявляемого в день, когда «Монархия казалась чем-то естественным». Наоборот, он утверждал, что «нам нужно сформировать свою систему управления». В газетах 13 колоний приводились доводы за и против конституции. Аргументы «за» были приведены в издании «Записки федералиста» («The Federalist Papers»), а аргументы «против» — в «Записках антифедералиста» («AntiFederalist Papers»).
The form of government was supposed to be republican (and here we recall Plato again), but its “defenders” had to be elected and, more importantly, rejected by the entire population. This meant that the people of America should reason similarly to the defenders of this form of government. Thomas Jefferson said:
“I do not know a safer way to maintain the maximum power of society than the people themselves; and if you think that they are not sufficiently educated in the implementation of the management process with a high level of distinction, then the best solution is not to deprive them of this, but to educate them. ” This is beyond the scope of “stained windows”!
Reading skills among the population needed to familiarize themselves with these kinds of ideas in their original form are under attack. Rating 1The U.S. Department of Education's adult ability to read well enough to understand these arguments found that in 1992 only 15% of people had the right skill, and in 2003 this figure dropped to 13% (and such a drop was a real and not an error of error ) This is not enough to support the original idea.
But what do these numbers really mean? America is a country of complex mixes of representatives of different cultures, many of them are still developing. More informative statistics during the study of the same Ministry of Education show what percentage of graduates after 4 years of college have the necessary skills. In 1992, this figure was 40%. This is amazing. How did the remaining 60% manage to get a diploma, even if they could not read at the “professional” level? By 2003, this number slipped to 31%, which is even more surprising.
In any situation, reading structured prose works could be forgotten. It is difficult to find and reflect all the causes of such changes. The simplest of them is that in the 19th century, people constantly read and wrote if they needed to go beyond space and time. As Neil Postman noted, there were no competitors. Those. when it was time to read or write something, and it was extremely important, then, as it turned out, an impressive number of people possessed such skills. 140 years after the invention of the telephone, many technologies have appeared that allow our deep addiction to oral communication to spread through electronic devices through time and space. Short news and sharing information about the world and someone else's acquaintances no longer requires strong writing and reading skills.
На тему «почему чтению и письму научиться сложнее», чем какому-либо естественному языку, написана куча замечательных книг. Самая лучшая из недавних — это «Пруст и кальмар» («Proust and the Squid»)2 выдающегося нейрофизиолога и эксперта по чтению Марианны Вульф. В ней представлен хороший исторический обзор систем письменности, некоторые последние открытия из области изучения мозга о навыке чтения и способности обучаться, а также основные принципы обучения чтению для большинства населения, которым не посчастливилось быть предварительно «подключенным» к процессу изучения этих навыков.
By the way, the reason why we can quickly learn a natural language, having been in linguistic traditions since childhood, and other animals, and even primates, cannot do this, lies in our brain, which, although plastic in every sense, is still not is a blank piece of paper, and contains structures organized by our genes that help us learn our language. But, despite this, this process does not proceed in one day, it needs years.
It is strange enough that even the very idea of writing was not so obvious to representatives of our family for 200,000 years of life on this planet. As far as we know, this process is only about 5000 years old, and what should have been the easiest way to organize writing, namely the creation of characters based on speech sounds and the very “recording of these sounds”, originated less than 3,000 years ago.
Why? Due to the effective processes that we need for speech, our physiological experience consists of directly recognizing by ear and expressing meaning directly, and does not boil down to collecting, at first, sounds, then morphemes, words and parts of speech. But this is also the experience that we get after how they learned to read fluently, or mastered any other skill: the components of the skill are grouped by the so-called direct perception and giving meaning.
It took much more time to come to other “strong ideas”. For example, mathematical systems based on abstractions, assumptions, inferences, and conclusions were discovered in Greece after the alphabet was invented, and perhaps partly because of this. The Greeks had several real scientists: Archimedes, Aristarchus, Eratosthenes, etc. But still, as far as we know, they did not have a “Science” as such. We do not know all the details of the Alexandrian era and the processes taking place in its stunning library, where, as expected, the specialists in mathematics and sciences tried to test each other's ideas using methods that could be called scientific.
For us, “modern science” appeared in the 17th century, and its qualitatively different methods of thinking about the world, about what confirmation, knowledge, proof, and even “truth”, transformed our world quickly and on a completely different level.
The advent of science has changed what has already been written and read, and also affected the awareness of what it is to read fluently and write quickly. For example, one of the most important books written in the entire history of mankind about important discoveries and conjectures is considered the “ Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy”Newton’s. To read it, you need to not only easily recognize letters, but also be able to read graphics and know the math. Theoretically, a modern "literate" person should be able to read this book, but, as Ch.P. Snow (CP Snow) in his essay “Two Cultures” 3 , which is what literacy is meant for, was not widely spread even among university professors.
Большинство из тех 13% американцев, которым под силу прочесть «Здравый смысл» Тома Пэйна, не могут прочесть книги, аналогичные «Математическим принципам» (или даже более простые, но с изложением научного характера). Это означает, что реальный процент потенциальных избирателей в США, способных справиться с проблемами, свойственными нашей эпохе, в действительности составляет всего лишь несколько процентов от взрослого населения.
Еще одна впечатляющая перспектива развития мира, в котором мы живем, появилась в XX веке. И имя ей Системы. Проще говоря, мы, люди, вплетены в четыре крупные системы систем: вселенная, социальные системы, системы технологий и мы сами: «Системы, в которых мы живем, и системы, которыми мы являемся».
Such a view of complexity has its own properties, forecasts, a set of concepts, dynamics, theories and principles. Many of the most important problems of the 21st century can be studied productively through the prism of system organization and dynamics.
In most systems, there are complex interactions between their parts that are difficult to understand with our limited minds, even with the help of modern mathematics. For example, many important natural systems (such as climate, epidemics), society (the beginning of the 1920s in Germany, the modern Middle East or the USA), technology (Chernobyl), and our bodies (the circulatory system or the system for regulating blood glucose levels) they can probably remain stable for many years, but then they suddenly turn into states that have a negative effect and are quite dangerous for us.
Today, many of these life systems can be disassembled and made more predictable. At the end of the 20th century, such systems moved into the category of more conceivable objects, because a tool for processing complex dynamic interactions was invented in the middle of the 20th century. And it was called a computer.
Some children have already begun to "competently understand the systems." For example, a 10-year-old child can draw a small red typewriter in Etoys 4 and write a script that would make it move in a circle.
You can make a copy with a similar behavior, and repaint the machine in blue. To see if the blue and red cars collided, and when this condition is fulfilled, repainting the blue car into red, even a child can write a small program. It can be assumed that the blue machine is a healthy person, and the red one is a sick person.
You can create thousands of tiny blue cars and just one red one, and then run the program to run to observe the nature of the spread of the epidemic. The percentage of infected can be calculated and displayed graphically during the execution of the program.
You can take a settlement with a different number of inhabitants. The fewer people, the more "village" will be discharged, and the longer it will take for the infection to spread. Children are fascinated by such inconstancy of “good luck”. And yet, all the villagers die. Rapidly spreading infections are like typhoid fever, and slowly spreading infections are like AIDS. And it will be seen that typhoid fever is visible to everyone, and AIDS will fall out of sight until it is too late.
The child created a model 5leading to the answer to the question of why it is extremely important to pay attention to incurable fatal diseases, and it does not matter how it looks from the side of a sane person. Millions, perhaps even billions, of adults, do not have these answers, and they die because of their absence. A child can post the results of emulation on the Internet, on a YouTube-like site for children's projects, and other children can download them, think over these results, make changes, etc.
From the point of view of this work, we have now revealed a whole new set of ideas that we need to study and think not only from the point of view of science, but also from the point of view of systems, and we have also added a new powerful and different tool for working with information - dynamic tool for creative thoughts 7, in addition to reading and writing skills that we need to learn.
What do children need to know in order to “write” their own emulator of the spread of the epidemic, and what should they learn in order to be able to “read” the results of this emulation and the results of similar projects of other children? And how can we help them learn new things? Can a computer by itself provide assistance, and not just be a wonderful new "box for creating the dynamics of various processes"?
You can consider a computer as a development of mathematics - it introduces new ways of creating models of various objects of our world, on which we want to concentrate. But we can also objectively believe that a computer is a qualitatively new way of understanding the many types of complexity (this is just how comprehensive the idea is that it constructs its own world).
As Frank Smith 6 noted , all “literacy” originates in ideas that we perceive as quite important and put our efforts into them, and also want to share them and our thoughts with others (and, what’s also important, get feedback) . This gave birth to writing systems, and then to the processes of teaching reading and writing, which is very intertwined с такими идеями. Появились грамотность и литература.
В какой-то момент достаточное количество новых идей, сдерживающих текущую систему мысли, перерастет в новое мыслительное пространство и, зачастую, приходится придумывать новые виды систем представления информации, ведущих к переосмыслению понятий грамотности и литературы.
Это подводит нас к главной идее данной работы: большое будущее «чтения» зависит от будущего «обучения сложным для понимания вещам».
Большинство из придуманных «масштабных идей», таких как математика, наука, равные права, системы, музыкальные структуры, такие как гармония и контрапункт, и прочее, пришлось изобрестиbecause they are not so explicitly embedded in our genetically engineered brains. We can study them to some extent, because we are able to create structures that are a bit like biological brains from internal images based on languages and the ability to manipulate them. For example, we have no connections for the concept of change , for which calculus was invented, but we are pretty good at artificial calculus systems, and we can beat the great geniuses of antiquity in these areas.
In many ways, the main reason for creating a structured educational process is to help people learn things that are difficult to understand . But many current educational systems misunderstand the real state of affairs of "learning a new". Simply put, we are practically blind, deaf, paralyzed and dumb. McLuhan, as always, spoke well on this subject: "Until I believe, I will not see." In other words, the new is by the definition of “something that has not yet been encountered before,” and if we are able to comprehend it, we will achieve this because our mind has learned to see, hear and touch. And we will not be able to state it beautifully for many reasons. As head teacher Tim Gallway 7 said : “One of the big problems with standard education is that the main parts of the body and mind that should be involved in the learning process do not understand English!”
There is a perception limit on the number of elements, for example, according to George Miller 8this is a number from the range of 7 ± 2 elements. When we begin to learn something new, our images are still very weak, and it’s easy to confuse us. The process of creating, combining and growing blocks of information should be regulated with caution.
Pavese Cesare once said: "To know the world, you must first create it," which implies both mental and, in most cases, physical labor. The great composer of the 20th century, Paul Hindemith, called the connection between music and man "creation." Those. what, on the whole, actually happens in art and learning, is not just “laboratory rat reflexes”, but the creation in the mind of our own version of what we are trying to learn and do.
If we consider the last two paragraphs together, we can see how some difficulties arise in teaching and teaching. We have a lot of problems with this “ something ”, and also we need to somehow manage to come up with versions for “something” that have not even become this “something”, but which are needed to get to the bottom of “ something ". To learn things that are difficult to understand, this can turn out to be a long and often painful and damp process, even when the optional overcoming of difficulties has been removed from experience. These difficulties have not yet been eliminated, and they can spend many hours, and most often thousands of hours, to create internal parallel working mental “agents” that will manifest themselves as components of our nervous system when a need arises to develop a skill.
Moreover, each of us has our own predisposition to a certain subject, depending both on the genetic level and on life experience. Someone needs quite a bit of help, someone needs a little more, and someone needs a lot of help in various aspects. Someone will be very motivated, and someone will not show even the slightest interest.
Объединив эти два вывода, несложно придумать как минимум 15-25 «типов» учеников, с которыми придется столкнуться в образовательном процессе. Несмотря на это, у большинства образовательных систем всего лишь один учебный план для всех. Отчасти это происходит вследствие невежества, но по большей части это последствия взаимодействия традиции и экономики: традиции, когда для каждого предмета свой учитель множество дней подряд, и экономической ситуации с ее доводами за «темпы повышения экономического роста за счет роста объема производства».
If you look at the situation from a different angle, for the most part in music and sports education predominantly individual training with an expert once or twice a week, a large amount of individual work, group work, where the main “practice” takes place, and a lot of years of hard work . This leads to good results, as most students really have difficulty trying to understand the weekly explanations of the experts, which may suit them according to their capabilities, style or rhythm, or maybe not. In general, it would be much better if they spend several hours each day on self-study, and meet with an expert to test knowledge and get feedback, and practice several times a week.
Only a few universities use this approach in academic studies, sometimes called the "tutorial system" (a system of training by attaching students to individual consultants). In the UK, such universities include Oxford and Cambridge.
This principle of “more than one-on-one training, but with weekly peer review and feedback” is quite important.
And again, briefly distracting ourselves to consider this thought: “The future of studying things that are difficult to understand depends on the students' desire to spend a huge number of hours, or even years, to become a professional in this business”
Here one could add: “... And also from the ability and desire of society to motivate students in various ways so that they would like to invest their efforts in this pile of hours. ”
According to experts, it would be very sad to take tennis lessons and not have a professional tennis player to play together (or even the opportunity to play). Or take piano lessons from a teacher who doesn’t play, or who won’t play with students. But first of all, how can they evaluate the student’s current knowledge in reality? What kind of motivation was laid in it, if the specialist himself clearly does not love this activity enough to burn with a desire to do it? But, of course, in the traditional education system this happens all the time.
Compared with many official educational processes, for a large number of subjects it is preferable to use the method of Socrates from the book, which changed the western train of thought. This at least happens one on one, at a pace convenient for the student, using a type of writing that changes our thinking. But, ultimately, this does not give enough feedback about the work, and often there is not enough practice that could really help the student master things that are difficult to understand. Something more is needed.
What about Socrates in the computer? Here you need something more substantial than the book counterpart, because the computer is an active participant, and he can recognize the behavior of students: where their eyes are directed, how much they are interested, the presence of doubt and the degree of confidence, etc.
But what can be done now? And what is the future scope and limit of the computer as a “superbook,” “a dynamic book,” such as Dynabook ! 9.10 , because both of them are meta-level information transmission tools that can contain characteristics and other similar tools, especially those that cannot exist without a computer, as well as a detailed guide that will help students learn difficult to understand things?
It was difficult to find answers to questions regarding social motivation, charisma of teachers and other things for almost six centuries, until a printed book appeared. There are many reasons why a person may want to learn to read, and then read in order to learn. But we cannot attribute any intrinsic properties to such means of disseminating information as a book or computer when we declare that their very existence will induce everyone to study what they need , and not just to satisfy their desires . An essential part of the importance of education in any society is to make people strive for what they need.. You can turn to the history of books and see some compromises, including the warning story about Madame Bovary, and there will be no doubt that most of this will be applied when using a computer as a means of recording, reading and disseminating information.
These tasks are quite complex. We can argue about what computers should do in addition to their basic functions of storing and displaying pictures of the past.
Many of the ideas of modern authors about what a personal computer can and should be like formed in the 60s after reading about learning environments managed by students. This topic was covered in the works of Maria Montessori 11, the patron saint of this direction, who wrote at the beginning of the 20th century, O.K. Moore (OK Moore) in the early 60s, and Seymour Papert (Seymour Papert) a few years later.
Montessori was a genius of a special type, which cannot be described in three words. Working with children as a doctor with extensive knowledge in the field of psychology and anthropology, she established an in-depth relationship between how children's behavior is determined by their genetic heritage in the process of learning their native language and culture from their environment, and came to the conclusion that schools can It would be organized in this way: “We live in the 20th century, and for children, the environment at home, in schools, is more like the 10th century. What would happen if we embodied the progressive ideas of our time in an environment where children would grow naturally? ” Some of her ideas about the environment are presented in the form of physical objects in Montessori classes, in particular, these are special toys developed by her for children, who experienced side effects from in-depth learning through the game. Other ideas were based on the treatment of children, and on what actions are expected from them, as well as how they interact. It worked just awesome! Children willingly plunged into the process, imbued with the ideas and spirit of this new educational project.
Psychologist O.K. Moore, while studying at Yale in the early 60s, 12 was also interested in somewhat similar ideas. He determined the characteristics of the reacting medium, which:
- allows students to freely explore the world;
- immediately informs the students about the consequences of their actions;
- has an adjustable pace, i.e. the student himself sets the speed of events occurring inside the environment.
- Allows students to use their full program to discover various types of connections.
- possesses such a structure, on the basis of which students are most likely to make a series of interconnected discoveries about the physical, cultural and social world.
He called such an environment: " self-contained , if you engage in the environment for his own sake, and not for the sake of rewards or evading punishment, which has no direct connection with the activity itself 13 ". By “discovery” he meant “discovery conducted under unobtrusive supervision” in the sense in which Montessori, Vygostky 14 , Bruner 15 and Peypert 16 understood it : (that is, to admit that it is extremely difficult for people to generate good ideas from scratch— hence the need for forms of management - but this is best known when the student makes efforts to independently create the final connections - hence the need for the process of discovery).
Moore directed his efforts to thinking and creatingA self-responsive, responsive environment that helps children learn to read through writing. He wanted to use the child’s craving for action in the creation process along with a sense of beauty and the desire for learning to build his own forms. This is not so easy, because, for example, to learn their native language, children need to talk a lot.
In the early 60's, Moore developed a “talking typewriter,” which responded to what young children were typing (at first it was a room with a Selectric typewriter, and next to a room with a student who had a microphone, and he could watch the child’s actions and respond to them). There was nothing but a typewriter in the room, and this was an important plan to make (based on our current knowledge, there is no need to explain why this point is critical!). Conductors to such an environment were the children themselves, not adults. Written by a first grader
We went to Boston, and when we went we had to stop to have dinner. We stayed with friends. When we got to the place, it was already 10 o’clock in the evening, it was already high time to go to bed. We woke up mom. I mostly watched TV. Dad watched it with me, and mom talked to Ally Friss. When dad did not watch TV, he talked with Uncle Al. It was fun!
Written by a preschooler
. Everything is fine with mom. Plaster was removed from her leg. Now she can take me to school. I'm glad of that.
Written by kindergartener
Pam, you could someday become a nanny. But, when you are a (sic) nanny, you cannot scream like you do now.
One interesting rule of the environment is that children can leave at any time, but then they will not be able to return until the next day (this is very similar to one of Montessori’s principles for choosing a toy).
The extended curriculum that Moore developed was rich and comprehensive, and also covered most aspects of language learning, including the ability to read and write. The key moment was how the “typewriter” responded to their actions in order to encourage them to start writing words that they knew. Children have a strong desire to createsomething and they loved to read the words and sentences written by them. This turned into a desire to read everything. Many of the ideas presented here have followed the same course as the latest assumptions of modern reading teaching experts such as Wulf.
The “real” thing for these 4 and 5-year-olds was the work of reporters in the newspaper, where it was necessary to write stories about what, in their opinion, would result in interesting news. Newspaper editors were first graders. As you might think, the results were impressive. (It’s worth imagining how these little children in the early 60s managed with a mimeograph and hectograph with the participation of adults!)
Moore's prophetic ideas were too far ahead of the computer technology of the time. But today they sound more sensible and sensible than ever. The best of them are based on how to use students' mental abilities and incentives to develop deep internal motivation for a large number of hours of training and practice. (Some of these ideas were used in the original PARC GUI - and we really wanted to get closer to the “instantly responsive”, and not just the “responsive” interface, but we still did not have the right level of understanding how to do this)
Since then, the ideas They tried to implement Mura several times, for example, in the mid-80s, when IBM carried out extensive work in the “Write to Read” project with the advent of PC 17, which was a great success, but still was a rather expensive undertaking in most respects.
Today, a real "talking typewriter" with auxiliary tools for choosing the topic of discussion "requires a lot of research effort, similar to those that led to the invention of the PC and the Internet in the 70s. Moore's approach consisted entirely of exemplary ideas that can be used today, but there are still too many dependencies. Instead, let's think of these ideas as part of a larger system that is necessary in order to bring PC capabilities closer to its most important development points.
The mathematician Seymour Papert, together with the children's psychologist Piaget, created a programming language for children that embodies advanced mathematical principles in a form that fits well in children's heads. The way to program the cars from the previous epidemic example is based on Papert's ideas. Children studied complex mathematical laws, independently performing mathematical actions by writing programs that were considered "real mathematics into which the computer breathed life." And again, a new future was invented for reading and writing (and reading through writing).
Which brings us to yet another important point: the future of learning things that are difficult to understand is the future.learning how to create hard-to-do things . In other words, the future of "reading" depends on the future of "writing."
A critical and provocative approach to this situation is that many of these processes of teaching reading and writing are quite applicable in teaching mathematics, music, computer design, and even scientific and engineering activities (the latter is “even” introduced because children who conduct research and engineering in the real world are faced with much more complex perception problems than those whose world of interests is fully represented in the computer environment). For example, what is our child doing now, sitting in a corner with white powder and dark liquid. Is it baking soda and vinegar or something else? Etc.
This is the true essence of personal computers and highly portable personal devices such as Dynabook in particular. Although part of the design itself and the convenience for people relate to the physical form and sensations of the device, 95% of the Dynabook design is based on the wealth of services that this device can provide to its owner, and above all, it is an interface that promotes learning, and not only reacts to actions user. That’s why the author answered questions about various consumer devices “Is this (for example, iPad) not Dynabook?” like this: “No. It has more performance than you could imagine in 1968, but it still lacks the basic functionality and user guide. ”
We looked at the past and present of the “learning to read” and “write” environments using technology. What are the real chances of moving to the next level of introduction of active teaching and learning in computer technology? For example, suppose we gained a lot of experience helping people learn a subject, using people as teachers and trainers, and we would like to create a computer environment that could do everything possible, but without the participation of experts. Then we restrict ourselves to those subjects whose objects of study can be fully represented in a computer environment, such as reading and writing, mathematics, computer use, and programming. We strive to create a computer assistant in cognitive activity, which will be better than a complete absence of a teacher, better than a bad teacher,
At a minimum, we need:
- see and interpret what the student does and feels;
- be able to communicate in ordinary human ways;
- good model of the subject;
- a good idea of how it is best for different students to learn the subject of study;
- a good model of human reasoning based on "common sense" to place the assistant tutor in conditions as close as possible to those in which the students are located;
- "Theory of relations", i.e. strategies that help to avoid the "prosthetics" of knowledge, and to contribute to the formation of skills and ideas within the student;
- authoring systems for “computer assistants' teachers” that would allow experts in a specific subject area and in pedagogy to inform the general system of personal training about specific subjects and methods of a particular approach.
It is easy to understand why this was considered a very difficult task over the past 50-odd years. But progress has occurred on many points.
- a. Now on computers it is possible to use video cameras to track the student’s eye movement in real time, the level of interest in what is happening (pupilometry), as well as to recognize the face and its expression. You can listen not only to what the student is saying, but also, to some extent, evaluate his psychological state.
- b. Computers already better understand highly contextualized speech and written language, and can also reproduce it all.
- c. Good computer models have already been created for some objects — for example, for geometry 18 , some text structures, lexical units of programming languages.
- d. We still lack an in-depth computer representation of how subjects should be taught to different types of students.
- e. We now have in our arsenal comprehensive working models of human reasoning based on “common sense” 19 .
- f. We are missing examples on how to avoid the “Siri syndrome”, i.e. using a computer as a servant, and how to "convince a student to want to learn how to ride a bike, not drive a car."
- g. At this stage, the authoring systems of computer tutors need designers of expert models and a large number of man-hours of various types of people in order to reproduce some real experience for the student.
Of course, the presence of components does not bring us any closer to a simple way to create the whole picture, especially when the combination is very complex and has many connections. However, in some cases it is easy to see how some particles help others. For example, a good working model of a human sound vision of the world and reasoning can be used to increase the necessary degree of understanding of what the student is doing, saying, asking what he needs. The reasoning block, as in the CYC 13 system , can rephrase ambiguous questions from students into 3-4 simple questions and ask to clarify which one was meant 20 .
Many successful tutors modeled human teachers, but this method turned out to be quite expensive and had some spontaneity such as, for example, systems based on the ACT-R architecture of Anderson, Koedinger 12 , and others. Carefully designed Acuitus 21 systemsrecently provided reports with impressive results. The operation of these systems is mainly based on reference situations with thousands of manually generated events, and is quite expensive. However, for objects of the bulk of consumers, such as reading in the early stages, grade 3 arithmetic, grade 9 algebra, elementary programming courses, etc., costs can be attributed to a whole nation of students. This is worth doing, because, having achieved the appropriate dynamics and good user experience, we will discover what we need to bring to mind, and can lead to more compact, more automated ways to create such systems. Despite the subsequent long-term prospects, the government hates investing in such learning curves.
As you ponder these problems, it’s important to understand that among all the necessary inventions that contributed to the successful development of personal computers, the key to a billion users was the graphical user interface, which is practical, often pleasant, and now completely invisible in the gap between two very different from each other by the world of people and the world that is hidden inside the computer.
Since in the 60-70s, the ARPA / PARC research community created a responsive graphical interface, the user interface style and developments on this topic, in fact, have not really advanced. Even a seeming interface middleman like Siri, for the most part, is a simple extension of the user search and notification system, which has been part of the responsive interface for several decades.
The technique of people communicating with computers turned out to be quite promising, almost universal, and relatively easy to use. But she has not yet shown all her capabilities and, more importantly, much needs to be done in this area.
The next qualitative transformation in the user interface of the environment will be: a teacher for each student - user interfaces that can significantly help end users to master new ideas and whole subjects.
In addition to the obvious simple advantages of such an advance, there is also the opportunity to present to the public new inventions that do not have to (a) follow the beaten path for many decades, or (b) strive for the least common denominator between education and mental abilities. Part of a new idea, whether it’s an application or how it’s easier to work at a computer, may be a “recommendation to the user interface” on how to help the end user learn new ideas.
This means that the real computer revolution has not yet occurred .
And also that we will miss this if we do not learn to think outside the scope of the present, which was created by several inventions 40 years ago. One way to do this is to “cross out the present” and try to go beyond what we think we want to think about and what we really need . And only after that we will be able to understand the future potential of technologies in the context of the main traditions of writing and printing to strengthen our best natural parameters and help ourselves to go beyond the limits of the genetic cell towards a brighter fate.
Notes and references
i A First Look at the Literacy of America's Adults in the 21st Century, National Assessment of Adult Literacy,
US Dept of Education, NCES 2006-470
ii Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid, Harper, 2007
iii CP Snow, “The Two Cultures ”, Canto Classics (reprinted 2012)
iv Alan Kay, Etoys, Children, and Learning
Alan Kay, Etoys, Authoring, and Media
v These examples were inspired by the work of Seymour Papert, Mitchel Resnick, and several decades of
our own research
vi Frank Smith, Essays Into Literacy, Heineman, 1983
vii Tim Gallwey, The Inner Game of Tennis, Random House, 1974
viii George Miller, The Magic Number 7 ± 2
ix Alan Kay, A Personal Computer For Children Of All Ages, Proc ACM Nat'l Conf, Boston, August 1972
x Alan Kay, A Dynamic Medium For Creative Thought, Proc Nat'l Council of Teachers of English, November
1972
xi Maria Montessori , The Secret of Childhood, Ballantine Books, 1972
xii OK Moore, Autotelic Responsive Environments and Exceptional Children, Experience, Structure and
Adaptability (ed. Harvey), Springer, 1966
xiii Anderson and Moore, Autotelic Folk Models, Sociological Quarterly, 1959
xiv Lev Vygotsky, Thought and Language, Revised Edition, MIT Press, 1986
xv Jerome Bruner, Toward a Theory of Instruction, Harvard / Belknap Press, 1965
xvi Seymour Papert, Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas, Basic Books, 1993
Mitchel Resnick, Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams, MIT Press, 1994
xvii John Henry Martin, Writing To Read, Warner Books, 1986
xviii Kenneth Koedinger, The Geometry Tutor, CMU
xix Douglas Lenat, CYC, Cycorp
xx Lenat, D., Witbrock, M., Baxter, D., Blackstone, E., Deaton, C., Schneider, D., Scott, J., and Shepard , B.
(2010) Harnessing Cyc to Answer Clinical Researchers' ad hoc Queries. AI Magazine, 31 (3), Fall, 2010
xxi Acuitus Web Site
US Dept of Education, NCES 2006-470
ii Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid, Harper, 2007
iii CP Snow, “The Two Cultures ”, Canto Classics (reprinted 2012)
iv Alan Kay, Etoys, Children, and Learning
Alan Kay, Etoys, Authoring, and Media
v These examples were inspired by the work of Seymour Papert, Mitchel Resnick, and several decades of
our own research
vi Frank Smith, Essays Into Literacy, Heineman, 1983
vii Tim Gallwey, The Inner Game of Tennis, Random House, 1974
viii George Miller, The Magic Number 7 ± 2
ix Alan Kay, A Personal Computer For Children Of All Ages, Proc ACM Nat'l Conf, Boston, August 1972
x Alan Kay, A Dynamic Medium For Creative Thought, Proc Nat'l Council of Teachers of English, November
1972
xi Maria Montessori , The Secret of Childhood, Ballantine Books, 1972
xii OK Moore, Autotelic Responsive Environments and Exceptional Children, Experience, Structure and
Adaptability (ed. Harvey), Springer, 1966
xiii Anderson and Moore, Autotelic Folk Models, Sociological Quarterly, 1959
xiv Lev Vygotsky, Thought and Language, Revised Edition, MIT Press, 1986
xv Jerome Bruner, Toward a Theory of Instruction, Harvard / Belknap Press, 1965
xvi Seymour Papert, Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas, Basic Books, 1993
Mitchel Resnick, Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams, MIT Press, 1994
xvii John Henry Martin, Writing To Read, Warner Books, 1986
xviii Kenneth Koedinger, The Geometry Tutor, CMU
xix Douglas Lenat, CYC, Cycorp
xx Lenat, D., Witbrock, M., Baxter, D., Blackstone, E., Deaton, C., Schneider, D., Scott, J., and Shepard , B.
(2010) Harnessing Cyc to Answer Clinical Researchers' ad hoc Queries. AI Magazine, 31 (3), Fall, 2010
xxi Acuitus Web Site