| Chieh on Education / Technology and Education In this essay, we will start a discussion about how to make our schools more efficient. For now, efficiency is covered in a heuristic manner rather than viewing it as a mathematical formula. The mathematical portion will be covered in a later section after the psychology essay. Looking back at our Blizzard example, we see that the company has developed computer software that acts as a teacher by providing information about a virtual world. The benefit of having a software program is that it only needs to be developed once for everybody to enjoy. This is similar to producing a movie. A movie, although its initial cost is large, only needs to be produced once, yet millions or even billions of people thereafter can watch the same movie. This is what I mean when I say that we must grasp how technology makes our lives more efficient. Before the advent of motion pictures, actors worked in plays. Can you imagine the amount of work required for a single actor to serve millions of people? It would have been impossible. But technology made it possible today with motion pictures. There is no doubt that technology is one of the biggest factors in increasing human productivity. If you just look at all the major advancements in the history of civilization, they are normally associated with some kind of technological breakthrough or discovery. Think about the impact of fire, the wheel, the printing press, electricity, light bulbs, computers, the Internet, and of course Google. Each one of these advancements has forever changed how people live, play, and work. Let's just take the invention of the printing press as an example. We take it for granted that we today can just go on a computer and find anything we want to read directly from Google. But before the printing press, making a piece of writing available for the world would have simply been too much work. There are things that machines can do faster and better. Making the discovery is only half of the story. Real success comes after learning how to leverage the technology. Before the advent of public radio and voice recording, singers never had the same status as singers today. Singers today are so much more famous because they leverage voice recording to reach the world population instantaneously. Before voice recording, no matter how well you could sing, the amount of people you could reach was capped by the number people who could hear you at any given moment. Therefore, a singer's career was limited by his or her physical stamina. The difference between then and now in terms of the amount of effort made and the potential goods and services produced for the world is immense. Since the invention of voice recording, a singer can sing only once and her voice will reach as far as the number of people willing to listen. This is an example of how the music industry has leveraged technology. This exact method was extended when motion pictures were invented. Actors jumped on the bandwagon and took advantage of the same type of leverage. As a result, many actors today are worshiped. With the invention of the printing press, authors today are also able to reach the entire world. The ability of technology to leverage human time is a theme we want to focus on here. With the advent of the digital age, almost any information can be recorded once and shared over and over again. And of course, more and more people are realizing this fact and are leveraging their time using the latest technologies. Instead of songs, movies, and books, however, people are publishing their personal lives on blogs, giving and getting advice on forums, and even publishing pictures of their pet fish. The idea is very simple in how they leverage their time. They only have to do something once, and as long as they have it recorded, they can share it as many times as they want, even without their presence. This transformation to the digital world has revolutionized human productivity, and our ability to transfer information has never been cheaper. We can see the impact of the digital age in almost every industry. Yet as more and more of society is taking advantage of the digital age, our schools are left behind in the Stone Age. While many other professions are enjoying the benefits of technology, our schools are still stuck in the most primitive method of information transfer. Just like singers and actors before radio and movies, we still rely on interpersonal transfer of information. I have been building up to this point using singers and actors as examples because the analogy is so striking. Now let's take a closer look at the efficiency and productivity of a singer before and after audio recording. The value of a song is only worth as much as the number of people it can reach, and when singers were still relying on interpersonal transfer, they couldn't reach many people. As a result, the value and productivity of their information (a song) was not worth very much to themselves or to the world. This is the argument I am making for our teachers: we have yet to take advantage of the technology that has already innovated many other industries. If we are going to make our schools more efficient and cost effective, I urge educators to learn from the success of others and innovate. In my opinion, in an age like ours, we really should be automating the teaching of raw facts as much as possible. Kids are not stupid. They can learn that George Washington was the father of our country watching a YouTube video just as well as watching a teacher speaking in front of the class. Learning in our primary schools today concentrates so much on getting facts straight, it often neglects the second part of learning. As a recurring theme of this book, the second part of education is the ability to use the actual knowledge. To become more efficient, I believe we should automate the first part (facts) as much as possible, while conserving our teachers' time for the second part of learning. The presence of a teacher is essential in learning, but I believe we have been using our teachers in the wrong places. It just doesn't make sense to have every teacher reinvent the wheel on how to teach some fact. It makes more sense to record the best teachers and use that recording as a supplement to ease our teacher burdens. With all the time freed up by the use of automation, teachers could then spend more time answering questions, having class discussions, taking more field trips, and setting up interesting labs and experiments. Teachers could concentrate on more hands on stuff. The point here is that facts can be learned easily through any medium. But wisdom and how knowledge can be applied in life are lessons that machines simply cannot replace. The teachers are the ones who know how to use that knowledge, and they should be spending more of their time sharing their wisdom instead of grading exams. The good news is that there are signs of change starting from the most prestigious schools. Schools such as MIT and Berkeley are leading the pack in providing video lectures for the public. Although there is still much to improve, they are definitely breaking new frontiers in storing digital information. Yet even with some of the universities recording their lectures on video, I envision something even more advanced. I envision an interactive program that not only teaches the material but also anticipates possible questions, leads students into more difficult practice questions, charts the progress of the student, and informs the student when his or her aptitude meets the standard to move on. A program like that would provide immediate feedback for mistakes as well as encouragement for improvement. And most importantly, we could even make this program fun! The benefit of digitizing our education could be seen immediately in many contexts. If we look at learning as a modern digital communication problem, it solves the problem of throughput. Let's pose an example to better understand this concept. Since every child has a different learning speed, it is very difficult for teachers to accommodate every child without holding others back. And it is almost impossible to teach to every child's potential without losing the rest of the class. As we will see later, classes with multiple students per single teacher are an extremely inefficient way to transfer knowledge. This is mostly because the teacher can only teach at a single pace while each student learns at a different speed. The teacher might teach too quickly for half of the class and too slowly for the other half. Unless all the students are at the relatively same level, it becomes extremely difficult for teachers to pace the lectures accordingly. However, if every student was able to learn independently from each other on separate computers, the teacher could spend more time with kids who had questions without holding up the rest of the class. Simultaneously, the kids who learn faster could move onto the next lecture without putting pressure on the rest of the kids. Everybody would end up learning at the speed most comfortable to them. We could even further improve the software to help the teacher pinpoint children who are having difficulty. The program could be set up in such a way that it maintains a constant dialog with the student. These dialogs might be in the format of short questions regarding what the student had learned. By collecting periodic performances on these questions, the software would be able to determine each student's current proficiency. The data could then be collected and sent to the teacher in real time to show which students are answering the questions correctly while noting those students who are lost. Lastly, since this is a program, it doesn't have to be in the format of lectures. Instead, it could take the form of challenging games. Inside a game, we don't necessarily need a teacher figure. Instead, the game itself could be an educational exercise. Or better yet, it could even be a real life simulation of the course material. Ironically, my call for virtual learning is already being embraced by our United States government. To be able to learn in virtual reality has already saved our government a lot of money, and its success will likely continue.1 Although this innovation currently exists in government, the concept is only being used in the military sector and not in the education sector. More and more of our soldiers today are being trained using virtual simulations. Military exercises that once cost millions of dollars can now be done for practically nothing. With simulation, our soldiers can practice the same scenarios over and over again without waiting for set up time. Pilots can gain flying experience without being inside a plane. The ideas presented in this chapter are already being implemented with much success. All of the data suggests that the digitization of our military has increased efficiency while greatly reducing costs. Observing this trend, I believe that digitization will do the same thing with our education. To make our schools more efficient, I believe as a country we should get together to produce a centralized repository of public digital lectures and software. Individual schools as well as students could then have access to this wealth of information. For the students who had trouble understanding their teachers, they could watch the same topic from a second or even third perspective. The students could then use the software to help them solve practice problems. Other software could also be designed in a game format that reinforces learning through fun activities. When students feel comfortable with the subject, they could then print out their own sample exams to test their understanding. Over time, the video lectures could become more and more sophisticated. Instead of having static videos, we could have three-dimensional teachers that allow students to pause and ask questions. This is a feasible plan because the technology is actually already available today. Wikipedia is a perfect example of what I am talking about. When you are reading about a topic in Wikipedia, there are very often words or concepts that you do not understand. At this point, you might see a link on that particular word that takes you to another page that further explains the concept. Now if we could do exactly the same thing in a video lecture format, students could pause a video when they have questions and jump to another video that answers their questions. This process could repeat indefinitely until the students are satisfied, and then they could return to the original lecture. I want you to notice that nowhere in this process is a human teacher necessary. No teachers are required to standby, and students are able to learn on their own. The amount of value this centralized digital library could bring to America is tremendous. If we look at this process from an efficiency perspective, the amount of time spent in producing any particular video would not amount to very much. Yet that same lecture would be able to benefit the entire nation. The amount of benefit per single teacher hour is astounding. That same hour normally used to teach a class of thirty children could now be used to teach every child in America. While writing this section, I recognize that since most readers will not have a computer science background, many of the proposed software innovations might simply sound like pie in the sky. It might be even harder to believe that we already have technology to interact with a video in real time. For those readers, I would encourage you to look into what YouTube.com has already done. Through the usage of Flash technology, you are able to link a point in the video to another. In other words, while watching a single video, people are able to pause it and jump to another video. This is equivalent to stopping a teacher to ask a question. This technology could be easily altered so when a person pauses a video, a list of potential questions could pop out. Depending on your question, you could jump to another video that answers your question. Although the technology is there, what we lack is an organized effort to use this technology for our education. If we were to have this automated teaching system, notice the amount of pressure that would be taken off our teachers. Teachers are humans too, and they only have a finite amount of time. Questions that could easily be addressed by videos could now be answered without the teachers. This would free up the teachers to answer the more difficult questions, which is a more valuable use of their time. If students do not get help from teachers during school hours, they are often left to their own resources. This implies that children without educated adults in the family are at a disadvantage when they go home. Without someone to help them, it becomes very difficult to complete their homework. Over time, their inability to receive the attention they need will weaken their confidence and motivation. Time after time, educational statistics show a strong correlation between a student's academic success and the educational level of the parents.2 This is a result that concurs with my own research. A household missing intellectual support can damage a child's academic self-esteem, and this is especially true for young children. With lower self-esteem, children are less likely to try as hard as others as their academic career progresses, pushing them back further and further. Over time, this lack of self-esteem can accumulate to destroy a child's chances for higher education. However, with readily available resources online, we could begin to close the gap between families with different backgrounds. If a child has trouble understanding the material in class, he or she could always get extra help when they get home. Video lectures could teach the same material with a different style that might better suit the student's learning preference. The video could also act as a tutor who goes through example problems with the student. This digital library could also improve itself through a feedback mechanism. For example, if a common question is always asked regarding a video lecture, this could become a cue that perhaps we should revise the video to explain the concept more clearly. Individuals should also be able to donate lectures on the same topic. This would provide a wider variety of viewpoints for the students. Students could then rate the lectures so the best lectures would automatically float to the top. |
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