Association for the
Advancement of Computing in Education
Celebrating 30+ Years of
Service to the IT in Education / E-Learning Community
Celebrating 30+ Years of
Service to the IT in Education / E-Learning Community
Keynote SpeakerWe would like our uses of technology to be amplifications of our best efforts -- rather than being like prosthetics, which hooked to healthy limbs soon cause them to wither. To come up with powerful visions for better approaches to education we have to think about the balance between our minds and our external helpers. For example, should we learn reading as a way to avoid remembering? Or should we learn reading as a way to learn much more internally, and via perspectives that are not possible through oral modes of thought? All musicians know that "the music is not in the piano" -- the piano technology is there to amplify and enrich our musical impulses, not to substitute for musical feeling and thought. The computer is a "meta-medium" -- its content is descriptions of processes that comprehend all existing media, plus media that cannot exist directly in the physical world. This means we can simulate over a very wide spectrum. We can simulate television, brain-dead textbooks, wonderful new ways to help people learn, old games and new games, and so on. The wide range of possibilities presents deep problems of vision, goals and design for aspiring educators. This talk suggests a number of powerful directions that use the technology in its deepest forms of human amplification.
