Photograph by Mark Garvin
We asked Steven O. Kimbrough, a Wharton professor and philosopher by training who teaches computing and computer-supported rational decision-making, what he thought about computer-aided instruction.
Q. What happened to all that programmed learning that people thought would revolutionize education when personal computers first came out?
A. Initially, it was all text based. So you would read things, respond to questions and get feedback on how well you did.
There's been research that's gone on for 30 to 40 years. It's been shown that people do learn a little bit faster than they would have with a book. But it's not clear that the benefit isn't from just having reorganized the material better.
It's more expensive to do this than to create a book. It's not cost effective. Computers change and programs change and therefore the original program is not useful anymore. Text lasts for ever.
Q. Is that the only direction that computer-aided instruction went?
A. No. In the '80s, computer-based graphics machines came along that could do graphics and video and sound. People began doing multimedia programs, like CD-ROM encyclopedias. There's no data to show people learn any better, and the production costs are very high.
The multimedia approach is based on flawed philosophy -- you organize the material and pour it into the student, and you make the drink as sweet and palatable as possible by making pretty pictures. The facts show this stuff doesn't work.
In a review of Robert Hughes' "American Visions" television show in the New York Review of Books, Louis Menand wrote, "Television is always overanxious to solicit attention, which is why the usual response to it tends to be not engagement but passivity." We already know about multimedia and it's called television. It's not engaging and enriching. We know "Sesame Street" at best is not harmful. It encourages passivity. The natural response to a great show is to sit back and watch it. You're wowed by fireworks, but you're not engaged. Compare the involvement to a play or a book, where you're really involved with the characters, care about them and want to know what happens.
To create shows that wow and call them education is hopelessly wrong-headed.
Q. Is there any good news?
A. Yes, there's good news. There are tremendous successes. They are in a broad class of software called simulation software. What the software does is mimic a real-world system with enough accuracy that's appropriate to your task. A real example is a flight simulator. They have really impressive performance. Pilots can take training on a flight simulator and then fly the plane for real for the first time, with paying passengers on it. That's a great vote of confidence.
Another example is the Wright brothers. The French had attempted several airplanes before the Wright brothers, but they all failed. The Wright brothers built lots of prototype models and tested them in wind tunnels, got their information back faster, and the first plane they flew really worked as a result of the feedback. They simulated flight with the wind tunnels. Now Boeing simulates wind tunnels with computers.
For simulation to work, it has to have the important aspects of the real system and then give you feedback. That's the way you learn. It gives you repeat trials cheaply and more or less at will without risking catastrophic loss.
Q. Are there specific other examples in education that you can think of?
A. There already are math-tutor programs for children, which diagnose errors and give feedback. The military uses war games. Businesses have management games that simulate parts of the economy.They teach people how their performance can be improved with elementary modeling. There's tremendous work with experimental games in lab situations -- games on markets, negotiations, any sort of decision-making that involves coordinating with other decision-makers who may not have the same objectives that you have.
The real hope is that we can build these programs that simulate realistic situations and test the student's performance and give feedback. We can generalize this idea to many other real-world situations, including solving design problems, solving human resource problems, negotiating, solving mathematical problems, solving strategic problems, etc.
You generalize a concept like a flight simulator but there's one difference. Here's the kicker. You can make it so the same simulator that you used for training can actually solve some of the real problems -- using the same interface. So you're not just learning a simulator; you're learning a tool.
Q. What about the cost?
A. Some of the high-end simulations are extremely expensive, $16 million for a real flight simulator. The Army's combat simulators run in the millions.
If there's real educational benefit here, it may well be worth it.
The nice thing about software is that even though the first copy may be very expensive, the second copy is free. So just one school doesn't have to use it. It can be copied easily and run somewhere else.
Some of the new developments in programming techniques -- component based software for example -- are a reason for optimism.
With cleverness, there are a lot of low-end things that can be done. An example is business-management games. Many business schools use them and I have seen several very innovative games appear recently, games that should be useful quite generally in education.
