Study the contrast between the tutorial which Yahoo-Geocities provides and which IMP has provided. GT is a projection of flawed in-person teaching in the classroom onto the new medium of Internet. It is easy to imagine a human teacher presenting such a lesson in the classroom, complete with flaws. What is the main flaw? CONFUSION is the main flaw in adult education as set out at the beginning of the IMP lectures.
(There are other flaws in K-12 education and some, such as traumatization of tender young psyches may well be more serious). Why is confusion sustained in person-to-person adult education? One reason is that we, as students in such a situation are often reluctant to be overly critical. But when it comes to teaching machines, you cannot hurt the feelings of a machine. We never apologize to our vacuum cleaners or our automatic doors.
You, the student/customer are always right. And the sooner high technology businesses like Yahoo-Geocities realize it, the better.
TEACHING MACHINE HISTORY
There are surprisingly few library books available on teaching machines as I found from a recent search.
Philip J. Jackson's "The Teacher and the Machine" (1968) is helpful in understanding the philosophical-ideological issues in a historical context. Remember that Jackson is writing in an era when some people saw the potential of computers in teaching but most computers were still the mainframes of universities and large businesses and even in a university setting few people outside computing science made extensive use of these.
The era of the personal computer, owned and operated by individuals, and individuals in large numbers, had not arrived and was not even envisaged. The Internet, to connect hundreds of millions worldwide in a huge network of teaching machines would have seemed like science fiction. Yet Jackson's comments are apt even today which proves that good scholarship is timeless.
Jackson starts by presenting an exchange with a more technology-minded colleague. "My trouble, he warned - with a burst of metaphor - was that I was doing research on oil lamps in an age that had discovered the light bulb! The educational light bulb, in my friend's view, is the COMPUTER-BASED AUTO-INSTRUCTIONAL DEVICE...." (page 2; blocks are mine). The main source of Jackson's own position which is less than enthusiastic about teaching machines is, in my opinion, found in his social analysis on pages 64-65. "Critical discussions of machines and their impact on society customarily end on an ominous note. Such gloomy finales usually make it quite clear, if there is any doubt left by then, that the machine is the villain in whose clutches man cannot but suffer a vexatious future. The conclusion is often preceded by some mention of the process of DEHUMANIZATION. (again the blocks are mine). So there we have it. Dehumanization is PRESENTED as the source of the technophobia. And Jackson comes back to dehumanization in his closing statement that "...the single most pressing educational problem involves learning how to create and maintain a humane environment in our schools." (page 90). You will pardon me if I seem cynical, but I have to suspect that teachers will reflexively react to teaching machines as welders at GM react to welding machines.
HUMANE EDUCATIONAL ENVIRONMENTS
Nevertheless, let us examine the humane-education issue more closely. I spent ~12 hours learning the PageBuilder procedures which I am presenting on the "101" web site above. I also paid a substantial fee-for-service to a computer consultant to tutour me and that time is included in the ~12 hours.
Most of that ~12 hours must be considered as time spent under NEGATIVE REINFORCEMENT SCHEDULING as spelled out in previous lessons. To escape from the aversiveness of confusion, trial and error learning which was costly to my valuable time, and monetary costs along with the concern that more money would have to be spent to learn this material, I had to learn to use PageBuilder. How humane is this kind of learning? It is not humane at all. Yet it has been my experience without exception in about two dozen IN PERSON teaching-learning encounters which I have had with computer experts over the years. And what gave the computer experts the idea that this is the kind of teaching which they could or should deliver? Did it not come from the teaching establishment itself? The PageBuilder Tutorial gives all indications of being a projection of bad person-to-person pedagogy onto the computer screen.
By contrast my "101" teaching machine is based on POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT SCHEDULING. If there is any confusion or costly trial-and-error in it, I would WELCOME the feedback on same because "The student/customer is always right". Let us now return to Jackson and his slightly caustic remarks on page 15: "Here, at last, is an invention that promises to reduce error, increase efficiency, speed learning, cut manpower costs, and ultimately transform teaching from something resembling black magic into an applied science. Anyone in his right mind, the advocates of the machine reason, will certainly recognize those virtues and applaud the device that makes them possible."
IMO, that is one of the best summary statements on the virtues of the teaching machine which I have yet come across. All of those HUMANE effects of the teaching machine are to be found in GT-Cured. The inhumane and even mildly dehumanizing effects of conventional teaching, whether done by a human teacher in a classroom or projected online, are to be found in GT-Uncured. Now the choice is the choice of those in the marketplace of global online education which is found in the thousands of state-sponsored institutions of higher education and private for-profit institutions of higher education which offer courses online.
EDUCATIONAL FUTURES MARKET
I have no doubt whatsoever that the future of education will be dominated by courses marketed online and that in the COMPETITIVE online market, those courses which meet the criteria discussed above will win the proverbial "lion's share" of the market.
GT gives a small example. IMP gives a larger example. And a course I am working on now with collaborators (C Programming) will prove the point even more dramatically because C Programming is a standard course taught at many colleges. For example Introductory C Programming at BCIT is COMP 2425. The tution cost alone is $395. Add perhaps $200 for books, supplies and transportation costs. And consider that if BCIT uses standard college pedagogy, there is probably a surfeit of negative reinforcement and a dearth of positive reinforcement used in the classroom setting.
The discriminating buyer in the market place is no fool. Nobody will pay ~$600 for a college course when they can buy a better course for ~$100 online. That is what [email protected] has been saying for the past year online. Within the next year, it will prove what it has been saying concerning the competitive marketplace of online education with machine-taught C. Perhaps BCIT should be given fair warning that a business admin student from SFU is 'on its case'.