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| Cast of Characters |
Concept Paper |
Skit Introduction |
Part 1 |
Part 2 |
Part 3 |
Part 4 |
Part 5 |
Part 6 |
Part 7 |
Concept Paper
35 years ago at SRI International, in
1962, Douglas Engelbart published a lengthy framework for augmenting
human intellect with computer technologies. You may have heard of him as the
inventor of the mouse. While true, it is one of the least important things he
did. His group invented many of the key elements of what we today call personal
computing, before Xerox PARC was even conceived by Dr. George Pake, its first
Director.
Engelbart asked us all to imagine--in a time when computers were extraordinarily
rare and considered useful primarily for their number-crunching capabilities--that
each of us had in our offices a devoted computer in support of our work activities.
He asked us to imagine that we could exploit computers' capacities for symbolic
representation far more generally, and to integrate interlinked text documents,
mail, diagrams, graphics, and video, for "bootstrapping" new work
practices in organizations. Learning was a basic goal of these human-computer
systems, in his view. Individuals, groups, and organizations would all be able
to learn from the unique affordances provided in the computational medium, such
as hyperlinked information resources, networked remote others, and searchable
archives of work artefacts.
Engelbart's work was thick with references to and influences from the writings
of Vannevar Bush, the first science advisor to a U.S. President--Franklin Delano
Roosevelt. In a seminal essay in Atlantic Monthly in 1945, Vannevar Bush deeply
foresaw how computing could come to serve as a kind of prosthetic to thinking
and communicative activities, serving humans by doing repetitive, clerical kinds
of actions while humans could be manifesting their creativity in forming problems
and making meaning rather than manipulating symbols. By the way, Bush's novel
conceptions of the government's role in supporting basic research and industries'
roles in funding applied research directly led to the U.S. policies that created
the National Science Foundation, a basic research organization for most American
sciences that is quite distinctive in the world, which has a budget of over
$3.3 billion this year, and which funds many of the projects represented at
this conference.
After six years of work with his Augmentation Research Center at SRI, at the
Fall 1968 Joint Computer Science Meeting, Engelbart conducted an extraordinary
90-minute live demonstration between San Francisco and Stanford Research Institute
(SRI) in Menlo Park of a fully functioning suite of newly invented technologies
including the mouse as a screen-pointing device, integrated text and graphics
and cross-file editing in a hyperlinked system, multiple display "windows,"
shared screen videoconferencing, and live collaborative editing (and version
control) of documents in a distributed client-server system. I'd like to show
a brief clip to set up for what we have to show and tell today.
Later most members of Engelbart's ARC group moved to Xerox PARC to form, in
the early 1970's, what became the birthplace of the first commercial personal
computer, the Alto. And the Alto begat the Macintosh when, one day in the late
1970's, the Apple II inventor Steve Jobs was hosted for a visit at Xerox PARC
by Larry Tesler, who shortly thereafter--I've heard it was the next day--went
to work for Steve to lead the Mac development team. But that is another story.
What we want to focus on today
is that Engelbart recognized and expressed many, many fundamental truths about
the relation between humans and computers from which we still have much to learn.
The most basic of these truths, still little recognized, is that humans and
computers need to "co-evolve," as he put it. This will take place,
Engelbart's prescient framework argued, through a process of "bootstrapping"--a
new use of the term he noted--in which people begin the co-evolution process
by doing their work in an environment which requires the uses of computer and
communications technologies. Only through the processes of continual invention
and refinement of tools to tasks, as tasks come to be redefined by what it is
that we discover that we can make tools do, will the true potentials of human-computer
symbiosis be realized. In fact, it could be argued that this bootstrapping process
is what allowed Engelbart's group to make such shocking advances over a short
period at SRI in the dawning days of personal computing.
Today, as we seek to create CSCL system, we face exactly this issue. Computing
and communications are not only making it easier and faster to do things better
than before in learning, but to do better things with learning. What will these
"better things" be?
Where we begin today in our "flying
circus," is in asking, for teachers considered as lifelong learners, how
collaborative computing may reshape their workscapes.
We do not yet know, but we have some clues in the early space of co-evolution
for where we might be headed.
A bit of background will set the stage. But first let me note that during this
event, I will "freeze-frame" occasionally, in order to offer a theoretical
context for something going on in our imaginary scenario--about the distributed
collaborative tailoring of educational objects. Think of Woody Allen and Diane
Keaton in the film Annie Hall talking to one another on a Manhattan rooftop
in their early courtship. Their talk aloud suggests one line of meaning, but
they are thinking something very different, which we hear expressed in a different
voice of thought bubbles, as it were. In a similar vein, you can imagine my
comments--once I take on my Narrator role--as offered in a parallel universe,
one in which theory annotates situated practice.
Now about the topic of collaborative tailoring.
As in other spheres of human activity, teachers as technology users are introduced
to tools that--it is expected--will "help them" in their work. But
the properties of a generic teaching context imagined by technology designers
are only a small piece of the puzzle. Teachers then need to "tailor"
the innovations proposed to them for helping their work to the local situations
they face. The local conditions require a kind of bricolage, as the anthropologist
Levi-Strauss would put it, as they improvise, as they put together elements
of a workable solution in a creative way to fit their situation.
The teacher is thus not doing "implementation" of a technological
"solution" that has been fully figured out without any knowledge of
his or her particular context (their learners with their breed of diversity,
their school culture and local community, their state standards, or whatever).
Teachers are continuing the process of design in their activities of tailoring
the tool to their task. What they ignore that a tool may offer, in a central
way, is no longer "a part" of the tool they use; what they improvise,
in just such a central way, becomes "a part" of the tools that they
use. Why shouldn't we begin to celebrate and honor, share, and extend the inventiveness
of each and every single teacher as they seek to appropriate learning technology
innovations for their own use?
However, we know that technologies for learning are a great challenge for a
large proportion of the teaching population in K-12. Roughly half of the U.S.
K-12 teachers do not routinely use computing technologies in their teaching.
And even for those who do, their support for learning how to do such tailoring
and integrating of new technology-based learning resources into their day-to-day
teaching activities is so minimal that it continually challenges the feasibility
of their effective technology use in school.
Yet it has become increasingly realized that fantastic tools for learners to
use to make more likely their motivated learning of complex subject matter and
deep understanding and knowledge application are not, by themselves, going to
revolutionize education. The teacher is a mediator, a gateway, a broker, a guide,
for new forms of learning enhanced by highly interactive technological media.
Without the teacher getting what the teacher needs to do their tailoring--and
wholesale "adoption" of technologies, as I have noted, is not what
will "work"--educational reforms that rely heavily on new technologies
will not thrive. The essential conditions for growth of an ecosystem of co-evolution
of teaching, learning, and new tools will not be met. It is with this recognition,
and these concerns, that we begin our circus.
To set the stage, we call
it a flying circus for several reasons. A "circus," since there are
many rings of activity that we wish to bring together--one (David Wexler, aka
Dr. Math) who is providing teacher workshops in San Diego for a large web resource
called the Math Forum (out of Swarthmore), another a remote participant (Jeremy
Roschelle) who is off developing software for mathematics teaching in SF, and
finally, several different roles that we will enact on the stage today with
our multiple screens. Also a circus since things may go wrong in a high visibility
setting--the lion may bite the trainer, the Internet connection or Java applet
may crash. Perhaps this may provide entertainment, or a sense of unpredictability
and drama.
And our circus is "flying," not because we have found a trapeze to
add to the proceedings (don't we wish, now that we see such a high ceiling),
but because cyberspace, where many of these communicative transactions will
transpire, really is a kind of flying medium. The action-at-a-distance we now
achieve in cyberspace defies ordinary means of travel or communication, and
would have been inconceivable only a few human generations ago.
That this is a flying circus about collaborative tailoring will become obvious.
Now I will shift from my Introducer role to my Narrator role, providing theoretical
frame for the scenario activities and bracketing them in various ways.
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