Since I have seven minutes, I will make seven points. The first is, I find it curious that we don’t get to use media for our presentations here. We’re basically back to 10,000 B.C, sitting around a campfire using language. If that works well enough, maybe we should have a conference with a different topic. It may be a little bit of the university attitude, “Well, let’s study the stuff, but good heavens, no—let’s not use it.”
The second point is, my work with children and some adults over the last 25 years tells me that technology does not help much in education. The way to produce musicians is not to put a piano in the classroom. The music is not in the piano. At best, a piano is an amplifier for a person’s musical impulse. (A survey by Casio in the early 1980s showed that piano lessons turned 9 of 10 people away from playing music. Only 1 of 10 felt amplified by the piano.) We have to be very careful when we try to apply technology to people.
On the other hand, musical instruments can be shiny and attractive—like the 76 Trombones. We should be able to use that attractiveness. But it can only be done with a curriculum that makes sense without any technology at all. Working with a student’s body and mind, the curriculum should be designed as though there is special media associated with it. Once that is accomplished, the technology can be added to amplify certain actions.
Music is a perfect case in point. You give up a lot when you play a piano, but you get to play more than one note at a time, something not possible with the voice alone. Because the piano is one of the least expressive instruments ever made, musical expression with the piano must be done by tricking people.
The important technology paradigm is not personal computing but intimate computing. My old friend Nicholas Negroponte was one of the very first people in the 1960s to identify this notion of intimacy. One of his books has a dedication with a wonderful double-meaning. It reads, “To the first computer who can understand the gesture.” I like to think he meant understand, not only the physical gesture, but also the gesture of having a book dedicated to it. (Negroponte indicates he did intend both.)
While we don’t have intimate computers yet, we do have gadgets like this wonderful little phone here. I can make calls to human agents now. In a few years, I’ll be able to make calls to computer agents to do things for me. Another gadget I am holding in my hand is particularly poignant. It costs $299 at Sharper Image. This is the King James version of the Bible, run by a 16-bit microprocessor in hypermedia form. It performs searches and finds correla-tions. It is a nice checkpoint for the Gutenberg Bible in 1454.
So the technology’s going to be intimate. Multimedia’s not going to be at the center of that intimacy, but will be like a planetoid orbiting around it. That’s one of the main points I want to make. The way to focus on multimedia is not to look at it directly, but to understand what it means in the context of computer simulations and modeling.
My third point is, for a school to work, the parents must be directly involved in the process. The parents set up a value system that makes what’s happening worthwhile. A school does not work because of its great technology.
Our achievement at Xerox in dreaming up the ideas that led to the Macintosh was to transcend the existing value system about computers. We put a little music in the Macintosh, and the result is 3 million people are now playing Chopsticks. That’s what’s done on the Macintosh. Playing real music is much harder.
My fourth point has to do with the nature of the brain. In dealing with education, we must pay attention to the learner. You cannot stuff knowledge pellets into empty vessels. The only way to introduce knowledge to people is to give them a reason to want to learn. McDonald’s would never run a print ad that read, “Eat Big Macs and you’ll get better looking.” In English, that would be rejected immediately. It’s not a plausible proposition. What is done instead is to run photos of good-looking people eating McDonald’s hamburgers. A completely different part of the brain makes a weaker inference in the desired direction, associating good looks with McDonald’s hamburgers. That works because the brain is not homogeneous or unitary. We think with different parts of the brain. One part of the brain may even believe something is true if it rhyms. If we hear, “A Big Mac and fries will reduce the size of your thighs,” a part of us says, “Hmmm, I wonder about that (especially in Southern California where people worry about the size of their thighs). Maybe I should get one and see.”
My next two points are important general questions about the process of education. When we put students into a learning situation we must ask, what parts of the human mentality do we want to affect? What are they learning, and what are their mental structures after they have learned? Students do not learn from multimedia; they learn from television! If television is having them learn the way people learned from stained glass windows in the great cathedrals, it is simply restoring a medieval practice. Learning, in and of itself, should not be the goal. People learned propaganda in Nazi Germany. We have to ask what students are learning, what parts of their brain do the learning, and what their mental state is afterwards.
The other general educational question is when should the material be easy and when should it be hard? The material is easy when students already have the needed structure to assimilate it. Sometimes we want it to be easy so students will have confidence and consolidate. But sometimes it has to be hard. We want them to climb, construct, and change their mental structures. The educational environment has to be challenging. The real question is how do we present the challenge?
My final point has to do with this notion of challenge. [To the moderator: Sorry! You can’t stop me now.] Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of the book Beyond Boredom and Anxiety, had the idea of studying the effects of ability versus challenge in autotelic activities like chess playing and rock climbing. What he found was that subjects with greater ability than the challenge they encountered tended to get bored, whereas those with less, tended to get anxious. Plotting ability on one axis and challenge on the other, he called the wedge around the 45-degree line, where ability and challenge are nicely balanced, the flow experience. The region to one side of flow was boredom, the region to the other side, anxiety.
The idea is that the experience gets better as we climb the wedge. That is, as our ability and the challenge increase, the flow becomes more intense. But moving too far out in one direction or the other is a problem. If the wedge were just a line (or very tight), we would constantly be jumping over its boundaries, falling out of flow. As we increased our ability, we would get bored; then as we added to the challenge, we would become anxious; then we would get bored again, then anxious again. So we want to widen the wedge. This is a design goal for any kind of learning situation, whether in building a computer interface or structuring a classroom situation.
One way to extend the flow into areas where challenge exceeds ability is by making the environment safe; in effect, inserting a safety buffer that widens the flow wedge into the anxiety region. I go to a music camp each summer where amateur musicians play difficult material, like Mozart piano quartets. It is a safe environment for nonprofessional-level players who want to play professional-level music. The camp increases the challenge for us while cushioning the consequences.
How can we widen the flow wedge when our ability exceeds the challenge? We can heighten awareness. By managing to notice more of what’s going on, we can extend the flow experience into the region of boredom. Media is a way to accomplish this expansion of awareness. We set the challenge when we decide what the content should be.
That pretty much sums up how I think about learning. I personally do not want to go back to the Middle Ages, nor do I think simply putting the knowledge of the world into television form is a good idea. As my friend Neil Postman pointed out, images beg to be recognized, words to be understood. We can get people to recognize things by showing them images. But much more than people who can recognize things, we need people who can think and understand.