College Student’s Guide to Computers in Education/Chapter 1: Introduction

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Links to the chapters of the book. You are currently reading Chapter 1.

Title Page

Preface

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: Inventing Your Future

Chapter 3: Expertise and Problem Solving

Chapter 4: Human and Artificial Intelligence

Chapter 5: Computer-Assisted and Distance Learning

Chapter 6: Learning and Learning Theory

Chapter 7: Increasing Your Expertise in ICT

Chapter 8: Brief Introductions to A number of Key Ideas

Chapter 9: On the Lighter Side

References

1 Beginning of Chapter 1: Introduction

[edit] Beginning of Chapter 1: Introduction

“Before you become too entranced with gorgeous gadgets and mesmerizing video displays, let me remind you that information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, and wisdom is not foresight. Each grows out of the other, and we need them all.” (Arthur C. Clarke)

Sometimes students think that they can safely skip over the Preface in an academic book, since often the Preface is written mainly for the teacher in a course. In this book, the Preface is mainly intended for students. It is part of the introduction to the book. Thus, if you didn’t read the Preface, I recommend that you go back and do so.

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is a powerful change agent. This chapter expands on the introductory materials presented in the Preface.

Technology and the underlying mathematics and sciences are cumulative, vertically structured disciplines. New developments build on the old. Improvements in transportation and communication make it easier for people to learn about and build upon the previous work of others. Some of the developments, such as the invention of writing, the development of mass produced books, and the computer make significant contributions to speeding up the world’s rate of technological and scientific development and scientific. Increasing population and improvements in worldwide education also make significant contributions to the pace of technological and scientific change.

Consequently, you live at a time when the rate of technological change is higher than it has ever been, and when the rate of change is steadily increasing.

[edit] Taking Responsibility for Your Own Learning

The fact that you can read and understand this written text indicates that you have a high level of thinking and learning ability. The fact that you are thinking about your current and future education means that you have the wisdom and foresight that I find so appealing in good students. (See the quote from Arthur C. Clarke given above.)

Your decision to begin reading this book indicates that you are inquisitive, and that you are seeking ways to improve your current and future life. Your current level of education and maturity means that you are capable of taking considerable responsibility for your learning now and in the future.

Unfortunately, one of the problems that you may face is overcoming the many years of previous schooling in which others told you what to learn and how to demonstrate your learning. Our precollege education system is slanted toward producing students who say: “Tell me what to learn, how to learn it, and how to demonstrate that I have learned it. Then, I will do what you have told me to do.” In some sense, our educational system tends to take self-responsibility away from students.

Higher education has some propensity to reinforce the concept of tell me what to do and I will do it. Consider a different path, a path is called Being a Responsible Adult Learner. On this path, you decide what you want to learn. You make use of what you have learned in the past, including what you have learned about how to learn. You focus on strengthening your learning capabilities in areas that interest you. You make use of the myriad of resources designed to help you learn. (College courses are but one of many such resources.) You set your learning goals, and you achieve them at a level that is satisfactory to you.

Being a responsible adult learner is a lifelong challenge. As you and the world you live in change over the years, your learning interests, needs, and capabilities will change. The life of a dedicated, lifelong learner is a challenging, but awesome and rewarding journey.

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has given us new aids to learning. For example, the Internet is a broad-based network of computer networks, a powerful aid to communication. The Web is the world’s largest library, it is growing very rapidly, and it is accessed through the Internet. The Internet and the Web together are a powerful aid to learning. It is important to your future that you become skilled in making use of the Internet and the Web as aids to communication, learning, and making use of your learning.

[edit] Writing for Online Reading

You are living at a time that is often called the Information Age. The storage, retrieval, and use of information are more important than ever. We are in the midst of a profound change, going from hardcopy storage to online storage of the collected knowledge of the human race. This change affects authors of academic books such as this one, and it affects readers of such books.

For example, as an author it costs me nothing to publish the book—that is, to make it available free on the Web. It takes only a few minutes to accomplish this task. Moreover, I can readily correct errors and update the book whenever I want.

Publishing online brings another important advantage to authors and readers. As an example, later in this book I will mention a few people who have made profound and lasting contributions to ICT. Raj Reddy of Carnegie Mellon University is an example of such a person. He has been a major world leader in robotics and Artificial Intelligence throughout his long career.

How much more should I say about Raj Reddy? I include him in this book because he is a good example of a person who has made a difference in the world of ICT. However, there are lots of such people. Thus, I certainly don’t expect that you will memorize his name and accomplishments, and remember them many years from now.

This person was raised in India, has risen to prominence in the United States and the world, and is working to improve the lives of rural people in India and throughout the world. He is a good example of a citizen of the world. Suppose that there is something about what I have said about Raj Reddy that peaks your interests. If so, you can:

View a video focusing of Reddy’s ideas on bringing computer connectivity and technology to poor people in third world countries, http://scil.stanford.edu/video/RajReddy.mov.

Read his 1995 Turing award talk on Artificial Intelligence (AI). The Turing award is the most prestigious award given by the Association for Computing Machinery. The talk provides an excellent introduction to AI and its future. See http://www.rr.cs.cmu.edu/turing.htm.

Read about Reddy’s Million Book project to get a million books scanned and available free on the Web, http://www.library.cmu.edu/Libraries/MBP_FAQ.html#current. http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/buzz/stories/s941429.htm http://www.library.cmu.edu/Libraries/LIT/Projects/1MBooks.html

Get a quick overview of the field of robotics at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot.

Get a quick overview of the field of Artificial Intelligence at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence.

See Raj Reddy’s vita and some of his publications at http://www.rr.cs.cmu.edu/rrlong.html.

Read more about Carnegie Mellon, a world class technology university at http://www.cmu.edu/academics/schools.shtml.

Notice how this shifts the decision of what to learn and how much to learn from me (the author) to you (the reader). If you decide to explore these Web-based sources of information, you will quickly develop an island of expertise (a specific, small area of expertise) that likely exceeds that of most or perhaps all of your fellow students and your teachers.

Your exploration of Raj Reddy and his work might lead you to want to know more about Alan Turing—the Turing award is named after him. He was a pioneer in the early development of computers and Artificial Intelligence. There is lots of information about him available of the Web. Google the quoted expression “Alan Turing” and you will get more than 900,000 hits.

Why did I tell you to put the search expression in quotes? It is because a search on the unquoted expression Alan Turing will produce hits that contain the words Alan and Turing that are not necessarily connected together in the first name, last name order. Notice this “subtle” way that I have attempted to teach you a little about use of search engines on the Web. The Web is the world’s largest library, and it is a virtual library. The knowledge and skills that you gain in learning to make effective use of virtual (not hard copy) libraries will be of value to you throughout your lifetime.

Notice that a couple of the references are to materials from the Wikipedia—an online, multi-author, unrefereed, free encyclopedia. There has been considerable brouhaha—especially among teachers—concerning students making use of this unrefereed material. Personally, I find the Wikipedia quite useful and I use it frequently. In addition, it provides an excellent example of cooperative, collaborative writing. Volunteers write it, and the volunteers often rewrite each other’s writings.

[edit] Helping Yourself to get a Better Education

The goal of this book is to help you get a good education. This is a “self-help” book, in that it is designed to you learn to help yourself get a better Information Age education.

The Raj Reddy example illustrates self-help. As you read that section, you made a decision —based on intrinsic motivation, time pressures, and so on—as to whether you would make use of the Web links that I provided.

Let me give a different, concrete example of self-help. The beginning of this Preface contains the quote from Louis Pasteur: “Fortune favors the prepared mind.”

When you read this quote from Louis Pasteur, did your mind “blip” over it, or did you pause to reflect on what this statement might mean, and why this book about computer technology quoted a person who died long before the first electronic computers were built? Did you reflect on your knowledge about Louis Pasteur and how his work has affected your life? Did you consider using a search engine to look up some information about Louis Pasteur? If you looked up some information on the Web, you might have come across:

If one were to choose among the greatest benefactors of humanity, Louis Pasteur would certainly rank at the top. He solved the mysteries of rabies, anthrax, chicken cholera, and silkworm diseases, and contributed to the development of the first vaccines. He debunked the widely accepted myth of spontaneous generation, thereby setting the stage for modern biology and biochemistry. He described the scientific basis for fermentation, wine-making, and the brewing of beer. Pasteur’s work gave birth to many branches of science, and he was single handedly responsible for some of the most important theoretical concepts and practical applications of modern science. (Rhee, 1999)

One of the differences between a storybook and an academic book is the density of ideas. In a storybook, you can skip over quite a bit of the content and still get the gist of the story. It is not expected that you will reflect on the meaning of each paragraph.

In contrast, an academic book is written with the expectation that you will read and reflect. You will actively engage your mind in thinking about how the content of the textbook fits in with what you already know. You will take responsibility for reconciling differences between your current knowledge and skills, and those being discussed in the book. A decision to “blip” even one short sentence is a decision to get less from the book than might otherwise be possible. The main learning that comes from a book such as this occurs though the reader pausing to reflect, do a mental exploration, and perhaps doing additional exploration of an idea.

[edit] Assessing Your Current Education

How good has your previous informal and formal education been? Can you self-assess—that is, tell all by yourself how good you education has been?

You can think about the processes of your education, such as the time spent playing sandlot sports, board games, and computer games. You can think about your years in school, the books you have read, the music you have listened to, the video you have watched, and the conversations you have had. You can think about music lessons, sports camps, boy scouts or girl scouts, and so on. All of these are aspects of the process of your informal and formal education.

However, I want you to dig deeper. How good have the results been from your point of view and from the point of view of others? How does the quality of your education match up to expectations of your parents, your spouse or a potential spouse, your employer of a potential employer, and so on? How does you education compare with that of your peers? Does your education appropriately prepare you for the overall future that you envision for yourself? Have you learned to take responsibility for your future education and for the challenges of a responsible adult life in a rapidly changing world?

The previous paragraph provides a good example of the challenge of reading an academic book. It is written at about a 10th grade reading level. You can probably read this much text in 20 seconds or so. However, it can take a great deal of time to think about the questions and to explore answers. The paragraph is only useful to you if you spend time in reflecting about your answers.

This reflection process is key to your future informal and formal education. You have reached a level of maturity where you should be taking considerable responsibility for your own education. You have the experience, knowledge, and skills to gain an education that fits your personal needs. Only you can tell if you are achieving these types of informal and formal educational goals.

[edit] Your Personal Goals in Education

Before proceeding to the next chapter, stop for a minute and think about your goals in higher education. Here are three areas that might come to your mind:

I want to increase my level of expertise in various areas that are in the college or university curriculum. I expect to receive written documentation (transcripts, certificates of accomplishment, diplomas, and so on) that helps provide evidence of my increasing expertise.
I want to increase my level of expertise in a number of extracurricular areas (such as social skills, relationships with others, sports, and recreation). In cases where one can accumulate evidence of increased expertise (such as golf handicap or other spots performance), I want to have evidence of my increasing level of expertise.
I want my higher education time, expense, and effort to help me increase various areas of expertise more efficiently and effectively than I could in other settings.

Note that your goals in (1) and (2) can strongly overlap. There is no find dividing line between curricular and extracurricular goals and activities. In thinking about (3), be aware that learning goes on all of the time, whether you are in school, holding down a job, raising a family, or vacationing.

As you think about your personal goals in education, think about how you can tell if you are achieving your goals. Robert Sternberg is a world-class expert in human intelligence. He defines intelligence “your skill in achieving whatever it is you want to attain in your life within your sociocultural context by capitalizing on your strengths and compensating for, or correcting, your weaknesses.” The reference (Sternberg, 2007) provides access to video (and a transcript of the video) in which Sternberg presents and discusses some of his insights into intelligence.

Whatever goals you have set for yourself, read this book with these goals in mind. This book will prove useful in moving you along the pathway of understanding and achieving your goals,

[edit] Summary and Self-Assessment

Each chapter of this book ends with a brief section that mentions a few of the important ideas in the chapter and suggests some ways you can self-assess your understanding of these ideas. Right now, without looking back at the material in the Preface and in this chapter, try to name several ideas from the material that seem important to you.

If none of the ideas seem important to you, then name an idea that I thought was important enough to emphasize, and do a mental rehearsal of why this idea does not seem important to you.

If you cannot recall any major ideas from the material, then reflect on how you have spent your time “reading” the material without having any of the ideas actually ending up in your retrievable memory.

Now, go back and quickly browse the headings for the various sections. Select one topic that seems particularly important to you, and select one that seems relatively unimportant to you. Do a mental compare and contrast between these two topics. Do a mental rehearsal of what you would say to me (the author) about ways to improve these two sections, or why one of the sections should be deleted.

From my point of view, the single most important idea in the material is learning to take increased responsibility for one’s own education. The message to you is to set some learning goals for yourself, work to achieve these goals, and learn to self-assess your progress in achieving these goals. Of course, I hope that your personal goals will include learning various aspects of ICT!

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