From the outside, Building 9 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is far from distinctive. It looks like just another office building. But walk down to the basement, where a class offered by the university’s Center for Advanced Studies is in progress, and you’ll see how technology is remaking the classroom. At the front of the room, the professor delivers her lecture. On her large, wired lectern rest two laptop computers. The sloped, theater-like arrangement of the seats makes it easier for her to see the students and recognize them when they have questions.Above her, three monitors flicker. One shows the PowerPoint presentation from which she is drawing her lecture, another displays a Web site that illustrates a point she’s making. The professor appears in real time on a third screen, which uses PictureTel hardware to let students in other locations “attend” the lecture live. Next to her is a huge screen she can use to emphasize what’s on any of her monitors. At each student’s desk is a power cord and an Ethernet connection, which allows students to plug their laptops into the school’s network. At the back of the room is a control booth that would look more at home in a television studio than a classroom. When it comes to technology-based teaching, this is about as good as it gets. Few educational institutions have the financial resources of MIT or are so forward-looking, but an ever increasing number of schools and businesses are using computers to play a major role in education. Meanwhile, experts are at work around the country to ensure that computer-based education also is top-quality education. In some instances, computer programs are being used in lieu of teachers. In other cases, human teachers are using computers as a teaching tool. Either way, it is clear computers have invaded the classroom and are around to stay. Roadblocks and successes Many forces are pushing computers to the forefront of education. Given today’s tight school budgets, the most compelling reason may be monetary: Assuming educational software actually works, it is simply cheaper than paying live teachers. But educators say it’s not as easy deploying computers in the schools as one might expect, even when there’s money in the budget earmarked for PCs.”Superintendents rise to become superintendents by learning to stay out of trouble,” said Marc Tucker, president of the National Center on Education and the Economy. “The accountability system in schools, as it stands now, doesn’t reward the use of new technology. It’s too risky, it’s too much work, it doesn’t fit the official curriculum.” So educators sometimes have to find inventive ways of integrating technology into their coursework.One huge strength of computer-based education is that it allows students to run through the same situation many times, each time a different way, and discover how different responses affect the outcome. These simulations are not only an effective means of teaching, they are also relatively inexpensive. Such simulations let pilots respond to in-flight emergencies in different ways without ever risking a life or destroying a plane. Programs such as the popular SimCity let potential urban planners discover how different decisions will shake up their virtual towns. More than anything else, these programs let the student experiment-and make mistakes. “If you don’t screw up, you learn nothing,” said Roger Schank, director of Northwestern University’s Institute for the Learning Sciences. Schank, a critic of both the educational system at large and how technology is used within it, differentiates between natural learning, which is interactive, and artificial learning, which is passive. In his many commercial endeavors, such as a system to help people learn how to captain a large ship, he tries to build products that “teach to do” by using examples and stories. “Delivering the same old stuff online is not a useful service,” he said. “A computer is a Trojan horse. Once it’s in the classroom, you can put anything on it.”Kids want to peek inside that Trojan horse. “Kids today are more nonlinear. Computers help them focus,” said Idit Harel, CEO and founder of MaMaMedia, a Web-based service for children. “For them, computers aren’t ‘high tech’ so much as they’re ‘my tech.’ “MaMaMedia research suggests that children treat computers like an extension of who they are. “Children don’t want to just consume media on their computers. They expect to be able to create their own media,” Schank said.It’s this focus on letting children build their own adventures that has inspired projects as diverse as Logo, the turtle-based programming language, and Purple Moon, a spin-off of Interval Research in Palo Alto, Calif. Finding a niche While a research fellow at Interval, Brenda Laurel, until recently Purple Moon’s vice president of design, conducted a massive research study into what girls ages 8-12 want from computer-based education and play.Laurel discovered something that parents had already learned by trial and error-that existing products didn’t serve the kids well. “There’s no story in your usual video games. In fact, video game characters are so boring you can’t even make up stories about them,” she said. In Purple Moon’s series of games built around Rockett Movado, a fictional junior high school girl, players can create their own characters and alter the action to their liking. If one scenario doesn’t work out, there are a hundred more to explore. But good theory doesn’t necessarily lead to profits; uniqueness wasn’t enough to make Purple Moon as much of a commercial success as it was a critical success. Last month, the company closed down due to what a company official called “oversaturation in the games market.” Boundless potential Whoever wins in the marketplace is likely to win big, since there is such a demand for educational games that are fun. Go to any grade school when it’s computer time and you’ll see that most of the children are eager to use the computer and many of them have remarkable facility with the mouse and the keyboard in spite of their young ages. Indeed, in many classrooms, the students are more adept with computers than are their teachers.While this speaks volumes about the adaptability of young people, it also highlights one of the biggest roadblocks in using computers in the classroom. “Technology has had zero impact on education so far,” said Elliot Soloway, a multidisciplinary professor at the University of Michigan and the editor of Interactive Learning Environments Journal. “Before we teach kids with computers, we have to teach teachers how to use computers.” For children or adults, experts say, the best method is a mixture of working with people and exploring on the computer. That way, a teacher can push a student in the right direction, based on his or her specific needs. The possibilities are endless, but educators and technologists insist that computers alone won’t pave the road to a new way of learning; only a combination of the right computer curriculum and the right teacher can do that. Linda Stone, director of Microsoft Research Virtual Worlds Group, may have said it best: “All this stuff is great, but kids need your time more than they need money or computers.”
