What Curriculum for the Information Age

M. A. White

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781135879136
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

First Published in 1987. This book has developed from a conference held at Teachers College, Columbia University on April 17, 1986, entitled "What Curriculum for the Information Age?" The idea for the conference evolved from discussions with the invited speakers who shared a concern that our public schools were not responding to the real potential that the information technologies hold for learning and for teaching. It was felt that the educational issue was not what technologies to buy, where to put them, or when to schedule instruction on them and that the real issue was the curriculum itself.

1

Learning and Instruction in the Information Age

Samuel Y. Gibbon, Jr.

Bank Street College of Education

The Information Age has arrived, and most societal institutions are experiencing profound changes as a result. Business, science, entertainment, medicine, communications and publishing, the law, banking, travel, government, the military, manufacturing, even agriculture have been or are being transformed by the presence of new electronic technologies, orchestrated by the computer and linked together over large and small distances. At a rate and to an extent envisioned only by the most extreme futurists the world is becoming inter-connected by an electronic nervous system over which immense amounts of information flow at nearly the speed of light.

The lives of individuals and families are inevitably affected by these institutional transformations. For example, workers are finding that some familiarity with the new technologies of information is required in a large and increasing proportion of jobs. (Indeed, our economy is undergoing an accelerating transformation as the manufacture and distribution of information grows in importance.) But the impact of the Information Age is also felt directly in the home. Almost every home in the United States is connected to an efferent channel of the global electronic nervous system by means of a color television set. A slightly smaller number of homes is capable of two-way communication around the world by means of the telephone. In a small, but rapidly increasing number of homes, the telephone is being used to receive and transmit digital information from and to computers. And although the danger is yet to be fully recognized, the privacy of every citizen in our society is invaded regularly by organizations that use information technologies to compile dossiers of information for commercial or political purposes.

The power of the electronic technologies that drive the information explosion continues to increase rapidly, while at the same time their cost continues to fall dramatically. As a result, access to the means of generating and exchanging information, although still limited and subject to sharp demographic bias, has increased; and information now flows from a growing diversity of sources to an ever-increasing number of users.

Such widespread and important societal effects should be reflected in our educational agenda: Schools should prepare students to function successfully in a world continually transformed by new information. More importantly, the electronic information technologies should be used in schools, as they are elsewhere, to represent present knowledge in new ways and to make new knowledge.

Computerized electronic technology makes possible not only the wide and rapid distribution of information, but its manipulation, analysis, synthesis, and recombination as well. Through these operations, new knowledge is created that helps us understand ourselves and our world in new ways. Much of this new knowledge is, and will continue to be, expressed in printed language; but more and more is produced in other forms: images—still and moving, graphic and photographic; sounds—natural and synthesized; and non-alphanumeric symbolic representations of all kinds including icons, graphs, and geographic and conceptual maps. Some of these diverse forms, as well as the technology needed to produce them, have been invented in order to encode new meaning intelligibly. For example, Landsat images of the earth’s surface made using electromagnetic wavelengths outside the visible spectrum must be “pseudo-colored” by computer in order to be “read” by the human eye and brain. Changes in surface vegetation can then be computed by subtracting one Landsat image from another and the result can be displayed in yet another pseudo-colored image. In other instances, the existence of new technological capabilities has stimulated the invention of new kinds of meaning. For example, graphic artists use computers to produce animated trompes l’oeil in which three-dimensional objects, complete with surface texture and reflected light, transform with mesmerizing impossibility into other shapes. As these examples suggest, the new technologies of information do more than increase the volume and speed of dissemination of information; they also extend the range of human senses, amplify the analytic power of the brain, and provide new instruments for creativity.

If these powerful technologies of the Information Age were as widely available in schools as they are in other societal organizations, what changes in curriculum content and in the paradigms of instruction would be indicated? Three overlapping categories of changes suggest themselves: additions to the curriculum, notably instruction about information itself and the technologies of information; changes in the content of the traditional curriculum; and changes in the structure of the curriculum and the style of classroom instruction.

ADDITIONS TO THE CURRICULUM

Information Studies

The principal addition to the curriculum called for by the arrival of the Information Age is a new emphasis on information itself. Students must learn to analyze critically its various forms and their characteristic uses, to recognize the ways in which opinion and behavior can be influenced by information, to search out needed information from the multiple sources available, to evaluate the quality of information, and to use the various media for effective communication. Reading, writing, critical analysis and evaluation of printed communications will continue to occupy a central position in the curriculum; but similar training must be provided in comprehending, analyzing, evaluating, and producing communications in visual media.

Students need to develop a repertoire of heuristics for judging the reliability of information. Some schools have undertaken to help students develop critical viewing skills with which to evaluate televised messages. Students in such programs acquire a useful skepticism about the claims of commercial advertisers and aspirants to political office and learn to look for evidence of bias in news reports. Students need to apply similar critical techniques to computer-based simulations or models. These can be powerful tools for analyzing and coming to understand complex systems or acquiring difficult skills in a risk-free environment; but students must learn to assess their veridicality. They must understand that the data and the operational rules that comprise the model or simulation are only selections from the complexity of the real world and that any model or simulation necessarily distorts, in discoverable ways, the system it represents.

A most useful way for students to learn this lesson is to construct a model themselves. Modeling a changing population for example can quickly lead to a vivid appreciation of the difficulty of model construction and the need for simplified assumptions. The electronic spreadsheet program is a tool for creating mathematical models of complex systems. It was created to allow the asking of “what if?” questions and the playing out of alternative financial scenarios, but it can be used to model other systems as well. Students should learn the power of this ubiquitous electronic tool by using it to construct and manipulate models.

Research Skills

Many careers in the information society will require skill in locating and retrieving information for which a need is known to exist. Even more valuable will be skill in combining information in novel ways so as to reveal an unsuspected opportunity or suggest a persuasive new point of view. In order to prepare young people for such careers, schools should offer students more frequent opportunities to pursue their own education through self-directed scholarship, guided and overseen by teachers, but not overly constrained as to subject matter. To this end, research skills taught to graduate students 20 years ago and to undergraduates 10 years ago should now be a routine part of the high-school curriculum. These should include, in addition to the library skills familiar to generations of book scholars, techniques for searching the on-line and off-line databases now available in large libraries. By teaching students to navigate a hierarchical tree of information or to search by multiple key words or to use Boolean statements to define the search domain, teachers can lead students to an understanding of the several ways in which knowledge can be organized; and this in turn can help students choose appropriate organizing structures for their own bodies of information.

As in the case of models, a most effective way for students to learn how to negotiate an electronic knowledge base is to create one of their own. Here, an opportunity exists to anticipate in the classroom a category of work that is just beginning to establish itself in the information society: community authorship. Classroom-wide research projects are, of course, not new; but electronic tools can facilitate collaboration of a kind and to an extent not previously possible. Local area networks with integrated word-processing and database management software allow students to work together in editing, amplifying, annotating, and organizing in multiple ways information they have retrieved from existing sources or generated themselves. For many students, collaborative creation of this kind can liberate talents whose exercise may have been inhibited by more traditional, and more competitive, individual authorship.

Typing

True voice-recognition technology at affordable cost remains in the distant future, so the alphanumeric keyboard will continue to be the principle device by means of which information in the form of language is generated, retrieved, and communicated. Word processing, network access, and electronic mail require use of the typewriter keyboard. In order to enjoy full enfranchisement in the Information Age, all students need to learn touch typing. (The author, whose education was deficient in this respect, feels this need most poignantly at the present moment.) The professional status of typing has changed rapidly and dramatically since the arrival of the computer in the workplace. Formerly, typing was the domain of the clerical worker, usually female, and typing classes were offered as vocational training in high school. If a young woman wished to be taken seriously as a professional she was often advised not to learn to type, lest she find herself trapped by her competence at a clerical level. In the last 10 years, the computer terminal, with its typewriter keyboard, has come to be as common a sight in executive offices as it is on the secretarial desks outside, and the gender of the respective users is beginning to be less predictable.

CHANGES IN THE TRADITIONAL CURRICULUM

Reading and Writing

The huge and growing volume of printed information requires the development of reading skills in addition to those traditionally taught in elementary school. Students must be taught to browse efficiently in various media, but especially in text. Attention to indices, menus, section headings, topic sentences and summaries, visual scans for key words, skimming, and other browsing skills need to be explicitly taught, and taught early, in part because of the emphasis in early reading on word-for-word, beginning-to-end reading. Instruction in reading comprehension presently addresses some of these skills, but the main emphasis in pre-college reading instruction is on fine analysis of grammatical and syntactic subtleties. Students also need to learn to discriminate those tasks and passages that merit close, careful reading from those for which fast scanning and breadth of survey are more appropriate.

To the varieties of reading matter students presently encounter in schools should be added screen plays and television scripts. Exposure to scripts will help children understand the structure and techniques of the visual media to which they frequently attend without thought. It can be enlightening to discover that the casually delivered, fragmentary utterances of television or film drama have actually been written, and that the sequence of visual images has been conceived with care to convey meaning. An examination of the written transcript of a television documentary can often reveal the purpose for which a particular juxtaposition of word and image was contrived. Television scripts and film screenplays have high intrinsic interest for the otherwise unmotivated reader, and some such documents even have literary merit.

Similarly, children should be encouraged to write many different kinds of texts. A language arts class might be assigned to write the following different treatments of a recent actual event: a journalistic account for a daily newspaper, an analytic piece for a weekly news magazine, a report from a remote location for the nightly television news, and fictionalized accounts in the form of a short story and in the form of a screenplay. Writing these various assignments would make clear the extent to which the purpose of the writer, the characteristics of the medium, and the demands of the marketplace condition the character of the message; it would encourage critical consumption of similar accounts in the mass media; and it would develop an awareness of the skills necessary for professional performance of the work.

Every student should learn to write using a word processor, and schools should make microcomputer-based word processing easily available to all students during and outside of regular school hours. The principles of good composition are readily taught and willingly practiced when text can be edited without effort. At present, research and development are being vigorously pursued to discover how computer-based writing environments with some artificial intelligence can be designed to support the efforts of the student writer. Writing instruction is one area of the curriculum in which schools are likely to keep abreast of new technological developments.

In schools properly equipped for the Information Age, of course, the writing assignments just described would be carried through to production and publication. Formatting software, graphics packages, and sophisticated printers allow the publication of documents that look as if they had been professionally printed. In the process of producing such documents, students can explore the effect of variations in such important design features as type size and font selection, column width and column breaks, page layout, graphic style, and balance between text and graphics.

The video writing assignments should be produced as well. Here, the design elements include sets, costumes, props, lighting, illustrative graphics, and so on. But the most valuable lessons will be learned in editing the resulting images. Students can then discover how profoundly and undetectably the meaning of a sequence can be altered by such techniques as cutting or reordering what someone says, inserting a reaction shot, adding music to the sound track, or choosing to make a transition with a dissolve instead of a cut.

The purpose of these production and publishing experiences is not merely to inoculate students against manipulation by the media. It is to make students literate in the communications of their culture, so they can appreciate skillful use of the media by others and can themselves communicate effectively.

Mathematics

Electronic technology has occasioned a re-examination of the mathematics curriculum. Clearly, the ubiquity of electronic calculators has made it less necessary the ability to perform with pencil and paper such tedious large calculations as long division and adding long columns of multi-digit numbers. It seems appropriate for students to understand the principles behind such arithmetic operations but not appropriate for them to spend long hours of drill perfecting the execution of the algorithms in repetitive problem sets.

If classroom time devoted to training in calculation can be reduced, then more time will be available for more important mathematics (e.g., problem analysis, estimation, rounding, approximation, place value, and orders of magnitude). The availability of calculators has made these skills and concepts more, rather than less, necessary. Students tend to have excessive confidence in results arrived at electronically, even if the answer displayed by the calculator is highly unlikely. This misplaced confidence must be reduced, and students must develop the habit of checking their computed answers for reasonability by performing quick rough mental calculations.

Learning a few tricks of arithmetic can make these rough calculations easier. For example, adding or subtracting from left to right gives a rough approximation at once. The procedure can be continued until the result is as precise as the situation requires. Using the conventional algorithm (adding or subtracting from right to left) gives the least useful information first: the units place of a six-digit sum is less informative about the magnitude of the number than the hundred thousands place. Tricks involving recombining numbers are useful. For example, multiplying by 50 is easier if you divide by 2 and add two zeros to the result. These and other familiar tricks of mental arithmetic develop a feeling for the structure of the number system. They give students a sense of intellectual power and confidence that the calculator technology is under their control.

Electronic technology can provide a rich variety of powerful mathematics learning experiences. Interactive computer graphics can be used to present mathematical relations in visually concrete form, manipulable by the student. Geometric relations are particularly amenable to such presentation. For example, the properties of a right triangle can be explored by manipulating the lengths of the legs, changing the sizes of the acute angles but always maintaining their sum at 90°. The Pythagorean relation can be similarly explored. Squares drawn on each side of the right triangle can grow and shrink as the length of the legs are changed, while the relation among the squares can be seen to remain constant. Two aspects of such presentations are essential: The transformations must be as smoothly continuous as possible and they must be under the direct and instantaneous control of the student. When these two conditions are met, explorations of this kind can provide a visual/kinesthetic understanding of mathematical principles. Later, when abstract formulations of the principles are introduced, they can be understood with reference to the earlier concrete experience.

Electronic technologies in combination can embed math concepts and problems in highly motivating “real-world” contexts. A dramatic television segment can set the problem, show engaging characters struggling to solve it, perhaps under considerable dramatic pressure, and then play out the solution as the dramatic conflict is resolved. Microcomputer software can then present analogous problems for the student to solve. “The Voyage of the Mimi,” a federally funded science and math project that combines video segments, microcomputer software and text material, uses this technique repeatedly. For example, in one episode the captain of the sailing vessel Mimi sets a course toward a dangerous shoal. An electrical problem causes his knotmeter (a nautical speedometer) to malfunction. The captain measures Mimi’s speed by timing the boat’s passage past a piece of bread thrown in the water. The calculation confirms the captain’s suspicions: The boat has been traveling faster than the indicated speed and therefore has gone farther toward the shoals than the captain had intended. He must now quickly determine the boat’s actual position. He triangulates Mimi’s location by taking two compass bearings with the boat’s radio direction finder; where the bearings cross, there lies Mimi, perilously close to the rocks. Students who watch this episode in class are absorbed by the dramatic action. Because the mathematics of navigation is central to the resolution of the problem, they remember most of the details; and they are motivated to address the next task: using computer-simulated instruments to solve an analogous navigation problem. The math concepts are difficult, but the dramatic demonstration of their value in a life-threatening situation sustains students’ interest through the hard work.

Perhaps the greatest need in math education is for the development of mathematical good sense. Mathematical statements abound in the Information Age: estimates of risk, projections of deficits, population growth curves, and measurements in gigawatts, femtoseconds, light years, and megatons. Too often the statements are accepted without examination, the numbers simply ignored. The words “billion” and “million” sound so much alike that they are often confused; but because the magnitudes referred to are so poorly comp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• PREFACE
• ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
• 1 LEARNING AND INSTRUCTION IN THE INFORMATION AGE Samuel Y Gibbon, Jr.
• 2 TECHNOLOGY AND THE CURRICULUM: PROMISE AND PERIL Diane Ravitch
• 3 INFORMATION AND IMAGERY EDUCATION Mary Alice White
• 4 CLOSING THE GAP BETWEEN EDUCATION AND SCHOOLS Judah L. Schwartz
• 5 CURRICULUM FOR THE INFORMATION AGE: AN INTERIM PROPOSAL Julie McGee
• 6 GENERAL DISCUSSION
• INDEX