ANALYSIS ESSAY

Makes Learning Fun Clifford Stoll

An astronomer who is better known for his writings on computer technology, Clifford Stoll (b. 1950) has had the satisfaction of tacking down a computer hacker who constituted a threat to national security, a tale Stoll recounted in The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze ofComputer Espionage (1989). In spite of his expertise and reliance on computers in his own life, Stoll exposes the harmful effects of computers on children in Silicon Snake Oil ( 1995). In High- Tech Heretic: Why Computers Don't Belong in the Classroom and Other Reflections by a Computer Contrarian ( 1999), Stoll deplores the fact that computers take money away from library books and other educational necessities, even as they take time away from young people's social development. The following excerpt is from High- Tech Heretic.

Technology promises shortcuts to higher grades and painless learning. Today's edutainment software comes shrink-wrapped in computing's magic mantra: "Makes Learning Fun."

You'll hear it from IBM: "The latest Aptivas have a superior selection of top-rated educational software titles like Kid's Room, an Aptiva exclusive that gives your kids a fun place to learn." The fluff goes on about "extreme multimedia delivers full-screen action, blazing graphics and front-row-center-seat sound, resulting in maximum impact in any application."

Public schools agree. Here's a press release pushing software developed by the Texas Agricultural Extension Service, and aimed at 4-H clubs: "It may sound fishy, but Texas 4th graders now have the opportunity to go fishing for facts on the computer, improve their academic, skills, learn how they can conserve water and maintain its quality in the state's lakes and streams and have fun at the same time."

The phrase shows up in promotions for college classes, too: The School of Journalism at University ofNorth Carolina at Chapel Hill teaches a core course in Electronic Information Sources. The class motto: Leaming is Fun.

An Oregon high school student who's spent plenty of time . online wrote: "I mean if I had a choice to learn in a fun matter or a traditial [sic] book manner I would choice the fun way of learning."

Read the promotion for Western Michigan University software to learn about groundwater: It "uses animation, so learning about Calhoun County is more of a video game than a dry lesson or research project. .."

Learn on your own. Blazing graphics and maximum impact. Go fishing for facts. Leaming will be more of a video game than a lesson. Technology makes learning fun. Just one problem.

It's a lie. Most learning isn't fun. Leaming takes work. Discipline.

Commitment, from both teacher and student. Responsibility-you have to do your homework. There's no shortcut to a quality education. And the payoff isn't an adrenaline rush, but a deep satisfaction arriving weeks, months, or years later. Equating learning with fun says that if you don't enjoy yourself, you're not learning.

What good are glitzy gadgets to a child who can't pay attention in class, won't read more than a paragraph, and is unable to write analytically? Ifwe want our children to read books, why direct them to computer screens, where it's painful to read more than a few pages? Ifkids watch too much TV, why bring multimedia video systems into schools?

These teaching machines direct students away from reading, away from writing, away from scholarship. They dull questioning minds with graphical games where quick answers take the place of understanding, and the trivial is promoted as educational. They substitute quick answers and fast action for reflection and critical thinking. Thinking, after all, involves originality, concentration, and intention.

1

Computing's instant gratification--built into the leaming-is­ fun mindset--encourages intellectual passivity, driven mainly by conditioned amusement. Fed a diet of interactive insta-grat, students develop a distaste for persistence, trial and error, attentiveness, or patience.

This obsession with turning the classroom into a funhouse isn't new. Eighty years ago in Thirteen Lectures, Austrian educator Rudolf Steiner wrote, "I've often heard that there must be an education which makes learning a game for children; school must become all joy. The children should laugh all the time and learning will be play. This is the best educational principle to ensure that nothing at all is learned."

Yep, kids love computers. Indeed, it's mainly adults who are uncomfortable around keyboards and monitors. But just what do children learn from computers?

Turning learning into fun denigrates the most important things we can do in life: to learn and to teach. It cheapens both process and product: Dedicated teachers try to entertain, students expect to learn without working, and scholarship becomes a computer game. When in doubt, tum to the electronic mind­ crutch.

Is the main problem of today's children that they haven't enough fun? Are kids really deprived of excitement? Are schoolchildren exposed to too few media messages--so that we must bring them the Internet with still more? Must every classroom lesson be sugarcoated by dancing animatrons and singing cartoon characters? Is the job of our schools to provide additional screen time for students who watch three or four hours of television a night?

"All schools need high-speed Internet connections and the appropriate computer hardware to deliver the latest educational applications...equal resources should be directed to the creation of dynamic, 3-D virtual learning environments," says Linda Hahner, president of Out of the Blue Design Company, who's excited that "Given enough tools, children will be able to build and program their own space missions."

Children build their own space missions? I'm impressed when a twelve-year-old carves a balsawood glider.

I saw a program for designing Barbie doll clothes: .. it lets kids select styles, colors, and mix outfits. Naturally, it's advertised as a teaching program, though I wonder exactly what it teaches. How to coordinate colors, perhaps, though the kid selects from a most parsimonious palette. You can't mix paints, can't dye cloth, can't stitch things together. At the end of a session, a child has no idea of the tactile difference between calico and corduroy, silk and sailcloth. Can't sew, either.

Along with a small group of parents, I visited a kindergarten class near San Francisco. The other visitors were immediately taken by the display of computer graphic printouts hung on the wall. ..clipart, designed by professionals and printed out by the children. The teacher, busy showing several children how to run the computer, didn't notice one frustrated child working at the crafts table.

While the visitors chatted about the computers, I watched that six-year-old clumsily fold construction paper into the shape of a house. Struggling with round-nosed scissors, he cut a door, drew windows with a crayon, and pasted the paper onto a base. Near the end of our visit, he completed his project-he called it a firehouse-and proudly showed it to the adults in the room. The teacher gave him a "GO away, I'm busy" nod; none of the other Visitors so much as glanced at the boy. You could see his face drop.

Well, yes, a six-year-old's crude firehouse hardly compares with a fancy computer printout. But these parents should have recognized the trivial nature of the computer "art."

Remember B. F. Skinner? By feeding corn to pigeons whenever they behaved the way he wanted, Skinner showed that he could get animals to learn behavior. In the 1950s, he applied his pigeon experiments to humans, creating a new way for people to learn: programmed instruction.

Skinner made machines which would pose questions to students. Correct answers would lead to new topics and further

2

questions; wrong answers caused a review and more questions to answer. It was a primitive form of hypertex--ach answer led to another encapsulated lesson. Widely promoted in its day, programmed instruction was supposed to revolutionize education.

Skinner's methods fit well with today's computers. Students peck at their keyboards for dollops of sound and animation; administrators get instant reports; parents hear how their kids now enjoy school. This is supposed to make learning fun, not to mention efficient.

Aah, efficiency in education! Get the student to correctly answer questions. Minimize costs and wasted time. Augment teachers with mechanical electronic aids. Sugarcoat lessons with extreme multimedia and blazing graphics so that student will happily learn on their own, while having fun in the process.

But programmed instruction flopped. The machine forced kids to regurgitate whatever answers the programmer wanted. There was no place for innovation, creativity, whimsy, or improvisation. Flashing lights simply couldn't take the place of a live teacher's encouragement. We resent being treated like pigeons.

In the wake of Skinner's programmed instruction came even nuttier educational fads--teaching machines, sleep learning, and music-induced hypnotic learning. Anything to make education easy and fun. Despite decades of promotion, they all fizzled.

Think Skinner's ideas are dead? Check out the popular children's software program NFL Math. It's designed around professional football and is supposed to teach arithmetic. "Packed with photo-realistic animations," this program "makes hitting a wide receiver with a pass more fun than hitting the books." It promises such "learning skills" as addition, fractions, statistics, and percentages. The kids get to watch short, poorly animated football segments, interrupted by half-baked math questions ("Which is more yards rushed- I, 182 or 1,207?"). Result? Your children will "score better grades in math!" Uh, right.

The program forces the child to do a math problem in order to be rewarded with two minutes of entertainment. Then the torture begins anew. What a great way to teach hatred of math.

NFL Math and its many brethren typically present questions in the format 4 + 3 = ? They can accept only the obvious answers. Like Skinner's pigeons, you get rewarded for pressing the right button.

A real teacher might well ask, "Seven equals what?" A fascinating question with an infinite number of answers: "Three plus four," "Ten minus three," "Days in a week," "The dwarfs in Snow White," "Number of deadly sins," "The Seven Immortals of the Wine Cup," "The Group of Seven revolutionized Canadian painting," "The number of samurai in Kurosawa's best movie," "The German expression Siebensachen, which means the baggage you carryon a trip." These answers, incomprehensible to any computer, make perfect sense to a real teacher. ..and open up whole fields for creative discussion. What began as an arithmetic question blossoms into a lesson on language, art, science, history, or culture.

New teachers, fresh out of college, seem to be most affected with the connection between gizmos, classrooms, and fun in learning. Ms. Jennifer Donovan, a student teacher from Stetson University, wrote to me, repeating the standard party line: Lessons must be fun in order to compete with television and to motivate students. In the 1950s, the job market did not call for computer education. But in a changing world, students are hard pressed to find well-paying jobs that do not involve computer technology."

These fit together: Jobs go to those who know computers. Computers motivate students. Students won't learn unless it's fun.

Well, many subjects aren't fun. I wonder how the fun-to-learn teacher handles the Holocaust, Rape ofNanking, or American slavery. Perhaps hers creates Web sites about these subjects--and the students concentrate on graphic design instead of history. But scholarship isn't about browsing the net--it's about understanding events, appreciating history, and interpreting our world.

3

"But you don't understand," say my techie friends. "Computers are wonderful motivators for students. In this age of television, they won't write or do their homework without one."

And so we happily provide computers to students and expect them to suddenly become interested in academic topics. We encourage them to play with the machine ...any scholastic connection is secondary.

Kids do seem to be motivated by computers. But doesn't that multimedia machine mainly motivate kids to play with the computer, in the same way television motivates kids to watch more videos?

Motivation--the will to move--comes from yourself. You choose what puts you in motion and causes you to move. Computers cause you to sit in place and not to move.

Don Tapscott, author of Growing Up Digital, sees a new kind of young intellectual explorer who will process information and learn differently than those who came before them. "New media tools offer great promise for a new model of learning--one based on discovery and participation," he says. Thanks to cheap computers, we'll see a shift from teaching to "the creation of learning partnerships and learning cultures. The schools can become a place to learn rather than a place to teach."

The field of educational technology is filled with such empty cliches. In this dreamworld, empowered students eagerly learn from one another, encouraged by teachers who act more like coaches than instructors. We'll replace the sage on the stage with a guide on the side. Exciting on-line expeditions will replace outmoded chalk-and-talk lectures. Student-centered learning will be tutor-led and context-based rather than rote plug-and-chug. Child-centered classrooms. Blah, blah, blah. :

Can't blame students for getting sick of teachers lecturing about how the square of the hypotenuse has something to do with the sum of the squares of the legs of a right triangle. We yearn for depth, narrative, passion, involvement. For experience. Along comes the magic machine promising interactive fun. What kid can resist?

And I can't blame teachers for getting sick of students sitting there with mouths agape, not listening but not quite sleeping. Perhaps that's why adults figure that making finger motions on a keyboard is an appropriate activity ... that something must be happening in the kids' brains. In that sense, computers are parent-pleasing devices: machines to give the appearance of learning and the illusion of interactive, instant information.

Seems clear that an inspiring teacher doesn't need computers; a mediocre teacher isn't improved by one. I've never met a teacher who feels there's too much classroom time--they always complain that the periods are too short and there's too much material to cover.

Teaching, alas, is a low-paid calling. Some teachers attend college and put up with frustrations for a steady pay and eventual retirement. But I'll bet the best teachers are in it for the feedback: the smile on the kid's face and the "Aha" from the chemistry student. These, of course, are the very things that technology removes. The Internet gets the credit and the teacher gets the blame. And that great promised land of low-cost education-­ distance learning--essentially eliminates interpersonal interaction. Maybe that's why experienced teachers approach computers with hesitation.

In Teachers and Machines, Larry Cuban points out that teachers are frequently criticized as Luddites resistant to progress. A century of reformers have blamed the slow introduction of teaching devices on reactionary teaching staff. For instance, Charles Hoban, who worked to introduce instructional radio and TV, said, "The current and historical role of the classroom teacher is highly ritualized." Any change in that ritual is "likely to be resisted as an invasion of the sanctuary by the barbarians ...Any systematic attempt to scientize and rationalize the intuitively determined interaction patterns of the teacher is likely to elicit at least some teacher hostility and resistance."

That hostility is well justified. Teachers need only open a closet door to find stacks of obsolete and unused teaching gizmos: filmstrips, instructional television systems, Apple II computers,

4

and any number of educational videotapes. Each promised a revolution in the classroom. None delivered.

"Oh, but computers are different from old technologies like radio and television" runs the argument. "Computers are interactive. They're fun!"

Well, just why is electronic interactivity good for scholarship? With a computer, you're interacting with something, not someone. Doubtless, even the worst teacher is more versatile and adaptable than the finest computer program. Come to think of it, aren't teachers interactive? It's hard to think of a classroom without interaction.

The old saw still rings true: What requires the least effort is least cherished. Yet somehow we expect a simple, easy, fun, digital education to be both lasting and valuable.

"But the Internet is important to schools," consultants in computer-aided instruction tell me. "It links students straight to famous scientists. They can chat with researchers at observatories and laboratories. And there's instant homework help available online."

Well, no. Famous scientists--and obscure ones, too--don't have time to answer e-mail from distant students. Those academics are taking care of their projects, managing post-docs, teaching classes, and writing grant proposals. Astronomers who enjoy working with kids would far prefer to meet the kids, not answer a slew of messages over the Net. That inquiring mind directed to the Net will likely dead-end in some press release or a mountain of indecipherable jargon.

Teachers have the difficult job of not just understanding a body of academic facts--they must understand their students. The teaching method that connects for one child won't work with another. The student who's strong in one area will certainly be weak in another. What seems like a game to someone will feel like work to another. The intention should be enlightenment, not entertainment.

Leaming isn't about acquiring information, maximizing efficiency, or enjoyment. Leaming is about developing human

capacity. To turn learning to fun is to denigrate the two most important things we can do as humans: I teach. To learn.

5