War of the Worlds: The Human Side of Moore's Law (technology, culture, and education commentary)

There is a technology war coming. Actually it is already here but most of us haven't yet notice. It is a war not about technology but because of technology, a war over how we as a culture embrace technology. It is a war that threatens venerable institutions and, to a certain extent, threatens what many people think of as their very way of life. It is a war that will ultimately and inevitably change us all, no going back. The early battles are being fought in our schools. And I already know who the winners will be.

The real power of Moore's Law lies in what the lady at the bank called "the miracle of compound interest," which has allowed personal computers to increase in performance a millionfold over the past 30 years. There's a similar, if slower, effect that governs the rate at which individuals are empowered by the technology they use. Called Cringely's Nth Law of Computing (because I have forgotten for the moment what law I am up to, whether it is five or six), it says that waves of technological innovation take approximately 30 years - one human generation - to be completely absorbed by our culture. That's 30 years to become an overnight sensation, 30 years to finally settle into the form most useful to society, 30 years to change the game.

The key word here is "empowerment." Technologies allow us to overcome limitations of time, distance, and physical capability, but they only empower us when they can be gracefully used by large, productive segments of our society. The telephone was empowering when we all finally got it. Now it is the Internet and digital communications.

Let's be clear about what we're measuring here. It has very little to do with specific technologies and everything to do with our adaptation to technology as a culture. What Cringely's Nth Law of Computing predicts is our rate of adaptation to technological life. This happens not at the rate technologies are developed but at the rate we are capable of broadly absorbing them. We've seen this sort of thing before, of course. I used to work in user interface design and noticed long ago that it took about a decade for every new interface standard to be absorbed by technical culture. This dates back a lot longer than most of us might guess, all the way back to microfilm readers in the 1960s. Older engineers couldn't stand reading microfilm while younger engineers found it effortless. Same for microfiche, which followed microfilm. The same effect could be found in typing: older people - mainly men - wouldn't adapt to it, but those who used a typewriter in high school or college quickly learned they could not live without it. Ditto for computers, first with batch processing, then time-sharing terminals, then command-line PCs, then graphical user interfaces, and now emerging mobile platforms. Each new technology is difficult for the older generation and easy for the younger, which explains why I am a PC master but a texting idiot. I'm just too damned old.

Here, buried in my sixth paragraph, is the most important nugget: we've reached the point in our (disparate) cultural adaptation to computing and communication technology that the younger technical generations are so empowered they are impatient and ready to jettison institutions most of the rest of us tend to think of as essential, central, even immortal. They are ready to dump our schools.

I came to this conclusion recently while attending Brainstorm 2008, a delightful conference for computer people in K-12 schools throughout Wisconsin. They didn't hold breakout sessions on technology battles or tactics, but the idea was in the air. These people were under siege.

I started writing educational software in 1978. The role of instructional technology has changed since then from a gimmick to a novelty to an effort to an essential component of any curriculum. Kids can't go to school today without working on computers. But having said that, in the last five years more and more technical resources have been turned to how to keep technology OUT of our schools. Keeping kids from instant messaging, then text messaging or using their phones in class is a big issue as is how to minimize plagiarism from the Internet. These defensive measures are based on the idea that unbound use of these communication and information technologies is bad, that it keeps students from learning what they must, and hurts their ability to later succeed as adults.

These are kids who have never known life without personal computers and cell phones. But far more important, there is emerging a class of students whose PARENTS have never known life without personal computers and cell phones. The Big Kahuna in educational discipline isn't the school, it is the parent. Ward Cleaver rules. But what if Ward puts down his pipe and starts texting? Well he has.

Andy Hertzfeld said Google is the best tool for an aging programmer because it remembers when we cannot. Dave Winer, back in 1996, came to the conclusion that it was better to bookmark information than to cut and paste it. I'm sure today Dave wouldn't bother with the bookmark and would simply search from scratch to get the most relevant result. Both men point to the idea that we're moving from a knowledge economy to a search economy, from a kingdom of static values to those that are dynamic. Education still seems to define knowing as more important than being able to find, yet which do you do more of in your work? And what's wrong with crimping a paragraph here or there from Cringely if it shows you understand the topic?

This is, of course, a huge threat to the education establishment, which tends to have a very deterministic view of how knowledge and accomplishment are obtained - a view that doesn't work well in the search economy. At the same time K-12 educators are being pulled back by No Child Left Behind, they are being pulled forward (they probably see it as pulled askew) by kids abetted by their high-tech Generation Y (yes, we're getting well into Y) parents who are using their Ward Cleaver power not to maintain the status quo but to challenge it.

This is an unstable system. Homeschooling, charter schools, these things didn't even exist when I was a kid, but they are everywhere now. There's only one thing missing to keep the whole system from falling apart - ISO certification.

I've written about this for years and nobody ever paid attention, but ISO certification is what destroyed the U.S. manufacturing economy. With ISO 9000 there was suddenly a way to claim with some justification that a factory in Malaysia was precisely comparable to an IBM plant on the Hudson. Prior to then it was all based on reputation, not statistics. And now that IBM plant is gone.

Well reputation still holds in education, though its grip is weakening. I know kids from good families who left high school early with a GED because they were bored or wanted to enter college early. Maybe college is next.

MIT threw videos of all its lecture courses - ALL its lecture courses - up on the web for anyone to watch for free. This was precisely comparable to SGI (remember them?) licensing OpenGL to Microsoft. What is it, then, that makes an MIT education worth $34,986? Is it the seminars that aren't on the web? Faculty guidance? Research experience? Getting drunk and falling in the Charles River without your pants? Right now it is all those things plus a dimensionless concept of educational quality, which might well go out the window if some venture capitalist with too much money decides to fund an ISO certification process not for schools but for students.

The University of Phoenix is supposedly preparing a complete middle and high school online curriculum available anywhere in the world. I live in Charleston, SC where the public schools are atrocious despite spending an average of $16,000 per student each year. Why shouldn't I keep my kids at home and online, demanding that the city pay for it?

Steve Jobs rejects the idea of Apple making or distributing e-books because he says people don't read books. He's right, book readers are older. Young readers graze. They search. Look how they watch TV. Steve didn't say people are stupid or we're all going to Hell in a handbasket. He just said we don't read books.

Technology is beginning to assail the underlying concepts of our educational system - a system that's huge and rich and so far fairly immune to economic influence. But the support structure for those hallowed and not so hallowed halls has always been parents willing to pay tuition and alumni willing to give money, both of which are likely to change over a generation for reasons I've just spent 1469 words explaining. We are nearing the time when paying dues and embracing proxies for quality may give way having the ability to know what kids really know, to verify what they can really do, not as 365th in their class at Stanford but as Channing Cringely, who just graduated from nowhere with the proven ability to design time machines.

The reality is that you can have the biggest, most powerful search engine in the world and it doesn't mean a thing if you are searching for information about Brittany Spears. Being able to search is founded on a knowledge base that tells you that you need to search, that a search of a particular sort may be useful, and the whether the result are meaningful.
So instead of dumping all that silly "knowledge" stuff, the internet makes it MUCH more important. Ironically, the best education right now is a classical education. Very broad and designed to instill context. The internet is meaningless without that info being put in context.

I agree with your post with a qualification: I'm not sure if you and I would agree on the definition of a "classical education".

I'm certain that we would both agree that it includes a very strong emphasis on learning how to read and understand books, as opposed to websites, but I wonder if you would agree with me that a truly well-rounded "classical" education will spend as much time on science and math as on philosophy, history and literature.

I would even go so far as to teach the little tykes organic chemistry, when they're still young enough to find it fun and puzzling.

Of course, nothing interesting is going to be learned in a public school. Some private schools are probably ok. A homeschooling environment is probably the best.

Public schools exist for the purpose of disseminating public propaganda, keeping public trough-feeders well-paid, and promoting the only social goal left in America: Diversity Uber Alles.

The greatest sin perpetuated by an educational system is to waste a student’s time.

That is, “Either teach or get off the pot.”

Before, when students were confronted by torpor and inefficiency in the educational system, caused by innumerable and almost insurmountable reasons, they had to grin and bear it, precisely because there was no other *way* of getting information.

That has changed. Now, with technology, information exchange is accelerated to an incredible degree. Instead of a student having to go to a library, locate a book, and locate a *single* fact within that book, in the same amount of time they can discover dozens or even hundreds of facts on the Internet.

But raw data and memorization are just the lowest level of education. The next *technological* evolution up the pyramid of education is ordering and correlating information. From there, analyzing and discrimination of information, interpolation and extrapolation, criticism and argument, and finally synthesis of new concepts derived from existing knowledge.

But how to achieve this?

There are some commonalities with modern education, obviously. At first, in early education, students must learn the abstracts of knowledge, such as the alphabet and grammar and arithmetic. But from there, as is already somewhat the case, they must learn to interface with the technology they will need.

It used to be that typing was learned in high school. Now it is taught, it *must* be taught, in kindergarten or 1st grade, for the student to be at a contemporary level of achievement with their peers, and to be able to progress further.

In the future, it will be just as essential to teach one or more of the several known techniques of memorization. This will *have* to be done for the student to be able to digest the vast amount of data they will need for their advancement.

But it goes beyond that. Students must not only be taught to memorize for recall, but to memorize in a *structured* way. The way information is taught today is an almost random jumble in a vaguely linear manner. This is too consumptive of intellectual resources. Instead it must, from the very start, be replaced with a minimum of a “two dimensional” ordering of information.

An easy way to conceptualize this is with a multiplication table. If students are taught multiplication in a random, but vaguely linear way, such as “six times seven is forty-two, and eight times five is forty”, students will have to use a huge amount of mental resources to consume and integrate that knowledge.

They will be forced to count with their fingers, or use individual mnemonic devices to remember particular things. And even then, the knowledge will be so linear, that while they might know that “eight times five is forty”, they will be puzzled if asked “What is five times eight?”

However, if their knowledge has even a two-dimensional organization, they not only understand the *progression* of the “eight multipliers”, but the *progression* of the “five multipliers”. To themselves, they will say either “8-16-24-32-40” *or* “5-10-15-20-25-30-35-40”, and get the correct answer. “Five times eight is forty. Eight times five is forty.”

Importantly, just a two-dimensional ordering system not only gives them the right answer, faster, but it also gives them a *check* on their answer. Verification that they are correct.

Now imagine the power if children are taught a THREE-dimensional organization of knowledge?

Taught right on top of memorization techniques, students at very low levels will have at their command knowledge and confidence in their knowledge.

Beyond this, the entire curriculum of even elementary school or its equivalent changes, because students will be *able* to absorb so much more information, order it, and use it *faster*. Subjects long ignored will re-emerge precisely because there is the *time* for them to be taught.

But even that can be multi-dimensional. For example, say a student is studying biology on their personal computer multimedia system. They are watching and listening to a recorded but interactive multimedia presentation, like a documentary, that is regarded as top notch. His teacher downloaded it from a national educational intranet, after selecting it from perhaps a dozen equivalent program blocks on the same subject. Each have a standard and similar organization, but very different content.

The student is both continually interacting with the program by typing in words, or speaking them into a microphone where they are interpreted. They are asking and answering questions, reviewing and being evaluated at the same time.

But they are also learning the lesson in both English and German *at the same time*. So they are learning *both* biology and the German language. Their typing is evaluated for accuracy and spelling and grammar. Three subjects. They might have to write an essay on what they are learning just after they have learned it. Etc.

In essence, the student is taking several classes at the same time! No human teacher can match that.

But the very best part is that his computer that is running the educational block is attuned to him as an individual. It tracks their personal efficiency, giving extra emphasis on slow areas, but also permitting digressions to more advanced information when the student is very interested and “on a roll”.

Optimally, if a student is fascinated by a subject, they might be able to track it up to college level, if they are interested and can keep up. This lets the brilliant student, even momentary brilliance, take the student wherever they can go, totally apart from what other students are doing.

Conversely, all students will eventually have a slump in one or more subjects. Because theirs is an individually tailored progression, the computer can take its time until it is certain that the student knows the subject, before advancing, and without holding everybody else back. Thus there are no huge “missing pieces” to their learning that will haunt them.

Student time is never wasted, in fact, it is optimized.

And be assured, this will not mean less need for teachers, but far more challenge for them, as they spend far less time on disjointed, vaguely linear memorization, and far more on the higher levels of learning.

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