THE ROLE OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY IN DEALING WITH THE LACK OF MEANING IN FORMAL EDUCATION

THE ROLE OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY IN DEALING WITH THE LACK OF MEANING IN FORMAL EDUCATION

Oscar Becerra

A correlation between high grade point averages (GPA) and high study persistence with the perception of school as instrumental in reaching goals in the distant future has been described by De Volder and Lens (1982).

Several studies also demonstrate the role of positive attitudes towards the personal future on the student's motivation and achievement. Being able to improve the perception of formal school, as instrumental for reaching goals in the distant future and open present must be therefore a desirable approach to help students succeed in school and, even more in their future lives.

This workshop (presentation/conference) attempts to describe a constructionist approach in the use of Information Technology integrated to a redesigned educational process that helps build a better teacher/student relation while making school work meaningful in the students eyes.

Depending of the duration, a formal review of theory about the diffusion of innovations and strategies to succeed in the introduction of innovations in the educational process can be introduced to the workshop.

Several authors (Holt, Kozol, Conroy) have suggested that school education as we know it, has lost its value as an instrument in the development of the individual. Some even suggest (Perelman) there is no possibility of improvement and the only hope is to replace traditional education with completely new mechanism.

My observation of the school system in Peru, specially secondary school (7-11 grade) has led reaching the conclusion there is a meaning crisis in the educational system. Let’s elaborate on what we refer to, as meaning crisis: If a student does not perceive what he or she is receiving from the educational system, as useful or having a purpose, he/she will conclude education is meaningless. We propose, based on personal experience with students of several social, economic and cultural backgrounds, that in most cases, failing students or students not getting the results they are capable of, from the educational system, are usually students who regard formal education as useless. Such situation is what we call the meaning crisis of the traditional education system or lack of meaning in formal education as mentioned in the title.

As a theoretical background our intention is to demonstrate students fail mainly because they are unable to understand why they should learn what they are expected to. Also, improvements in teaching methods and the introduction of computer mediated teaching tools have not helped and will not help to answer the basic question: What purpose does Education serve for me as a student?.

Assuming Viktor Frankl's assertion (Man's Search for Meaning, 1946) "Those who have a why can bear any how" is right, we may conclude the educational system fails because it is more involved in supplying how's and lacks the ability to provide why's. This also reinforces the findings by De Volder and Lens (1982), because seeing education as instrumental in reaching personally significant goals in the future is providing students with an answer to the basic question of why should I learn what I am expected to.

Other observation is that, even for students with high GPA, most of the information acquired during school years, is lost and has to be relearned when it becomes necessary. At this point it is important to distinguish between data, information and knowledge: Data is a set of symbols that may or may not have a particular meaning to an individual; information happens when those symbols are assigned a particular meaning by an individual or group; knowledge appears when information can be used to reach a personal goal which we will call ?critically solve a meaningful unprecedented problem?. As an example we might use the menu of a Chinese restaurant on our first visit: The unprecedented problem is we are hungry and have never been to a Chinese restaurant, the kanji symbols in the menu have no meaning if we are not literate in written Chinese. We might use our previous knowledge of restaurants to request a menu in English (or learn Chinese), the symbols (data) become information (unless we don’t recognize the ingredients even in our own language), dinner (actually eating it) is knowledge. The way so called knowledge is conveyed from teachers to student in the school process has been compared to licking the English version of the menu. (Denning)

Skills and information not lost by students (knowledge) share certain characteristics:

They were acquired in a natural learning process, what might be called the natural way, i.e. the amount of time involved in learning is short, when compared with the time spent using the abilities acquired during the learning process.

The role of the teacher during the learning process was to provide examples of ways to use the new knowledge in the solution of problems or in order for a student to accomplish personal goals.

Students had positive attachments to teachers and viewed them as resources in reaching their personal goals.

In the current school environment in many places it is not unusual to find 45 and even 50 student classrooms with one teacher as the only resource available to them for learning. This severely limits the ability of school teachers to develop participatory approaches where students can use information to do things, instead of just hearing about them. As a consequence, the perception of school education as non instrumental in reaching personal goals for the future is reinforced.

In this situation, when Information Technology is introduced in the classroom, the results are what Jay Forrester (1960) called the counterintuitive behaviour of complex social systems, with the result that the attempt to reform education using technology makes worst what it aimed to improve.

Examples of the above mentioned situation are classes where students are forced to learn the parts and components of a personal computer, or spend one school year, learning numberless functions of a word processor or spreadsheet or programming language after programming language, without ever having the opportunity to produce something useful with the knowledge they are supposedly acquiring. In many schools, this situation is usually aggravated by the fact that computer courses in schools are usually given by technicians with little or no background in Education.

The Public Education System in Peru is comprised of a number close to 15,000 schools around the country. During the past 9 years many of these schools have been receiving computers, as part of different government programs. In 1987 there was a National Committee for Educational Computing who developed a program to introduce computers in education.

The emphasis was on CAI (Computer Assisted Instruction) packages and teaching programming languages. During 1988 and 1989 a group of 200 public school teachers were given sabbatical time, to attend a program developed between the Ministry of Education and the National University of Engineering. As in most programs, the results were never evaluated or published. From the original 200, just 50 teachers concluded the program. It is very probable most of them are now working as computer programmers, since that was the emphasis of the whole program.

In 1989 the Ministry of Education announced a national contest for teachers to design CAI packages. The results were never reported, the packages were of dubious quality, mainly because the schools didn't have the tools to make the development of such packages possible and the whole program for computers in education faded until the committee was dissolved.

Since those initial efforts, in 1997, the number of computers in public schools were estimated by the officers from the Ministry of Education, to be any number between 10,000 and 15,000. It is not known how many of them are operative and/or being used. The configuration range from 8086 diskless machines with monochrome monitors, to some 486 processors with multimedia, the later ones acquired during 1995. There has also been a public effort to formalize the software licenses for all the computers since most of them were acquired with no software.

There was no evaluation of the results of the official programs to provide schools with computers, but it is generally accepted that the results had been poor or null. The main reason for this situation being the lack of support to the program from the educational point of view. Most teachers had to improvise what to do with the computers, many of them took courses at local training centers, just to be able to use the computers for word processing and to be able to teach some programming.

During 1997-1998 there was a strong will to improve the situation but it was not clear how this could be accomplished. The results obtained had led many people to the conclusion that computers are of little or no use in education and it seemed there was evidence to support this. Some others were trying to find ways to help improve the situation: the Catholic University introduced Technology in Education as part of the curriculum in the Faculty of Education and established a Research Laboratory for Computers in Education(*). It was expected this laboratory would be instrumental in the development of policies to improve the support for the use of technology in education.

In 1997/8 the National Project of Educational Networks made a serious attempt to introduce Internet communication in 200 public schools: teachers were trained in educational approaches to the use of technology with little emphases in computer technical details not pertinent to the task. The results to date are very encouraging. In parallel several other technologies are being tested with the same approach and similar encouraging results. The World Bank is helping the Ministry of Education evaluate the results and we look forward to their publication.

The objective of the workshop will be to determine how a constructionist approach as the one suggested by Seymour Papert (Mindstorms, The Children's Machine, The Connected Family) and others (Idit Harel, Yasmin Kafai, Mitchel Resnick, etc.), by helping to rethink the role of Technology in Education, may in fact do to Education what Reengineering has done to Business Administration (Hammer & Champy). I am convinced technology can be a powerful resource for the improvement of education and if it hasn't is because its use has not been properly directed and supported.

The emerging role of INTERNET in building what is called the global village, with its almost infinite capacity for sharing and accessing information, paired with the availability of ever faster and more powerful computers and communications facilities is rendering the role of teachers, as sources of information, obsolete. At the same time the need for critical judgement becomes a crucial necessity, in face of the avalanche of information now available at the students fingertips. The paradox of being thirsty and unable to drink from the firemen's pipe exemplifies the new kind of needs that education must satisfy.

I expect the participants in the workshops will understand the new role of teachers, as guides and counsellors and of schools, as places where students will share and construct positive images of their personal futures and find ways to acquire the skills necessary to make them possible.

The work will be interactive with practical and discussion sessions where current educational practices will be challenged and alternate ways to construct knowledge will be proposed (by the participants). Based on results reported earlier (International Logo Conference, 1993), it will be possible to analyze the impact of the proposed approach on school performance and attitude.

Public school systems have thousands of computers, many are leading edge technology. Almost all private schools have also some kind of computer laboratory. It is simply unfair students are not benefiting from the situation.

There are a few schools in both sectors (public and private) who have chosen to implement the constructionist approach, making it possible to evaluate the proposed approach. The way these schools work, focuses in the use of computers as tools to develop projects. At a very early stage (first or second grade) students are taught how to operate the computer and control it to do what they want. The way they work is project centered. The student defines a project he or she wants to accomplish during a certain period. The teachers act as facilitators and resources for the construction of the proposed task.

Some of the referred schools have been using this methodology for almost 10 years. Sharing their findings, problems and achievements may be very helpful for any school teacher or officer.

Bibliography

Becerra, O. (1993). Putting technology in its place at K-12 Education. Paper presented at the VI International Logo Conference. Caracas

De Volder, M.L. & Lens, W (1982). Academic achievement and future time perspective as a cognitive-motivational concept. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1982, Vol. 42, No. 3, 566-571

Frankl, V. (1959). Man's search for meaning. Washington: Pocket Books

Hammer, M. & Champy, J. (1993). Reengineering the corporation. New York: Harper Collins

Harel, I. (1991). Children designers New Jersey: Ablex

Papert, S. (1971). Teaching children thinking (Artificial Intelligence Memo No.247). Cambridge, MA: MIT

Papert, S. (1980). Mindstorms: Children, computers and powerful ideas. New York: Basic Books.

Papert, S. (1984). New theories for new learnings. Paper presented at the National Association for School Psychologists' Conference.

Perelman, L. (1992). School's out. New York: Avon Books Dennings, P. The next 50 years of computers

Oscar Becerra T.

Latin America Education Segment Manager
IBM Corporation
Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú
Faculty of Educación
Professor
Professional Biography
Javier Prado 540, La Molina, Lima 12, Perú
Tel. +51 1 349-0050/944-3755, e-mail: br1beo@PE.IBM.COM

Author
Oscar Becerra is manager of the Education Segment for IBM Corporation in Latin America, member of the consulting committee of the Faculty of Education of the University San Ignacio de Loyola and professor of applied information technology at the Catholic University in Lima Peru as well as invited scholar in other universities in his country. He has been a university teacher for more than 20 years.

Mr. Becerra was twice elected as a directory member of Kidlink Society and managed for two years the Kidleader list for Kidlink. In 1998 he was a member of the team in charge of the organization of the IV Kidlink worldwide management meeting and Peruvian Conference on Telecommunication in Education which gathered more than 1300 Peruvian teachers in 3 cities.

Mr. Becerra graduated with a Bachelor degree in Physics at the National University of Engineering in Perú and holds a Master’s degree in Educational Computing and Technology by the University of Hartford, USA. He has a diploma in Business Administration by the Graduate School of Business Administration in Lima. Oscar Becerra is now developing a research project on the role of Information Technology in dealing with the lack of meaning in formal Education, while working in the redesign of a school in his home country.

	They were acquired in a natural learning process, what might be called the natural way, i.e. the amount of time involved in learning is short, when compared with the time spent using the abilities acquired during the learning process.
	The role of the teacher during the learning process was to provide examples of ways to use the new knowledge in the solution of problems or in order for a student to accomplish personal goals.
	Students had positive attachments to teachers and viewed them as resources in reaching their personal goals.

	Becerra, O. (1993). Putting technology in its place at K-12 Education. Paper presented at the VI International Logo Conference. Caracas
	De Volder, M.L. & Lens, W (1982). Academic achievement and future time perspective as a cognitive-motivational concept. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1982, Vol. 42, No. 3, 566-571
	Frankl, V. (1959). Man's search for meaning. Washington: Pocket Books
	Hammer, M. & Champy, J. (1993). Reengineering the corporation. New York: Harper Collins
	Harel, I. (1991). Children designers New Jersey: Ablex
	Papert, S. (1971). Teaching children thinking (Artificial Intelligence Memo No.247). Cambridge, MA: MIT
	Papert, S. (1980). Mindstorms: Children, computers and powerful ideas. New York: Basic Books.
	Papert, S. (1984). New theories for new learnings. Paper presented at the National Association for School Psychologists' Conference.
	Perelman, L. (1992). School's out. New York: Avon Books Dennings, P. The next 50 years of computers