Polemic on Education and Information

Allow me to step back from the messy details of educational technology and reflect for a moment on the meanings we usually attach to the words "teach" and "learn".

If you are a "teacher" then you should know by now that "teach" is an intransitive verb. You can teach to someone, but you don't "teach people". People learn. Sometimes they learn better or faster as the result of interactions with other people (even, occasionally, with teachers), but all the learning is done by the individual student. So what is your role?

Well, I disagree with those who claim that lectures are useless. Good lectures are very important sources of encouragement and inspiration: a student who despairs at the prospect of integrating mountains of information into a coherent mental picture is often encouraged to see that it can be done; and if it is done well enough, (s)he may be inspired to think, "I want to be able to do that!" But of course no one actually learns the subject from a lecture.

Can "teachers" only encourage and inspire, then? Perhaps that is plenty; but maybe we can also [forgive the trendy buzzword] facilitate learning, if we understand why, when and how people learn. So . . . ask yourself the following question: "When do I learn, and why?"

In my case, there are several answers that overlap but are clearly (in my mind) different:

1. When I'm required to (reluctantly). Students are frequently forced by circumstances (prerequisites etc.) to learn things they don't really want to know. Such information is not easily absorbed, having no psychological space reserved for it, and is quickly forgotten as soon as is practical. Who can blame the student for freeing up space in an already crowded memory? It would be nice if we could always muster some interest in any subject we are required to learn, but for me this ideal is infrequently attained.

2. When I need to know for reasons of my own. This is the usual situation when I pick up the manual I neglected to read when I purchased the device or the software that is now malfunctioning. Students may have the same motivations when working out homework problems or preparing for exams in subjects they actually care about. Under these circumstances one is naturally obsessed with reaching the desired information as directly and efficiently as possible.

3. When I'm curious about the subject. If the manual is well written, I will almost certainly get sidetracked onto interesting topics other than the one I set out to learn about. (Every try to look something up in an encyclopedia? Bet you couldn't read just the part you set out to!) This is when "learning is fun" but I fear the information so acquired is less subject to recall than that acquired when "learning is needful" as in the preceding situation.

Again speaking only for myself, the answers are (in order of increasing effectiveness):

1. From listening to someone else talk. I may be half asleep, but I do pick up something.

2. From reading

   • a beautifully written book; or

   • a badly written book.

   The latter requires more effort to understand and is therefore more effective at forcing me to learn rather than merely memorize. This is kind of depressing, but my experience offers no escape from the conclusion that learning, like athletic training, is hard. To borrow a phrase, "No pain, no gain."

3. From paraphrasing in my own words. This may be just me (or people like me), but I never feel like I understand something until I have found a way of expressing it in my own words. Simple "feedback" is OK, but it is much more effective to say, "You mean . . . " than to repeat, "You said . . . . "

4. From using what I have nominally learned. E.g. in Science, from doing assigned problems or (more interesting and therefore more effective) from working out adaptations of what I have heard or read. In the Humanities one rarely uses ideas to "do problems" but the latter type of application is equally valid. Synthesis is (IMHO) the core process of learning.

5. From trying to explain it to others. This ranges (in order of increasing stress) from "brainstorming" with enthusiastic peers to writing papers on my research to writing [fragments of] textbooks on well-known subjects to lecturing in front of a captive audience to speaking in front of a voluntary audience to arguing with peers who think I am wrong. (By the time I can comfortably defend my ideas against a concerted attack by Bill Unruh, I know the subject!)

Now let's put the two questions together and ask, "What would help most?" Well, lectures are nice but we have that pretty well covered. Ditto textbooks and manuals of the usual kind. "Cooperative learning" is very trendy today, so the potential effectiveness of "brainstorming" has been recognized and this avenue is being explored. What is sadly neglected (IMHO) is exploitation of the "need to know" motivator.

Let's suppose you have just conceived a need to know about something and you have in hand a textbook or a manual that (you have reason to believe) contains the information you seek. Do you open it to the Table of Contents? I think not! You turn immediately to the Index in the hope of being led directly to the information you actually want.

If your textbook or manual has a good Index and you are lucky, this strategy will succeed in placing the desired information before your eyes in one step. But wait! What are all those unfamiliar terms? You may be able to guess at the meaning of some of the jargon, but there is apt to be at least one "stopper" that sends you back to the Index. Before long you have bookmarks in half a dozen pages and probably another book or two open on your desk, trying to get an idea of where you stand in the edifice of human knowledge . . . .

Of course, this is why we have good pedagogy: start with Chapter 1 and proceed as the author intended; this will ensure that you don't get stranded in unknown territory. But what creates the motivation to actually read the whole book? In most cases, I believe it is an evolution from the "need to know" impulse through the resulting "expanding focus" to bemusement with the topic and a sense of why it might be a good idea to read the book through in its intended linear pedagogical sequence.

What we really need is a universal manual with an omniscient Index. Time to visit the World Wide Web . . . .