resources | kahn & hopper, 1992 [research interview]
Paul Kahn & Mary Hopper, Passages from Personal Interview, March 2, 1992
Passage 1
Kahn: The general problem of developing educational software and getting
from the idea stage, to the implementation stage, to the care and feeding or
longevity stage has a lot of different problems. This is true even if you
focus on a single platform, because it is a moving target. From the time you
start, the software is not same software and the platform is not the same
platform. If you tried to use sound and video a few years ago, it is not the
way to do sound and video now. So that's a set of problems that does not
need multiple platforms to make it complicated. Multiple platforms is the
same set of problems times the number of platforms, plus the issues of
compatibility between more or less equivalent software.
Passage 2
Kahn: For the tools that we developed in Intermedia, there were some
points that seemed to be critical for success. The first point is that it only
works for faculty who think they have a problem. That may sound obvious, but unfortunately it is not quite as obvious as it seems. If a faculty person comes to us and says, "I've been trying to get across these kinds of points for the last ten years, and I know that I am having trouble getting them across," and if the points they are trying to get across match the strengths of the system, then you generally have a success. For the Intermedia system, the problem that seemed to be the best was the need to get your students to understand the interrelationship between many pieces of information. Now, if you have a case where the faculty member says, "I've been teaching second year Latin for the last 20 years, and everybody learns second year Latin, what's the problem? I don't need it," then it does not work out well.
Passage 3
Kahn: The system always lended itself to working in small teams, from say
two to five people on a course. George Landow initially had three graduate
students, as well as himself, and generally ended up with a couple of kind of lead undergraduates each semester. In some cases he managed with one
graduate student, or in some cases no graduate students, but he is
extraordinary in the sense of the amount of time and interest he has for
devoting to the system.
© Mary E. Hopper [MEHopper] |
MEHopper@TheWorld.com
[posted 01/01/01 | revised 02/02/02]