resources | lawler & hopper, 1992 [research interview]
Robert Lawler and Mary Hopper, Passages from Personal Interview, July 20, 1992
Passage 1
Lawler: One of the general issues that is part of the business world is the portability of systems. As a database designer, I was always concerned with tradeoffs, and whether or not the knowledge that you've invested in when you bring up a system on one piece of hardware would be portable to a different vender's computer at a minimal cost. That is a central concern for people who manage computer resources in a business community. A second point is that businesses usually deal with important information. They never want to lose data. So it's very important that if you have files, you back them up in such a way that they can be restored in case of a system disaster. This embodies a whole mind set: that what you have as a system is only one image of the reality of what data is. The practice of down loading files, and recreating files at need, is functionally central. This focus gives a kind of access to cross vendor portability.
Passage 2
Lawler: I think the example of virtual memory will demonstrate an important point. Before virtual memory, programmers did horrible things to get programs to run in limited real memories, but after the introduction of virtual memory, people could escape from limitations of the machine. The question is one of reaching a critical point of available resources, to escape from the focus on the issues of design which are primarily economic and primarily physical, into the focus on design issues which are primarily logical and organizational in terms of what is coherent.
Passage 3
Lawler: About those roles, there has to be someone who is in fact, a person who is called a liaison between different areas of concerns, on the one hand technical and other more content oriented. Now, what are the most important issues between the different levels of competence in, on the one hand, the technical area and on the other, the content area.
Hopper: Let me provide you with a metaphor from my literature experiences that I find useful in conceptualizing these issues for myself. There is one fairly common exercise of analysis which focuses upon the relationships between Shakespeare's heroes and fools as they are manifest in his different plays. He experimented with these two roles, such that they range from being very different and distinct characters, to other cases where they are presented as alter egos or foils, to finally where they are incorporated into a single role, as when Hamlet play his own fool. I use this analogy when I conceptualize the dilemma of technical expertise in courseware development on the one hand, and content knowledge on the other. You have the case of the content expert and the computer expert, the master of content on one hand, and the master of media on the other. In some cases, they can be the same person. But the more complex the system gets, the less likely it is that someone will be both. At that point you have
a divergence, and question is how far apart they get. Do you have one person who will communicate directly with the other person in a pair? Or do you have the case where you have a whole string of people to communicate between the master of the computer medium and the master of the content. And the further apart they get, the more communication and resources become issues, because when you develop a chain of people, more and more people, more and more effort to communicate, and more and more resources. I think it's almost a limit on the complexity of the environment that will actually produce effective educational materials. You can produce materials with a big team, and have content experts almost completely ignorant of the workings of the computing environment. On the other hand, with a simple enough system, you can have one person who can administer his own system, and be a content expert.
Lawler: He plays his own fool.
Hopper: Yes. But, now you've got the limitation of a low level environment. So it's a trade off. In education at large, I fear we might be trapped into using the low level systems due to barriers created by a lack of technical expertise.
Lawler: That's an interesting issue. I went up to Motorola University, and it's very clear they are interested in exporting some of there expertise to educational community, but they think their expertise is essentially in quality control. But it may be the case, that what they could do, is engage people who are involved in database application design, or other computer specialties as people who could provide some knowledge to people who wish to develop educational computing projects in various disciplines.
Passage 4
Hopper: When I started, I went into HyperCard, and it was a project that was not complete. The first thing I had to do was figure out a way to make it work. It took me weeks to figure out what it was, how it was organized, where all the data was, and how much of it there was. It was not clear at the time. What pushed me was that we had to teach it.
© Mary E. Hopper [MEHopper] |
MEHopper@TheWorld.com
[posted 01/01/01 | revised 02/02/02]