resources | putnam & hopper, 1992 [research interview]
Thomas Putnam & Mary Hopper, Passages from Personal Interview, July 30, 1992
Passage 1
Putnam: The places where it has really succeeded is where a person came in
with an education problem to solve and found that the medium could be
used to solve the problem, not the other way around. They didn't start
with a computer and say let's see if we can go out and apply this to
education somewhere. The medium is here. It's not the problem. The
problem is that doing something with it takes an enormous amount of
effort. The hard part of this is still the intellectual effort of the teacher to
build the material into something that can be delivered as instruction.
That's the thing that takes the time. It still takes the time to say what is it
that I want to do, which materials am I going to put together, how am I
going to have them interrelate, and how am I going to have it interface
with the student.
Passage 2
Hopper: When you have a faculty member come in and say "I have this
instructional need and I have found something that will meet it in
computers," do they need to understand computers? Does the technical
and subject matter expertise need to reside in the same person?
Putnam: That's an interesting question and we've talked about this and I've
seen a number of universities setting up services in their central computing
organizations to offer course preparation services to faculty who come in
and say, "I'd really like the computer to do this, can you help me
implement it?" There is a little bit of that going on. Not much. And there
are several things that stand in its way. Usually somebody doesn't come
along and do that who doesn't know a good deal about the computer in the
first place. If you get somebody who is not computer literate who goes to
a trade show, sees a computer doing something, and comes back and says,
"I want to do this," but they don't know anything about it, it's a very
difficult problem to interact with them because they don't know the
limitations of the technology or its capabilities.
Hopper: The limitations of the technology. I hear that a lot. Could you
elaborate about what that means?
Putnam: Well, for example it takes time to program a computer. Full
motion video, interacting with full motion video, and 20 objects on a full
motion video screen, is not practical. That is to say, it's not like you can
see an image go by and point at something and say, "What was that?"
That kind of interaction is not practical today, unless you have explicitly
programmed in the position on each object is on each frame. The other
problem is that I think people, who aren't accustomed to using computers,
aren't able to visualize the delivery of course materials in a systematic
way. Then the problem is that they develop grandiose ideas with
extremely broad scope, but don't have it pinned down enough in order to
translate that into a systematic set of steps, even if those systematic steps
involve only simple text on a screen, let alone if they happen to have
integrated other media. You get that problem when you talk to someone
who is a rank amateur, although there are fewer and fewer of those
anymore.
Passage 3
Putnam: The point is you also have to conceive of why is it digitized,
who's going to use it now that it's in that form, and how are you going
to put that together. The problem is that to do good development using
these tools takes a lot of time and effort. If I were going to try to
give you one piece of advice that would best help steer your efforts,
the one thing I would suggest is to be very careful that you don't
mistake the means as the end. Start with the specific curriculum that
you want to deliver, and then figure out how to deliver it with the
facilities at hand. Then you can begin to balance the materials,
their volume, their presentation, how their integrated and the cost
of doing this in different ways. Take a specific problem that somebody has,
which has a specific end in mind that is related to education, and then
be sure that putting the computer to work to deliver that is helpful.
I think you'll have much better focus on your end product, and you'll
begin to understand the issues of cost and efficiency in that environment,
than if you start with saying lets start with the media, lets start with
the technology and put all these materials together, then have people use it.
I think you're likely to spend a lot of time thrashing around taking that
direction. If you get to the point, in the process of developing specific
educational materials, where you find that you need a place to put it so
that other people can get it, you have the beginnings of a larger project.
Passage 4
Putnam: We get fascinated with the medium, and the whole problem is the
means become the end. Then you end up with lots of technologically
knowledgeable people, who are proselytizing their particular religion
which is, "hey, we can do this on computers and it's interactive and
individualized and multimedia, and" Wait a minute, did we ask the
important questions? "Did this in fact substantially improve the
delivery of education. "Did the student learn more as a result of
this enormous expense we went to?" Did we, in fact, do a better job?"
And in fact, it is possible to do a better job, and in theory it is
possible to do some things that you couldn't do with a textbook or
standing in a classroom or a lecture environment. But, I think what
ends up happening all to often, is that we get fascinated with technology,
and nobody ask the question, "Was this worth it in the first place?"
You also have to ask whether it was worth it. For example, there are
a lot of good things we can do given time, and money, and people,
and intellect, and things like that. The problem is we never have
enough time, money, people, or intellect to do all of these things
which can be done. So at some point, if somebody is in a position
where they are trying to make decisions about what's strategically
important, they don't try to do everything. They pick those things
which have a big payoff for the investment dollars, and they invest in those.
© Mary E. Hopper [MEHopper] |
MEHopper@TheWorld.com
[posted 01/01/01 | revised 02/02/02]