Alan Kay and some reasons why the educational technology revolution hasn't happened

While reading a recent post from Gardner Campbell I was taken by a quote from Alan Kay

The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas

A google search later and I came across this interview with Kay for the Scholastic Administrator magazine. The article is titled “Alan Kay still waiting for the revolution” and there are some, for me, interesting perspectives. A smattering below.

The difficult part is helping the helpers

Kay identifies the greatest obstacle to his work as being “helping the helpers”. i.e. the teachers. In talking about Logo, Kay a key failure being that the second and third waves of teachers were not interesting in Logo and didn’t have the math skills to teach well with Logo.

I see this as the biggest problem around e-learning (or blended, flexible, personal etc learning if that’s your buzz word of the moment) within universities, helping the helpers.

The tokenism of computers

On computers and tokenism

But I think the big problem is that schools have very few ideas about what to do with the computers once the kids have them. It’s basically just tokenism, and schools just won’t face up to what the actual problems of education are, whether you have technology or not.

Again there’s some resonance with universities. For a lot of senior and IT management in universities there’s an idea that we must have an LMS, but there’s not always a good idea of what the organisation should do with it once it has it. The most important part of that “idea”, is being able to identify what about the policies and practices of the institution needs to change to best achieve that idea.

For example, with the LMS the institution can increase interaction between staff and students via discussion forums, e-portfolios etc. But we won’t change the workload or funding model for teaching, or recognise the need to change the timetable to remove the traditional 2 hour lecture, 2 hour tutorial model.

The difference between music and instruments

In talking about some of the limits or potential problems associated with the trend to one-to-one computer

Think about it: How many books do schools have—and how well are children doing at reading? How many pencils do schools have—and how well are kids doing at math? It’s like missing the difference between music and instruments. You can put a piano in every classroom, but that won’t give you a developed music culture, because the music culture is embodied in people……The important thing here is that the music is not in the piano. And knowledge and edification is not in the computer. The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas.

The provision of the LMS or some other “instrument” is the simple task. Helping the people figure out what you want to do with it and how it can be done well, is the hard part.

Helping everyone find their inner musician

Why educational computing hasn’t lived up to the potential?

So computers are actually irrelevant at this level of discussion—they are just musical instruments. The real question is this: What is the prospect of turning every elementary school teacher in America into a musician? That’s what we’re talking about here. Afterward we can worry about the instruments.

How do you encourage and enable university academics to become musicians? I don’t think you can forget about computers, e-learning or the LMS. They are already in universities. There’s a need to look out how you can change how academics experience these technologies so that they can start developing their musical ability. Sending them to “band camp” (e.g. Grad Cert in Higher Education) isn’t enough if they return to a non-musical family. The environment they live in has to be musical in every aspect.