I envy your enthusiasm! It seems to me you don't really understand the objection I'm trying to raise, so I'll try again. But first, a digression on a topic we both care about (the rest of you can skip it, as it's off-topic). (-8 <DIGRESSION> I used to teach at university, too, and remember the experience vividly. Over two years or so, I several times taught a course which had up to 70 students, as well as team-teaching smaller courses with professors (graduate seminars, especially, were small!). My preparation for such courses was basically to get hold of the list of registered students as soon as possible, and read the names through for a few days, especially before I went to bed at night and when I woke up in the morning. Having the labels (to some extent) in my head made it really much easier to attach them to the faces later! For me, teaching was pretty much all about interacting with students. The material was never something I had to focus on. In my Human Communication introductory survey course (the huge one!), for example, I taught only ONE lesson (out of about 30) as a lecture. It was the most technical one, which included dense material about cultural, societal, and media codes (i.e., in several eastern cultures, white is for funerals rather than weddings or christenings; in an old Hollywood film, dark clothing and "menacing music" introduce a villain, while in a book, a row of asterisks means time has passed; etc. I had to lecture because it's too time-consuming to "draw out of" students what they mostly don't know!) Even teaching statistical and research design methodology, I preferred to be interactive. For an example, see my long article on "Statistics: An Inductive, Conceptual Approach" which I originally presented (to APL programmers) while, for example, physically binding plastic fruit together with premeasured dowel rods so "students" could grasp concepts of multidimensional scaling, Factor Analysis, analysis of covariance, etc. You can find the article converted to hypertext in the Bookshop at accesswriters.com (it's the only entry currently on the Science shelf). </DIGRESSION> Ok, now this is important: Do you know that if kittens are raised in an evenly lighted space with only vertical lines in it, they never learn to see horizontal lines (or vice versa)? Yeah, move them when they're grown to a space with bars in it, and they'll run into them, over and over again. They are literally blind to those bars; their brains never had the experience, and thus never made the connections, at a critical stage in their development. Our minds (and our brains) do what they have to do, by and large. If we spend time thinking about numbers or mathematics when we are young, we develop certain abilities others never do, probably because the preliminary connections (neural pathways) are there. For example, we can remember longer numbers because somehow the number (or chunks of it) becomes meaningful to us. Now, if the mind is stressed (and I do mean "mind" this time, not brain, because I'm talking not of a physical stress but an emotional one), as most of us know, we are distracted, we lose track of details, we lose focus. Being stressed can result in Alzheimer's type behavior-- leaving the glasses in the fridge sort of stuff. Why? Routinely, humans cannot easily focus on multiple levels. In fact, I, personally, define "intelligence" as the ability to move up and down the "ladder of abstraction." I have known people who function in society all right (usually as shop clerks, etc.), but they can't do this at all. When we focus on a higher-level task, we simply do not have the psychic energy available to remain focussed on the lower-level tasks simultaneously. Thus, as most of us have experienced, if we spend several minutes adjusting the leading of a line of type (or the placement of headers in HTML pages, pick suitable example yourself), we may never notice the words in the line are ungrammatical, or misspelled. That's why I taught everyone I dealt with as a documentation consultant to proof their work as I proofed mine: Never try to proof a page at a time; instead, first just check only the format of, say chapter headings or headers. Then check only for page numbering and illustration sequential numbering. As a last step, always read for content, after all the formatting has been fixed. (And yes, sometimes the content obviously needs to be something else or somewhere else -- at some other level, perhaps, so the whole cycle starts over again in all affected text areas!) The problem with using a computer *AS* you teach is that the computer is necessarily requiring SOME level of both low-level sensory (i.e., looking at the screen or typing) and higher-level cognitive (i.e., remember which key to press to bring up face recognition) focus. At its worst, a computer demands high-level focus. Most of the time, since OS's are still in their infancy, most people using a computer already have a very complex stack in their head, from OS through application to task to actual input, etc. I don't believe using a computer (while, for example, teaching) can ever become as (instinctive/natural) background-ish to us as, say, pacing and vocalizing are. The more we split our attention, the more psychic time we have to give to managing the focus of attention -- the stack or task list... So I don't think a completely computerized teaching environment is a great idea. I don't know if you realize how very poor the average person in our culture is at listening. Most of us do it VERY badly. But (except for distance learning), listening is the basic skill a good teacher needs, right up there with understanding the material, and being able to articulate it in many ways. (Of course, some would say the latter two things are the same, but that's a philosophical argument for another day!) Anyway, what I'm trying to say is, paying attention to someone (or many persons) is already hard for us, in this post-literate culture. Distracting our attention further, by splitting it intentionally between interacting personally (speaking and listening, attending to non-verbal cues) and any sort of computer i/o will make it harder. It may well be beyond humans to teach well in that sort of environment, at least until we've evolved another thousand years or so! Surely we've all experienced, in our classes, the professor who is trying to write something on the board while speaking, and gets it wrong. We usually laugh when that happens (but it's not happening all the time)... Writing on the board is a very simple distraction compared with handling the kind of immersive system you are describing! Sorry this is so long, but I think it's important. I suspect either this year or next will be the year of the wearable, and it will transform society again. We should be very careful of incorporating them into environments which demand high levels of interpersonal attention, in any way which makes yet another demand on our attention. (In medicine or teaching, perhaps they might be used to record and play back interviews or classes to allow us to do later analysis?) I've been waiting for a wearable since 1998, and I really, really want one, but I also know quite a lot about human cognition. We need to be careful. (How many deaths have cell phones caused? And talking on the phone is a relatively familiar activity, plus there's little or no interference between the mostly visual cognitive activity of driving and the mostly vocal and auditory cognitive activity of phone conversations!) Cheers -- Carol Stein-- Subscription/unsubscription/info requests: send e-mail with subject of "subscribe", "unsubscribe", or "info" to
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