Ben Reynolds writes:Interactive broadband. Its downside is that it literalizes the information flow metaphor of the traditional face-to-face classroom. Lots of info goes to the user, but the user has a much smaller upload. A lot of traditional teacher types will try to use interactive broadband to make a cyber version of the traditional classroom. We'll have to fight hard to stop that.
The upside of broadband is the ability to give each user interactive access to expert knowledge asynchronously. The subjects of these expert knowledge systems can range from effectively omitting needless prepositions to structuring a narrative, micro and macro scale writing expertise. Basically, you can the expertise and make it available on demand.
But it's not just "read and remember" or "multiple choice." It's "which of these likely approaches would you like to try out?" There's no right answer, just a series of more or less effective approaches. The user chooses an approach and gets an expert explanation, for example, why a first person narration in which the narrator dies is unlikely to work (but also of ways to make it work, along with famous examples of success and failure).
I'm not replacing teachers with these expert systems, just using computers to do what they do best -- repetitive work. An experienced teacher can anticipate what certain types of students in certain situations are likely to think or write. We know the safe road, the thrilling road, the road less taken, and the road to perdition.
You use your teacher when the student has a new question, or when the artificial intelligence can no longer anticipate the student's next move, or when the canned explanations aren't cutting it. You use your
teachers to respond to actual writing, not to exercises that, after about 3 years' teaching, are pretty much human-in-a-can.I developed an exercise called "Throwing the Eraser: A Definition of Writing." It's chapter two in my ancient text, Writing Instruction for Verbally Talented Youth: The Johns Hopkins Model, which we distribute to new writing teachers. Once, I saw that exercise being performed in 10 or more classrooms simultaneously: human-in-a-can.