Ta-Wei David Shou
Mathematics and Science Education Department National Hua-Lien Teachers College |
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1. Information Age We are undergoing the most significant change ever experienced in human history. We have moved from the agricultural age through the industrial age and into the information age in a span of just 100 to 200 years. The requirement to success in different ages varies and it is summarized in Table 1. Table 1. To success in the variety of age
Toffler, writer of " The Third Wave " (1981), in his 1990 book, " Powershift, " discuss the impact of the information age. In the past, social change has been controlled primarily through force ( i.e., military ) or the market (i.e., money). Toffler states that today knowledge is the key to power: "The control of knowledge is the crux of tomorrow's worldwide struggle for power in every human institution. He who controls access to knowledge has power." (p. 20) From this perspective, education and access to information become equivalent to the importance of having access to guns and money for earlier generations.
From the view of economic activity manifested in Figure 1 cited from Huitt (1995), one of the trends is also the movement from an industrial to an information society. In 1980, the United States produced approximately 25% of the world's industrial production . This was accomplished with only 5% of the world's population and a decreasing proportion of that was involved in manufacturing.
Regarding the facts stated above, it is obvious that more knowledge workers will be needed by the society. If the school system does not change and if there is continued dissatisfaction with the product of this system, then change will be forced upon teachers. Educators will be r esponsible for making the necessary adjustments from the inside or someone else will do so from the outside. It could be that they force changes in the teacher training and certification procedure.
2. Pedagogy Paradigm Shift
Thomas Kuhn (1962), in a book titled "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" discussed the importance of a powerful concept: paradigm. He said that scientific paradigms are "accepted examples of actual scientific practice-- examples which include law, theory, application, and instrumentation together that provide models from which spring particular, coherent traditions of scientific research. People whose research is based on shared paradigms are committed to the same rules and standards for scientific practice." With the change of a few words, it is also an important concept for educational reform to reflect the society need.
Over the past, there was the "knowledge transmission" model. This model is built on a pedagogical approach involving a transmission or broadcast of information, in which "teaching is telling and learning is listening." Behaviorist learning theory (Skinner, 1949) holds that complex skills are developed through the acquisition of simpler subordinate skills that are sequentially combined. Curriculum has been organized in small chunks of knowledge, so that the student can progress in an orderly sequence from simpler to more complex tasks. The basic stimulus/response model reinforces with the positive reinforcement of high grades for correct answers and negative reinforcement of low grades for wrong answers. Much of the early computer use, from programmed learning to drill and practice of basic skills, was designed around these behaviorist assumptions (Greeno, 1998).
Now a day major pedagogy reform is based on principles of constructivist learning theory. Constructivist approaches extend the educational theories of Dewey who described effective student learning as motivated by interest, empowered by knowledge, and driven by a conceptual challenge or problem. Piaget's theories of intellectual development (1952) also emphasize on the constructive process of learning. They regard learning not as a reinforced repetition of what others think, but as an active process of comparing, contrasting, and creating new systemic interpretations that can accommodate multiple perspectives on both the physical and social environment. Vygotsky (1978) proposed that intellectual construction is fundamentally a social process while individual cognitive processes result from an internalization of interaction with more competent others.
Constructivist classrooms, in which students are encouraged to practice their critical and creative thinking, have been difficult to create with past technological applications and environment. Back to the industrial society, 50~60 students were taught by one teacher, and no rich information sources easily accessible to students, and factories need skilled workers. It were better suited for a transmission pedagogical approach emphasizing basic skills instruction and rote memorization of facts (e.g. via programmed learning and drill and practice applications). In examining classrooms over time, Cuban (1993) found that student centered learning was rarely evident in more than a quarter of the classrooms. Today, however, the possibility for widespread school change based on constructivist teaching and learning theory has inspired a number of educational reforms (Stringfield, Ross, & Smith, 1996). These plans for educational reform use new tools to build these learning environments and use communication technology to support them. This possibility mainly comes up from the advance of information science and technology.
3. Review the History of Information Science and Technology
Let us review some interesting events over half of century past (Key Events in the History of Computing, Prepared for the IEEE Computer Society For Distribution in 1996 As Part of the 50th Anniversary Activities by J.A.N. Lee, Stanley Winkler with Copy by Merlin Smith). Then they will be summarized regarding application of computers.
ENIAC was unveiled in Philadelphia which represented a stepping stone towards the true computer.
UNIVAC computer was delivered to the Census Bureau, just in time to begin work on the decennial census. Eventually 20 copies would be built and delivered to a wide variety of both government and commercial users according a contract.
Grace Hopper, by now an employee of Remington-Rand and working on the UNIVAC, took up the concept of reusable software in her 1952 paper entitled "The Education of a Computer", (Proc. ACM Conference, reprinted Ann. Hist. Comp., Vol. 9, No.3-4, pp. 271-281)
While many universities in the US and other countries were building their own computers, the Cambridge University EDSAC was the first to be commercialized. The IBM "Type 701 EDPM" was built as a result of the conviction of T.J. Watson, Jr. that IBM had to take a step into this field and his convincing his father that computers would not immediately destroy the card processing business.
It is interesting to note that the title of mentioned paper "The Education of a Computer" (1952) reveals a fact. It is that people teach computers as through the computers were children (human) half a century ago. In the other way, through the event about IBM (1953) we realize that new technological adoption begin with make those people working in old ways feel safe.
As the time goes by, with many creative people’s efforts, the computer is becoming more and more powerful both in its computation ability and in its memory capacity while becoming lower price and easy to use.
Table 2. The Trends of Computer Applications
Most computers are produced as general purposed computation machine. Therefore, the usage of computer reflects the thinking of people as well as how people choose their way in life. As Table 2 Shown, we found that people gradually rather stay relaxed, perceptual, and open than serious, rational, and closed. The application of information technology follows this trend.
4. Recent Development on Information Sciences
The development of information sciences also reflects paradigm shift in its research focus. We generally describe several selected perspectives and briefly discuss them in a chronological order.
l Computer Science is the Study of Computers
l Computer Science is the Study of the Programming of Computers
l Computer Science is the Study of Problem Solving via Computers
l Computer Science is the Study of Computation Model
At the initial stage of information sciences research focus on the computer itself. How computation machine work? What is the basic theory for information exchange? What is the structure and organization of systems for computation? Second, how to teach the machine learned what we want it to do? Various languages are devised to this end. Third, how to represent a problem and design a respective algorithm to solve the problem by computation? What is the time and space complexity? Is the problem solvable? Decidable? Is the algorithm optimal? The main challenge is devising the most efficient solution. Forth, as hardware become faster and cheaper, our problem becomes easy to use of computer. Randomization has also been used in dealing with several problems. Parallel and Distributed Computing extents another direction that has multiple processors work together so as to speed up computation or tolerate faults. Efficiency is no longer the main concern. So, is there ready-made software that can help us at the minimum learning and elaborate operation? User interface becomes more important than ever. Object-oriented software engineering model therefore justified itself. Fifth, even though human-like machine has been proposed at the very beginning of development in computer sciences, it is still a tough problem. Turing test, proposed by British mathematician Alan Turing as long ago as 1950, is to test whether a computer be able to dialog with people like human does. Artificial intelligence is a research domain that is pursuing two goals:
Some successful cases are based on the restricted problem domain such as Rule-based Expert Systems. Rule-based systems are derived from strict logic reasoning. On the other hand, AI also has stem several concepts from biology, neurophysiology, genetic engineering, etc. These efforts come up with initial success. Artificial neural networks, Genetic algorithm, Computer life are so called Soft Computing that take an acceptable solution. At checker game in 1997, the computer “Deep Blue” eventually wins. Grandmaster Garry Kasparov's is defeat by the supercomputer Deep Blue. This in a sense demonstrate that once meticulously analyze a well structured problem, such as a game, a relative low domain-skilled person teamed with computer can beat a high domain-skilled person. What is the meaning on this?
Human chess players examine a few future moves at a rate of several per second, using experience and intuition to avoid considering irrelevant moves. Deep Blue examines all possible future positions for 10 or more moves ahead at a rate of 200 million positions a second. It is this fantastic speed, combined with "selectivity rules" for rating positions, that gives Deep Blue its enormous brute-force power. And it wins games. Somebody often argues that airplanes fly faster than birds but without flapping their wings. But computers have passed a Turing chess test. Many AIers believe that as computers grow in complexity and power it is only a matter of time until they become aware of their existence, with an intelligence that may even surpass ours.
The Internet, and more specifically the World Wide Web, is probably the most influential new technology since the post-War invasion of television. The Web is unique for several reasons. First, it extends computer capability from pure computation into intelligent communication. Second, it extends television capability from information broadcasting into interactive information delivery. These include its potential to increase our ability to work and learn from others who are distant in time and location (Riel & Harasim, 1994). Technology supports and expands the socio-cultural links that help give us intellectual identity (Vygotsty, 1978). It also provides new learning opportunities that enable students to develop the interpersonal and intellectual skills necessary to construct shared understandings of their world. This new technology is the key for creation, collaboration and communication of ideas and products. The Web stimulates the call for teaching and learning in new ways that can help students learn to work in a world culture. In this way students may shape their destiny in the shrinking, interdependent world of the 21st Century. However, we need new tools to deal with such a tremendous information source.
Fundamentally, an agent is something that can perceive its environment and act accordingly to the situation it perceives. Agents can be either autonomous or semi-autonomous. An autonomous agent works and acts on its own. However, a semi-autonomous agent needs to collaborate with users. Agents are useful in many ways. Some agents help people to save time by selecting or filtering information. Pattie Maes calls these agents Personal Digital Assistants (PDA), such as electronic-mail, meeting-scheduling, news-filtering, and entertainment-selection agents (Maes, 1997). Technologically, a software agent can do anything it imposed and allowed to do on behalf of its client. Image its power which can help you in data gathering and processing. Note that it may be multiple restless agents working for you day and night.
Fifty years ago when computer first was built, “computer education” means how we teach the computer to realize what we want it to do. We people make the best effort on empowering the machine to do some intellectual work (i.e. computation, memory) on behalf of us. We like the computer “know” as much as it could. Through such process we gradually realized how we think and begin to think what we want and who we are. It is a philosophical problem. To clarify the idea, we quote the Minsky’s 1996 talk about Computational Epistemology (Nick Gessler’s Web Site).
Knowledge is used to understand reality. It help us adapt to the world we live in and enables us to act with effect. However, knowledge is nothing but a human’s constructed thought (constructivists’ view), so it has limitations and biases. In most instances, we go through life using false or ineffective theories about the world. These theories work but they have serious flaws. Ever wonder why our parents think they know better? Knowledge has a life cycle; it is created, it is used, and then, when some better and more effective theory or concept is formulated, then older theories are discarded .
As we mentioned above, multimedia and Internet are overwhelming in this information age. For teachers, we may create multimedia content and interact with both the real world and the virtual world through Internet. By support of computers and internet, we should ultimately enjoy teaching and learning while students enjoy learning. It also enable us to continue develop the interpersonal and intellectual skills necessary to construct shared understandings of our world. Before that, make sure to establish our creative and critical thinking habit as well as information science knowledge.
5. New Problem Solving and Creative Thinking
There are many aspects to creativity, but one definition would include the ability to take existing objects and combine them in different ways for new purposes. Creativity is also the ability to generate novel and useful ideas and solutions to everyday problems and challenges. Living in a rapid changing information age, people are facing new situations and new problems everywhere in every minute. We need to think creatively than ever.
Creativity is the ability to produce work that is both novel (i.e., original or unexpected) and appropriate (i.e., useful or meets task constraints). It is important not only to individual but also to society. Individuals, organizations, and societies must adapt existing resources to changing task demands to remain competitive. (Sternberg 1996)
Before early seventies, research on problem solving was typically conducted with relatively simple, laboratory tasks (e.g., "disk” problem, later known as "Tower of Hanoi”) that were novel to subjects. The underlying assumption was that simple tasks, such as the "Tower of Hanoi,” captured the main properties of "real” problems, and that the cognitive processes underlying subjects' solution attempts on simple problems were representative of the processes engaged in when solving "real” problems. Thus, simple problems were used for reasons of convenience, and generalizations to more complex problems were thought possible.
However, beginning in the seventies, researchers became increasingly convinced that empirical findings and theoretical concepts derived from simple laboratory tasks were not generalizable to more complex, real-life problems. Even worse, it appeared that the processes underlying complex problem solving in different domains were different from each other (Sternberg, 1995). To succeed in real world involves much more than old and scholastic problem solving. To this end, Sternberg proposed Triarchic Theory about Successful Intelligence which reminds us to pay more attention on creative thinking.
Sternberg’s research suggests that schools probably overemphasize the development and use of memory-based learning. They have found that students whom they taught in a way that matches their triarchic pattern of abilities learn more and perform better than do children simply taught for memory (Sternberg, Ferrari, Clinkerbeard, & Grigorenko, 1996: Sternberg, Grigorenko, Ferrari, & Clinkenbeard, in press).
Flynn (1987) has pointed out that in the United States and in more than a dozen other countries for which records have been available, IQs have been rising roughly at a rate of 18 points per generation (30 years). This increase has been going on for at least several generations. IQ-measured abilities are the kinds of abilities most frequently measured by conventional tests of abilities. Clearly they are important for school success, in that scores on such tests are predictive of grades in school as well as other scholastic criteria. However, the rise in IQs over the generations has not been matched by any obvious increase in world peace or world order, the real world problem. Creative abilities are attractive as a set of abilities schools should develop and nurture, if only because they seem so important to success, at least in the complex and rapidly changing world in which we live (Sternberg, 1998).
Bloom's Taxonomy of Learning categorizes learning by levels of complexity. According to Bloom, the domains in which learning occur includes the psychomotor domain which is skill based and may include learning involving skeletal-muscle use and coordination. The affective domain includes learning which involves attitudes, values and appreciation. The final domain, the cognitive domain involves knowledge, information, and other intellectual skills. He classifies the intellectual abilities into six stacked layers which are arranged in a hierarchy beginning with the more specific and concrete types of outcomes and extending to the more complex and abstract ones. These are (1) to know, (2) to comprehend, (3) to apply, (4) to analyze, (5) to synthesize, (6) to evaluate. We try to remap these abilities into Sternberg’s Triarchic Successful Intelligence as shown in Figure 2. It leads us to rethink the emphasis on the teaching/learning goals.
Figure 2. Remaping Bloom’s cognitive levels into Sternberg’s Triarchic Successful Intelligencs.
Teachers can create learning environments in which students are encouraged to create and build upon knowledge through their own actions. Through internet exploration students can actively participate in both the content and pace of the instruction. Students will not only listen, memorize, and work on test, but also gather plenty of information based on their own decision, analyze those information, make judgement, communicate with people around the world, create knowledge, and apply them to their real life.
Thinking processes require the management and processing of vast amounts of information. The human mind unfortunately is limited in its capabilities to manage, recall and sort information. On the contrast, computers are professional in these tasks. Using computers to supplement the human thinking processes would be an obvious development for today. Owing to the development of internet, information gathering potentially could be done automatically, of course under the monitoring of human being. Computer aided thinking do not provide us with a solution, we have to find the solution within ourselves.
The information processing used during thinking includes:
They are some available creative thinking tools (Koy, 1997):
a) Text based outliners
b) Visual Outliners
c) Idea processing
d) Questioning Programs
To our understanding, there are warriors who are afraid of artificial intelligence that may eventually surpass human’s intelligence. They deny anything in computers, even worse in the “mindless machines”, should be referred to as intelligence as well as creativity. However, we do see that computer application domains emerge from routine and repetitive works, such as what robots do in factories, accounting, and automatic telling machines, into higher intellectual works, such as secretary’s work (personal assistants). Should we worry about the question such like computers take over everything?
Typically, technological adoption begins with assimilating new tools to accomplish old tasks, generally in a way that is better, cheaper, faster, or done differently. Technological adaptation, however, evolves through a process of active accommodation or purposeful readaptation into a new way of doing things altogether, as we gain skill over the tools.
We suggest that people in information age should treat computers not only tools but also partners. We should be happy to work together with computers and let them undertake and share our physical and cognitive loads. There are still something that computers and networks could not reach. Through knowing information sciences better will we be liberated from memory, and computation, and communication workload. Through the process people may know more about how human think. We will rather enjoy than need creative thinking.
6. Summary
Technological adaptation evolves through a process of active accommodation or purposeful readaptation into a new way of doing things altogether, as we gain skill over the tools. We look at the range of new accommodations that are becoming part of the classroom vision for the schools of the next century.
We suggest that people in information age should treat computers not only tools but also partners. We should be happy to work together with computers and let them undertake and share our physical and cognitive loads. There are still something that computers and networks could not reach. Through knowing information sciences better will we be liberated from memory, and computation, and communication workload. Through the process people may know more about how human think. Then we will rather enjoy than need creative thinking.
In this paper we examine the development track of information sciences and explore the value of creative thinking and education paradigm in information era. We also suggest that those research domains such as Internet, Artificial Intelligence, Computational Epistemology can enlighten human power in creative thinking and complex problem solving.
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