Sunrise - 1990
`Sunrise'
The attached paper has been written in an effort to present an introduction to 'Sunrise'.
[The paper was written in 1990, by which time Sunrise had worked with children of all ages and many adults, both in formal and informal settings. This paper was an attempt to define the elusive 'Sunrise' concept.]
The paper aims to give meaning to the concept of 'Sunrise' and to provide some insights into what might be considered exemplary of 'Sunrise' practice. It is not a commentary of what people do in their classrooms nor a paper in which practices are judged. It is a paper which aims to give meaning to concepts in order that they might be modelled and evaluated.
It is the intention of the writer to work on the ideas contained in the paper at the same time as modelling and evaluating them.
As is argued in the paper, knowledge is dynamic and cannot be held in suspension for examination. It is considered that while to even attempt to do this would be facile, to evaluate a changing concept is impossible. Thus there is a tension between learning by allowing our knowledge to interact with our experiences over time and learning by evaluating our past (in this case recent past) knowledge.
The difficulties inherent in the processes of modelling and evaluation are not such that we should avoid them, but they do present us with what at the moment seem enormous challenges.
Apart from the substance of this paper and the questions which might be asked of that, there are questions about how relevant it is to what is proposed for the QSC and, if there is a connection, how the two are related and how they might be reconciled where they differ.
Liddy Nevile
22 October 1990
Table of contents
CHAPTER 1 - Education and computers
Computer awareness
Computers as machines
Computers as objects with derived 'intelligence'
Computers as typewriters
Computers as Courseware
Computers as managers of learning
Computers as Information/communications technology
Computers as applications packages
The computer as tutee
The computer as 'second self
Metaphors and visions
The value of a vision
The philosophical foundations for Sunrise
Computers as the infrastructure for a new literacy
Sunrise is
Conclusion
CHAPTER 3 Sunrise - a frame for curricula
Computer intelligence and natural learning
Constructionism
Computers as just one of many reconstructable tools
Computers as personal tools
A content framework for Sunrise
Tensions between the old and the new
A curriculum for change
Strategies for change
Introduction
In 1987 the Australian Council for Educational Research formally entered the arena of educational computing. At that time there was considerable pressure from the educational fraternity and the general community for information about the wisdom of the 'rush to computers' which was evident in schools across the nation.
In the period just before, Australia had witnessed one of the biggest single educational reform efforts to date in schools - $18,000,000 had been given to the state education departments and to private schools by the Commonwealth Schools Commission for the introduction of computers into schools. What was done was a matter for the states so long as they stayed within the guidelines set by the Commonwealth, and these were generous as they had been drafted by representatives of all the states.
In 1987, the pressure to account for the use of computers in schools was mounting and ACER's adoption of Education and Technology as one of its five major themes reflected calls for investigations of such things as the value of word processors, the effects of computers on girls etc... To many, these seemed to be pressing problems which could not be left much longer.
This pressure was not new and had been evident for some time in other arenas. Most particularly in the United States, there was a call for accountability to those who appeared to claim that computers were capable of delivering what could be seen as an educational panacea. Nowhere was this acted out more dramatically than on the stage at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when Roy Pea of the Bank Street College in New York challenged Seymour Papert with research data which showed that 'Logo does not make children better planners'.
In many ways this debate, which raged for several years and will not be forgotten for many more, epitomises what was happening in education. So much was happening so fast that it seemed that within a few years the computers might have found their way into schools and some permanent role for them might have been defined. Anxiety about this was developing, however, from two points of view. Some felt that the computer's role should be evaluated precisely because such grand claims were being made for this innovation in a world where cynics had seen 'too many other innovations.' Others believed that the computer was so fundamentally different from any previous innovation that we should not seek to close quickly on the role it might have.
Generally, there was no disagreement about the need for information about what was happening. The differences lay in expectations. The former group thought this was a matter of evaluation of what was happening while the latter thought that standard evaluation would not give a fair account of what might happen. The latter group agitated for new ways of using computers, new types of school activities based on computers. Papert was one of these and in his report of some work done with children in the period before most people had even heard of microcomputers, he outlined his vision for the future. Pea, excited and inspired by Papert's words, tried to realise the vision and then to evaluate it using standard quantitative assessment tests.
Pea was impressed by children's ability to program the computers and tried to investigate how this activity helped them develop their planning skills. The investigation was based on the assumption that as they were using a structured programming language, they should behave in a more structured way. What was discovered was not so much that the hypotheses were supported or otherwise (in fact the children did not become better planners) but that Logo, the language they were using, did not have to be used in a structured way. Later it was realised that one of the reasons for the popularity of Logo was that it could be used in either a structured or non-structured way, In addition, it was inappropriate to worry about whether Logo developed planning skills or otherwise in isolation from the context and reasons for which Logo was being used.
This, then, showed not so much that one way was right or wrong but rather it was the catalyst for some re-thinking of the questions which are appropriate in these circumstances. It was becoming clear that until we are sure about what should be evaluated, how it can be evaluated when everything about it is changing, and that there is anything to be gained from evaluating the role of the computer rather than everything in the context, we will be wasting our time,
There were also Australian researchers who were feeling a sense of failure with respect to some of the grand claims for computers. It was true that students could do amazing things with computers but what benefits did they offer to education for all, to mainstream learning in schools? It was this question which led so naturally to some of the proposed research projects that ACER was encouraged to undertake.
Instead of taking this course, ACER joined those who said it was too soon to ask such questions or to attempt much formal evaluation of computers in education because there were no examples yet of the type of computing environments in which the potentially most beneficial applications could be developed. Isolated computers or teachers certainly could demonstrate new and powerful ways of using computers but these examples would not necessarily generalise to all schools. What was needed was a concerted effort to build schooling environments in which teachers and children could take advantage of computer power for appropriate purposes. This would mean both that there would be enough computers, and computer based activities, for the learning environment to be really computer-based and that the ways in which the computers were used would be representative of the future, not merely as electronic replacements of more conventional tools, so the research would be really informative.
Thus ACER turned towards the development of a 'school of the future' concept. This was, it was suggested, somewhat pretentious so the name 'Sunrise' was adopted. The focus of Sunrise was to be learning environments, not computers. What sorts of learning could take place in a school with computers was to replace what can the students learn from or about the computers. What types of school settings should be developed to maximise the opportunities and what types of school activities should be promoted?
The form of Sunrise would not be fixed, It would be developed and shaped through the experiences of those engaged in it. It would seek new ways of doing things in the new contexts which might be developed. There would be a critical selection of activities not just based on a belief that with a computer they might be better or more cheaply done, but also because they would capitalise on the power of the computer.
The developing Sunrise culture was influenced by Papert's ideas. Already a decade had passed and many had tried what Papert and others seemed to advocate. From the lessons, both good and bad, there was plenty to learn. Sunrise thus had the benefit of hindsight but was still to be formed and articulated.
In 1988 and '89, teachers and students from one class at Princes Hill Secondary College spent the equivalent of one day a week working in a Sunrise School established in the Museum of Victoria. The Museum was fast absorbing computers but wanted more information about how computers would be used and understood in the future. The students and teachers from Princes Hill had, by general standards at the time, a generous supply of computers in the school and had been involved in a number of creative curriculum developments around the computers. The PHSC teachers were wanting a chance to step beyond 'computer integration' into the existing curriculum in search of more productive ways of reforming curricula.
The Principal of Methodist Ladies' College (Melbourne) did not just want more computing either. At that school there were already hundreds of computers and students at all levels had some time to use them. He wanted something different. In his words:
In late 1988 MLC picked up the challenging gauntlet thrown down by Sunrise and entered into an agreement with ACER. MLC was to have a Sunrise class in Year 7 in 1989. The agreement provided for both separateness and togetherness. While we were to evolve together, MLC was to develop its own particular curriculum based on themes from its current Year 7 courses, It was impossible to free the MLC Sunrise class from the existing school curriculum. Yet in a unique sense, the Sunrise class also reformed the other eight Year 7 classes and has subsequently led to substantial rethinking of our Junior Secondary curriculum and teaching methods. As well, Sunrise thinking is rising up to Senior School and down into the Junior School. While other schools are experiencing a top down reorganisation necessitated by the new [Victorian Certificate of Education] VCE, the Sunrise class has meant that MLC has a bottom up transformation at the same time. interestingly, this has not left the Middle School, Years 9 and 10, trapped between these converging forces. Rather, these reformations have encouraged Middle School to step out too, with significant new curriculum initiatives. (Sunrise Notes No 2. p. 23.)
When the Queensland Department of Education decided to work with the ACER Sunrise Project it was for similar reasons, Already Queensland had many schools in which very exciting uses of computers were being demonstrated. Teachers and students had shown they could integrate computers into the schools but what was needed was some effort to deal with the growing frustration that computers should be able to do more.
What had happened within the Sunrise Project by the beginning of 1990 was far more than had been contemplated originally. It had been hoped that one Sunrise School with some students on a part time basis would provide the research data for the work of the project. In the event, there are two major Centres, one in a very large private school and the other in a government system, and a closely connected community in which exchange between all three schools involved to date has been most rewarding.
CHAPTER 1- Education and computers
The computer ... affects the way that we think, especially the way we think about ourselves. I believe that what fascinates me Is the unstated question that lies behind lots of our preoccupation with the computer's capabilities. That question is not what will the computer be like in the future but instead, what will we be like, what kind of people are we becoming. (The Second Self, Turkle p 13)
What basis do we have for thinking about computers? How can we understand their relationship with education?
If we are interested in the meaning computers have for different people, we can learn a lot from the metaphors they use when talking about computers. This process of giving meaning to computers has been going on for long enough for its history to provide a useful way of thinking about what roles computers have been expected to play In education during the last decade, at least.
First there were the metaphors which equated the computer to other existing technologies and which ascribed to it purposes which were already known. Then there was a development of purposes, based on computer experience, and a consequent new set of metaphors. Beyond these there seem to be other metaphors which inform a different discourse about the use and place of computers. Which of them will survive and for how long is no more certain than whether the former ones were appropriate.
In the following analysis, the use of metaphors is taken quite literally. The word `computer' is used to represent the user's model of the hardware and the software. In fact, it is probably because these models differ so much from the actual software and hardware that the user does understand the computer in the way indicated by the metaphor. What is usually taught in schools relates to computers as they are, or more particularly as they are thought to be, and so it is useful to think of computers according to the meanings which they have had at various times for many teachers.
By examining the various meanings which have been ascribed and then discarded, we should be able to work towards a better shared meaning of the roles of computers and thus their utility within the learning context. Sunrise is concerned to take advantage of the position in which the use of these metaphors can be considered in hindsight and to learn from this about finding a meaning for computers which includes them as convivial `partners' in the effort to enhance student learning.
Computer awareness
`Computer awareness' suggests the first metaphor. The computer is an object 'out there'. It is something to be 'aware of even if it is not to be controlled, used or manipulated. It is a 'thing' made by computer scientists.
One day 'computer awareness' might be thought of as a quaint reason for spending millions of dollars and thousands of hours of teachers' and students' time. Computers have become so common-pl ace that even if students do not own things which they think of as computers of their own, they are using them everyday in all sorts of places where they take them for granted. All the effort devoted to developing student 'awareness' of computers has suddenly been discounted; the simple passage of time probably would have achieved the same result.
In hindsight one wonders what it was of which the students were to be made aware. It is almost as if computers, which were seen to have the potential to change the structure of social and economic relationships, were being understood as a threat because they represented a social disease. In the same way that people are now fighting the social disease of drinking in the context of driving, it seems that teachers who were concerned about the future of their students were wanting to inform them of the dangers of participating in the rush to computing without being able to recognise the inherent dangers in this process.
Now we might want to approach these problems differently. It is true that computers can be used in ways which reform the structure of society and that many of those ways are not beneficial to all the people within the society, but developing suitable criteria with which to evaluate what happens has proved to be a far more complex and demanding task than was previously anticipated. It is not simply a matter of showing the students that computers do what people tell them to do, as was the motivation for much of the early computer education work done in the 1980s.
Computers as machines
Programming was (and in many places still is) the most common 'computer activity' for teaching computer awareness. it seems that this situation persists in many countries where computers are scarce because the programming language is the only software that comes with the computers. This was the case with the early computers here too and so probably the reason for the teaching of programming: the teachers were being resourceful.
In most programming courses, students were taught to get the computer to do things. They were shown that people can give instructions to computers in much the same way as operators attach cams to machines. The computer (in this role) was to be seen as an object to be mastered by the user, a machine to be 'controlled'. The programs were usually meant to get the computer to perform particular functions in much the same way as a calculator does. This was understood by the teachers to be the meaning of programming.
In most cases, the students were to learn of the existence of computers in the wide world through participation in a few structured programming activities. Given the nature of the computers being used this exercise could now be described as one involving a simulation of computing, in which students used 'school computers' for relatively trivial tasks
In some cases the students were encouraged to undertake trivial programming exercises in order to see that humans program computers but they were then shown how 'real' programs were the work of. `real' programmers, people who lived and worked in an esoteric field which would not be the concern of the average human,
Today it might be felt that both goals were naively conceived. It has turned out that programming is becoming more of an activity for users of computers as it becomes a less distinct activity from writing in natural languages and the increase in the power of computers has exceeded all early expectations.
Computers as objects with derived 'intelligence'
Programming was often used, appropriately it was thought by many, to de-mystify the computer. The early notions of R2D2 and robots and cyborgs were dismissed in favour of ones which showed that man could master the computer. Romanticism was dispelled and so was the idea of intelligent machines. While some might have described the programmed computer as having 'learned' to do something, this would be taken to mean that it was 'taught', that it could not 'learn' in any way which was equivalent to humans, and certainly that it could not learn alone or be creative (surely the essence of intelligence). It is the image of a computer as a machine for productivity not creativity.
Today programming is often seen in a different light. As will be described later, it can be understood as an activity more akin to communicating than commanding, more for the negotiation of ideas within formal representational systems than the unilateral declaration of operational definitions. The mechanistic model of programming has, for some, been replaced by a far more abstract cognitive model.
Computers as typewriters
A very common and easily adopted image of computers is as smart typewriters. Almost all adults know the function of typewriters and the status which has generally been associated with those whose work is typed, The meaning of typewriter includes both the functional use of the machine and some sense of who uses a typewriter; who produces and who presents type-written products.
As soon as one thinks of replacing the pen with the typewriter, the issue of calligraphy as a basic skill seems to appear. There is little need to argue that well-printed text is easier to read than most handwritten text but there is often much debate about the value of handwritten as opposed to printed text. It is very difficult to separate the form of the text from the substance of the text.
Understanding the computer as a typewriter exacerbates this confusion. The computer with even a moderately functional word processor does far more than a typewriter, hides more of the 'pain of construction' from the reader. The computer can be connected to printers which produce far more aesthetically pleasing texts than were possible even with the best typewriters. The products can emerge as 'published', not merely typed.
For those with developed skills of expression, of creating and editing of text, the word processor offers special facilities which are generally understood to make the task easier, These facilities may not be seen for what they are by those who are thinking of the computer as a typewriter. The opportunity to have spelling checked automatically can be understood satisfactorily as an enhanced typing function, as possibly can the way in which writers can use outliners to develop the structure of their work before they flesh out the general substance.
These are all functions which relate to the type of text which formed the infrastructure for knowledge and communication in an era when the form of text was something which could be produced by a typewriter.
These functions can be understood in other ways, The computer holds the text in suspension for some time while the writer develops it, There is 'space' created around the text; time, actually, in which the writer can perform the various processes involved in writing in the order in which the writer feels inclined, when the writer feels inclined. The processes can be performed individually or in combination, as the writer chooses. Some explain this facility of the computer as providing for the decomposition of the writing process and they use it to teach writing process by process. They use the computer as an amplifier of the writing process,
For many the fact that computer-produced text looks good, does not reveal its developmental history, and has immediately some status simply because it is computer-produced, is a reason for using the computer when teaching writing. The motivation engendered by the improvement in the presentation of the products of writing, the ease with which subsequent drafts can be generated and so on, aspects which might be associated with productivity and presentation, form the basis for the desire to provide the students with word processing facilities.
The computer as typewriter does not provide a model of computing which is concerned with new forms of text. It does not allow for text to be something other than static symbols, powerful as these may be. It does not encourage the writer to work with new structures of text or new types of text yet, as is argued later, both are seen by many as intrinsic to computer text.
Computers as courseware
In recent years, many children have described what they did in computer classes as 'learning the computer', Slowly it was realised that the children's comments were too often too accurate. The emphasis was on the computer as an object to be studied rather than as an object to be used in the study process. Subject specific software was produced, even some which would 'teach' and expressions such as 'courseware' were developed
Metaphors, again from the established technologies, were used. 'Electronic textbooks' were developed for use by students at their own pace, and at their own level, at least to the extent that this was anticipated in the software, The underlying meaning of the computer in this context seems to be of a kind of hybrid book/video-tape which can be stopped and started under control.
The problem with the metaphor is that it does not always include adequately the role played by the programmer. The user does not always have control of the electronic textbook because often the programmer has prescribed the way in which the user will progress through it. While this is not necessarily the case and the user can be given the control, the strength of this sort of software has been seen by many to lie in the veracity with which it follows a design based on some pedagogic model. In practice the models as developed are very often prescriptive and do not offer the learner much control of the learning situation.
Similarly, the designer of this sort of software usually works according to some model of evaluation which specifies the processes and the use of the evaluation, The software will be written to reflect this in its definition of the user's progress. 'Courseware' which deals both with teaching and assessing the learning of students soon becomes known as 'training materials'. It is, more often than not, found to be an over simplification of the teaching/learning processes and so suitable only when there is some justification for an impoverished teaching/learning context. These situations are identified when one hears of training for vocational purposes, for safety and health reasons, for distance education, and the like. Somehow, 'courseware' is the antithesis of humanistic, wholistic teaching/learning.
There are, however, other possibilities within the electronic textbook metaphor. The most popular example of this is provided by !he Apple Hypcrcard system which has adopted the idea of changeable ordering of the pages and so works with the model of the electronic 'cardset' instead of book. The inclusion of the facility to have the pages (cards) connected but not in serial form, and to a multiplicity of other cards simultaneously, makes a significant difference. The user can move back and forth within the 'text' (unless this option has been specifically excluded by the programmer) in the same way as the reader of a traditional book or set of cards.
In addition, the user can be provided with a range of facilities which are more appropriately seen to be new forms of text than as video-display versions of books and cards. The metaphor of computer as electronic book does not suggest nearly as much as is offered by the computer in this context, as will be shown later.
Computers as managers of learning
The computer in this role is generally a record keeper. It is expected to be able to provide teachers with timetables, reports of students' performance and often to direct students to tho next appropriate piece of work, having evaluated the students' previous performance.
Routine data handling is a natural role for computers but one which has been adopted slowly and cautiously in education. It need not involve any prescriptive determination of what the students are to learn or how or even from whom, and so can assign the computer a role in which it is merely an administrative arm for the teacher, dealing with many of the tedious tasks which do not really use teachers' professional knowledge.
One reason for the cautious adoption of these systems by teachers must be that many of them do not know how to use the available computers well enough to design the sort of records they want. Most computer-managed learning packages come with all this predetermined and some teachers may not wish to learn either how to use another piece of software or how to do their record keeping someone else's way. Added to the difficulties for the teachers in getting started are the factors to do with access to computers. The teachers need to be able to have their records with them wherever and whenever they want them. That would require note-book computers and management systems which the teachers can control.
Computers as Information/communications technology
The word technology is used frequently to refer to the object which is being employed, for instance the computer. Information technology is therefore a device or devices for handling information, like an encyclopaedia or a diary. The information is an object too, by implication. It is 'handled' by information technology or transmitted by communications technology. The information (or communications) technologies are things which are made to perform some functions with respect to the information. The users of these technologies will need to know how to get them to perform according to their purposes, The skills of driving the technologies will need to be taught to students.
It is easy to see how these ideas are formed. Instruction has a lot to do with the transmission of information (knowledge?) from one person to another and we easily come to think of teaching as instructing and so to behaving as if it is the paramount duty of the teacher to transmit knowledge to the student. Again we have the notion of knowledge as an object inferred from confusion with information which is an object.
Teachers who think of knowledge as an object to be manipulated or transmitted by computers, commonly prepare learning activities for their students by identifying the sort of information to be found by the students and the functions which they are to perform once they have the information. The action is focused on these processes and their performance by the computer. The students are taught to make the computer do to the greater amounts of information it can store and handle, things which they could do to small amounts of information. The processes to be performed are ones which have been performed in the past, the relationship between the students and the information with which they deal changes only in quantitative terms.
There is a risk these students are too often made aware of the facility of the computer without any sense of the purposes for which they might want to use the computer this way. They rarely have access to computers anyway at times when for personal reasons they might want to use these facilities. While it is assumed that these students are developing 'computer skills', it might be more accurately stated that they are learning to make the computer exercise these skills for them. This model of the computer does not include the computer as an intelligent partner in the process of handling information and seek to discover new relationships with information that could result. Instead, it locates the computer amongst the established processes almost without changing anything but the speed with which information is handled (and therefore the quantity of information),
What are missed are the ways in which the processes themselves can be transformed by the computer. If technology means knowledge about techniques, if knowledge is dynamic and if the techniques and representation of knowledge continue to undergo such fundamental changes as have been witnessed in just the last few decades, information technology and communication technology should be life-long subjects for all students. One suspects they will be, at least for a generation or two, and that for this reason trivial excursions into the field in isolated subject lessons should be replaced by comprehensively reformed curricula.
Computers as appicatlons packages
The use of word processing and other applications packages allows a teacher to separate the various aspects of the process involved. This happened with process writing very quickly in Australia but in !he U.K. where school computers did not have word processors in the early days but did have data bases, the same happened with them.
Once teachers had recognised that the applications packages made it simple for them to single out the various sub-processes, it was a short step to start teaching the processes in the fragmented way using the applications packages. The facility with such 'higher order skills' as word processing or data handling was easily equated to the moves which were well-established in mainstream education.
Schools which could adopt a policy of applications packages as the basis for their computer work would also be in the position of saving on the purchase of extensive amounts of software and the need to teach those who were to use it, what to do.
The idea is that the students will develop the 'basic skills' by learning to use the three major types of applications, word processors, databases and spreadsheets, and then they can use those skills 'across the curriculum'. The choice of applications in the first of these packages is interesting as it was the same as was being chosen for small businesses. Many of the forms of expression traditionally valued In schools, such as graphics, models and music, were not valued.
More recently the range of applications has been extended. It was found that for computers handling music was really no different from handling numbers or text. The skills of higher order were understood to include such things as problem solving and this could be done in any context, so why not in music, geometry, or anything which was freely available? Within the Apple Macintosh environment, new applications can be added to the system with such consistency that the range of applications becomes a matter of choice for the user (school). Learning to use yet another application appears to be a trivial exercise because the user interface which provides access to the application is the same as for the last.
In fact most of the packages are not integrated beyond offering what is more appropriately described as transparent file transfers, which simply means that the products from one can be used in another. The simulated 'integration' of the applications software again supports the image of the computer skills as objects in themselves, to be mastered for use in a range of situations. The limitations of the narrow range of applications and the low level of their integration leads teachers to design tasks for the students which are often concerned with making sure the students can perform all the functions. It is not often that the students can gain a sense of having a powerful personal tool at their disposal even if they do achieve a sense of working with a tool box,
These packages are missing what some see as the vital part, the power to program. More and more this is being overcome by the provision of what are called macros: the user can program procedures which operate on the data using the integrated system or even get the computer to keep a history of some process and automatically tum that into a program. The macros are like higher order processes as they operate across the range of applications and they provide a fairly primitive form of dynamic modelling facility for the user. But the constraints remain: the user has to be using one or the other application or combining them and can only do simulations of real-time modelling as the processes are not really integrated, If a cell in a spreadsheet has its value changed, the value which appears in the report which contains that section of the spreadsheet will only change if the process of 'integration' is run again,
Thus the limited nature of the model of computer works to constrain the model of what can be done with it. People who are very versatile with their integrated packages can almost be seen to be thinking in one mode or another, using now the spreadsheet then the word processor, They learn to think the way the computer requires them to think.
The computer as tutee
The programming of computers soon led to the idea that the old adage that 'teaching is the best way of learning' could be put to use. Some teachers moved quickly from seeing programming as a way of making the computer able to perform some function on which they could then concentrate, to seeing the act of teaching the computer as valuable in itself (Taylor). In this role, as tutee, the computer is obviously more useful if it is able to respond in a suitable way to what it is being 'taught' and if the ways in which ii Is taught are in some way useful to the student in learning too.
As Turkle says;
Mirrors, literal and metaphorical, play an important role in human development. In literature, music, visual art, or computer programming, they allow us to see ourselves from the outside, and to objectify aspects of ourselves we had perceived only from within. Bruce was referring to this when he said, "I could see what I was doing on the computer and I could see what a nut I was". Deborah came even closer to this idea: "When you program a computer there is a little piece of your mind, and now it's a little piece of 1he computer's mind. And now you can see it" (Turkle, p. 155).
For some who have worked with students Iearning to program the computers, the computer has been the tutee. The programming languages being used have been associated with artificial intelligence and the students have been given a sense of programming which is akin to teaching an intelligent object. Two such programming languages are Prolog and Logo, the former most popular among those of the British tradition of artificial intelligence and the latter among those of the North Amerlcan tradition of Lisp, There has grown about each language, a culture in which some of the research has been concerned with the use of the computer language concerned as a model for thinking about human learning. In significant ways this work has led to improvements of the systems of Logo and Prolog to reflect emerging knowledge in this area.
For programmers in artificial intelligence, the programming language is a formalism in which the substantive and operational aspects of the discipline are represented.
The Logo group worked with a formalism which was itself extensible. The Logo language available to the user can be extended so long as the language from which a new word is being constructed is comprised of already existing words and follows the appropriate syntax. Thus the user can 1each the computer facts and how to do things. (This image was made even more natural when the screen cursor was cast as a 'turtle' which could be anthropomorphised.)
The syntax and semantics of Logo have been developed to suit particular purposes. The way of addressing a turtle which is involved in the construction of geometric shapes is obviously not necessarily suitable for addressing a piece of mail which is to be sent away electronically or an automaton which is built of LEGO bricks and small electric motors. the most essential vocabulary for use of that language. The user is left with the task of adapting the language for particular purposes and so it supports the desired ways of getting things done (by extending the language). Logo knows only what it ls taught and it has to have internal consistency in this although it does have a limited facility for 'local knowledge'.
Prolog is based on a different premise. It has a knowledge base which is increased by the user but has as its core the use of a formalism based on logic (and is often called logic programming).
Some researchers, working either with Prolog or Logo, have used the process of 'teaching' the computer as windows on the minds of the users to discover how and what the users are thinking. They have also watched the users operate with the feedback they get from the computers. In both cases the feedback is not so much in the form of error messages but conclusions and products which are or are not as expected, The user usually finds the computer has returned what was asked for but not always that the question was as the user Imagined it.
In both cases the understandings which are developed by students have been the object of research. It is not clear how closely the programming language should match the established formalisms such as those of mathematics or how much mathematics will change to meet the formalisms of computer science. In the meantime there has been a lot of research undertaken to find how well students can master the two formalisms (the computer language and the traditional formalism, in working within a domain such as mathematics) and how they manage to bridge the existing gap.
Whatever the answers, there is a growing sense of optimism associated with this work which suggests that the computer may be able to play a unique role in the learning process. The computer's Intelligence is considered to be central to this. The user's access to the intelligence of the computer is gained by programming, this is the central function and all the other functions come as features to support it. Programming is then, not an add-on, something which can be used as a last reason to overcome inadequacies, as in the case of macros.
The intelligence of the computer is taken for granted and so the systems are designed with programming at the core. The features which are added into the language are merely refinements of the language and integral to it. The whole system is naturally and really integrated. Real-time dynamic modelling becomes possible. 'Thought' experiments can be performed as computer experiments and the computer becomes the thought laboratory.
The computer as 'second self'
In her treatise on computing from a psychological and sociological perspective, Turkle drew attention to the psychological challenge from computers as an extension of the computer user's intelligence. She identified various ways of approaching the question about the psyche of the computer and the relationship between it and the psyche of the user.
For me, one of the most important cultural effects of the computer presence is that the machines are entering into our thinking about ourselves. If behind popular fascination with Freudian theory there was a nervous, often guilty preoccupation with the self as sexual, behind increasing interest in computational interpretations of mind is an equally nervous preoccupation with the idea of self as machine (p.24).
She describes different expectations for different users;
For example, the hard masters tend to see the world as something to be brought under control. They place little stock in fate, It is not surprising that hard masters take avidly to the computer. It is also not surprising that their style of working with the computer emphasises the imposition of will.
The soft masters are more likely to see the world as something they need to accommodate to, something beyond their direct control, They tend to feel more impinged upon, more reactive. As we have seen, this accommodating style is expressed in !heir relational attitude toward programming as well as in their relationships with people. (p 105-6)
She argues that programmers are the users who come closest to their computers and that among them, the real masters are those who combine hard and soft mastery.
The idea of 'formality' in scientific thought implies a separateness from the fuzzy, imprecise flow of the rest of reality. But using a formal system creatively, and still more, inventing it, requires it to be interwoven with the scientist's most intuitive and metaphorical thinking. In other words, it has to be mastered in a soft form (p119).
Turkle's work brings into question the assumption that the users of computers are people who necessarily have only an objective relationship with their computers.
In sociological terms the impact is significant too:
Of course there was talk about new hardware, new ideas for programming and circuit design. But there was also talk about the rebirth of ideas from the sixties, in which, instead of food cooperatives, there would be 'knowledge cooperatives’;·instead of encounter groups, computer networks; and instead of relying on friends and neighbors to know what was happening, there would be 'community memories' and electronic bulletin boards. Computers, long a symbol of depersonalization, were recast as 'tools for conviviality' and 'dream machines.' Computers, long a symbol of the power of the 'big' -- big corporations, big institutions, big money -- began to acquire an image as instruments for decentralization, community, and personal autonomy. (p 172)
Metaphors and visions
From some of the many meanings which have been attributed to the computer by the use of metaphors, it can be seen that computers can mean almost anything to anyone. They are new enough and mysterious enough to be capable of manipulation, both deliberate and unconscious. It seems that the challenge for education is to develop a vision which will help forge the metaphors before they are cast forever by those from outside education with interests which do not emphasize the students' benefit.
Sunrise ls one way of doing this. In critically evaluating the meanings for computers and the uses which have been developed, Sunrise shifts the focus from the computer to the classroom, the students and teacher and therefore the classroom activities as well. What is needed is a way of thinking about all these things which will form the basis of a vision for the future in which computers belong. The new metaphors should be useful for education and appropriate to the computer, not the other way around, The computer's presence provides the impetus for the new formulation of the classroom and the means by which it may be achieved but it is not what is being changed. It is the classroom and all it entails which Is In question.
The value of a vision
In what is sometimes known as educational computing, there is a seminal text. In Mlndstorms, Papert brought together many ideas from the emerging culture as it was in the 1970's. Mindstorms was visionary; it lacked substantiating data, it did not solve problems, or even suggest ways of doing this. It provided, one might say, only a vision. This was a new vision of education which has been the source of inspiration for thousands of teachers and many researchers. This, despite the fact that within a few years of its appearance, its author was publicly questioning some of the aspects of his own vision (Papert, 1984). It continues to be regarded as the major inspirational text in the field.
In the mid 1980s, Papert started working with the new computer language which had been built when he and his colleagues wanted to see what would happen if children could control artificial intelligence. Many of the things which happened were simply the result of coincidence, for instance the commercial introduction of microcomputers and the development of graphic displays led to the possibility that what was being done at such vast expense and experimentally might become common-place. Other results were serendipitous yet more closely related to what Papert and his colleagues were doing. The slow fade of the graphic pixel on the display screen, for instance, was the inspiring effect which lead to the development of turtle geometry, now recognised as a powerful new formal geometry (Turtle Geometry, MIT Press),
Papert's colleagues were working with children and undergraduates, all exploring the possibilities within the new computer system. They were often slow to make sense of what was happening because it was so very different from what had been done before. Young children were manipulating ideas and objects in ways which had been denied to them in the past for lack of a formalism in which to do this and undergraduates were revealing the extent of their lack of intuitive fluidity with certain concepts with which they already had been judged to have demonstrated proficiency in the standard formal settings.
In this milieu, there were several preliminary reports published of which Papert's was the most visionary. He extended what was happening to predict what might happen. He painted a scene in which a number of disparate strands of educational development might be brought together. He wrote about new activities for children and hinted at new forms of schooling. He provided a vision of a new world in which education was a process for the release of spontaneous learning. Papert's charismatic writing was an inspiration to many who were questioning the value of this new artefact, the computer. It provided them with a convivial image of the computer and an irresistible challenge.
In some ways, Papert's generosity of vision became a problem for those trying to implement it. He had loosely described the computer, or Logo (the program running on the computer), as capable of delivering what he wanted from his dream. He had created an impression that it was the computer, as hardware, or the program, as software, which would be the catalyst for the changes he dreamed about. In hindsight, he was forced to recognise his error.
Papert was describing a culture, a way of life which included some computers but he had under-estimated the efficiency with which people could use the same hardware and software to achieve a range of objectives. The experimental evidence from Pea's (1984) work showed that Logo did not necessarily produce more structured thinking and better planning and that, indeed, it could be used in an unstructured way. The question then is how much this matters. How much does It reduce the utility of the vision.
At this time, when economic depression and cultural revolution are global concerns, when the future of life itself is seen to be at risk, it is important to be sure about long-term goals If only in order lo avoid the further diminution of the precious resources we have, most particularly our children,
... there have been times when vision was central, as in Einstein's quarrel with quantum mechanics, which he pursued in the face of strong evidence against his position because he felt sure that God did not play dice with the universe. Another case in point is Bacon's Novum Organum. In spite of being wrong in nearly all of its specific predictions, this text has endured because it had a vision of what science could be. These examples illustrate that, at pivotal moments, vision can become the essence of what is at stake, and practical problems can be secondary or irrelevant. (Chaos Bound - orderly disorder in contemporary literature arid science by N. Katherine Hayles - Cornell Uni Press 1990, p 112.)
It would be hard to argue other than that Papert's vision has brought educational computing into sharper relief than anything else. The 'vision' has changed, evolved, and the emphases have become more pronounced. Today Papert talks mostly about the ways in which schools can be reformed, about the expectations and aspirations of those who are using computers as the catalyst for reform of their classrooms and schools. He tries to talk, not about computers, but about education as it might be with computers. He works to provide an image of a brighter future against which what teachers and schools are doing might be evaluated,
Perhaps the most significant thing about Sunrise is that it is an attempt to bring the vision, as appropriated from such work as that of Papert, into a form in which It can be made operational.
Sunrise is partly a vision but it uses this to develop a set of meanings which lead to practices and in the end classroom reality. It is not a single, cohesive algorithm but a dynamic collection which will be shaped by the people, the facilities and the understandings of those who interact with it.
CHAPTER 2 Sunrise
At its heart, Sunrise is about a type of 'school',
One in which the children are engaged in the construction of something. They are engaged in a meaningful activity and they are learning a lot passionately. (Papert, WCCE)
In a Sunrise classroom, the usual ‘order' has been replaced by buzzing activity. Students are building robots, writing stories on the floor, talking to each other about how to do their maths. There is little provision for full-class instruction because there is little need for it. Students work in groups, either on shared tasks or on individual projects but rarely in isolation. The constructive climate is generated by the explicit acceptance, within the community, of the legitimacy of students' knowledge. Their standards are high and they do not easily accept all that is said; it is a community of critics. While there is a willingness to give and accept instruction, there is a counter-acting interest in the verification of what is being exchanged. Knowledge is the object of the community's endeavours: it is a public utility not a commodity for personal gain, The ability to Increase another's knowledge is prized. Competition motivates the quest for harder, more useful knowledge for the community. There is no sense of the zero-sum approach that often appears to be associated with 'school' .knowledge.
In this classroom there appears to be a lot of play. Students are passionately involved in activities and do not notice bells. The play ls 'hard'. There are highs and lows involved, break-throughs and dead ends. Imagine trying to make a robot that can find its way around a maze. So many ideas prove to be ineffective, unexpected results lead to new avenues for exploration, theoretical and practical problems interact to produce confusing feedback. Other people solve what seem to be relevant parts of the problems, how are their solutions incorporated into this mess: if this does this, then that...
What are these students really doing?
We discern some maths in the programming of the robot, some engineering, some physics, some design, a lot of logical thinking and a lot of lateral thinking, and plenty of language is exercised. The students must be thoughtful of others and prepared to temper enthusiasm with cooperation. We cannot be sure that we can determine all that they are doing but when we watch these children we have no doubt they are learning a lot, fast. What looks like play seems to be 'hard' play, (Papert)
In this classroom what is the role or the teacher with respect to the students?
..to guide them, to act as a consultant, to help when they are in trouble, maybe to spot that this child is in a sort of cul de sac, on a plateau and could be encouraged to take a leap forward....this description of the teacher, not as a technician, not as a policeman, not as an enforcer of the curriculum, but as somebody who is part of a learning community, is of a teacher really being a teacher... being able to exercise at each moment an individual judgement, individual decision about where to go and what to do, what action to take. It is this freedom of the teacher to decide, and indeed the freedom of the children to decide, ... (Papert, WCCE)
This vision is concerned with a different set of activities from those which the majority of classroom teachers would expect to be developing in their classroom just at the moment. It contains a different organisational and controlling process, different planning, accounting and evaluating processes. It is a dream of a radically different learning environment from that which would be found in most schools.
Outside the classroom there are aspects of the vision at work too. The school administration is playing an important role; many of the traditional functions have been found to constrain the teachers unnecessarily and have been reformed: the ways of assessing, evaluating, accounting for the time in the classroom have had to be changed. The teachers are responsible for their work and they account for it in ways which are sensitive to their endeavours. They are entrusted with the responsibility to apportion time to tasks as they judge appropriate, to determine the nature of the content matter of their classes, to make decisions, take risks, nurture the culture in which their students interact.
Within the community there is a new understanding of literacy, and numeracy, a new relationship growing between the students and knowledge.
The philosophical foundations for Sunrise
Sunrise has grown from the work of many. There is no doubt that the most influential of all has been Papert. His book Mindstorms has been the inspiration for so many oll1ersitls hard to identify the exact origins of the thinking behind Sunrise.
In the 1960s, Papert and Minsky shared a desire to discover what children could do with a computer and a suitable version of artificial intelligence. When Papert worked in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he was expanding his ideas about learning and teaching in a situation which exposed him to some or the most outstanding influences of artificial intelligence. There is a very strong presence of these influences in all that is Sunrise.
Papert went to MIT. from Geneva where he had been working first as a student and then as a colleague of Piaget. The influence of Piaget's work is not easily recognised in the work of Papert. In fact, Papert claims he was inspired by the work of Piaget to a significant extent. He is always respectful of Piaget and boasts that one of the greatest contributions he could make to education is to reverse the work of Piaget.
It should be understood that Papert was impressed by the discoveries of Piaget with respect to the development of the children with whom he was working. Papert used t11esc findings to guide his work in which he proposed, with artificial intelligence, to represent abstract ideas in a form which would make them accessible to young children. In order to do this Papert modified Lisp, the language of artificial intelligence at M.I.T. to make a language which could be a formalism for children, in which they could represent formally their juvenile Ideas.
In order to use artificial intelligence, Papert was assuming that what children needed was reality not tangibility, that for them reality might exist not only when something could be seen to exist in the everyday world but that a thing might be real because it could be related to, associated with other things which were tangible, or real, and so on. Papert therefore, was interpreting Piaget's work in a new way and treating it as informative but not prescriptive. Papert worked to find ways of making it possible for children to gain access to things Piaget had found previously they did not know about. Papert's thesis was that children lacked the medium in which they could play with these ideas, not the ability to handle complex ideas.
Another important influence on Sunrise is the work of Higginson. It is suspected that this work was also very influential in the early stages of the thinking which resulted in Mlndstorms.
Higginson's work with Papert was concerned with the notion of mathesis which Higginson had previously worked to define as a humanistic form of mathematics and one which should form the basis of school curricula instead of the purified and unrealistic (l.tlrm used as above) mathematics with which most school curricula are concerned. In arguing that schools could benefit from such a change in focus for their mathematics programs,
Higginson showed that a mathetic curriculum could be developed around a set of experiences which were 'potentially rich' in mathematics. It is submitted that the criteria developed by Higginson and the ways in which the situations were to be used, form the basis of what later became known as the microworlds of Papert.
The work of Higginson has had a direct influence on Sunrise, particularly in the way in which classroom activities might be selected for a Sunrise curriculum.
Papert and his colleague Minsky worked to formulate models of intelligence. Minsky has continued this work and recently released the most comprehensive explication of his ideas in this area (The Society of Mind). diSessa was a student at M.l.T. when Papert and Minsky were still working with their first ideas of intelligence as the interaction of many intelligences. It is not surprising that diSessa developed ideas along these lines too. diSessa believes in the dynamic and fragmentary nature of knowledge and has gone on to challenge the work of those who claim that expertise is a matter of accumulation of more and better 'knowledge'. He argues that expertise is knowledge which is transformed and enriched and that such concepts as 'misconceptions' are not productive.
Sunrise has been influenced by this work too. In pedagogic terms there is ab'ICal difference between models which work to replace 'misconceptions' and those which aim to engage with the inappropriate ideas. There are implications for the ways in which students might be encouraged to think of working across the range of disciplinary areas, for instance.
Finally, the influence of the constructivists cannot be denied. It is not so much that Sunrise is another school of constructivists but that it aims to make operational the ideas of the constructivists. Papert's term for this is 'constructionism’ and it involves a determination on the part of the teacher to provide experiences and scaffolding which promote the construction of knowledge by the students. This requires more than a mere acceptance of knowledge as something which is not external to humans.
Sunrise is not an isolated concept. It has strong tics to much that has gone before it and must always be sensitive to the context in which it is located.
Computers as the infrastructure for a new literacy
The Sunrise concept of literacy depends upon the use of a computer medium. It is impossible to be either prescriptive or deterministic about such things as literacy, but it might be helpful to try to formulate one possibility,.
The most fundamental difference between the computer and the traditional text media must be the difference between the static nature of the latter and the dynamic nature of the former. This can be exemplified, most simply, by the difference between text printed on paper and words scrolling on an electronic screen or by the difference between symbols as representations and symbols which are both representations and controllers of those representations.
Since the late 1980s the notion of interactive text has been viable. Readers of such text, on computer screens, are able to 'point' to particular parts of the text (be it graphic, or verbal) and have revealed to them other texts which are connected to the first but not displayed as part of it. The reader, as reader, is able to interact with the text and decide what is displayed. The writer too, can have this facility in a computational environment, as part of a word processor, for instance. Indeed, the reader can be offered a role as writer using some of these systems. Such text is more than text. It is 'hypertext.'
These systems do not support all the traditional qualities of writing. In the past, writers have not been able to control readers but they have worked to an expectation that text should be structured in a serial way, that the reader can expect to be able to 'follow' the structure if the text is read from the 'beginning' to the 'end'. (In fact, readers have personal reading styles and what is done with texts is not under the writer's control.)
The traditional criteria which are currently applied to text, as just described, will not make sense in the context of hypertext. That is not to say that structure will not matter but rather that a wider range of structures will be possible. Attention to structure may place more demands on the writer if there is to be any predictable level of specificity of writing at particular levels in the hypertext. Different criteria, appropriate to this range of structures, will have to be developed. It has never been the case that all that the writer' writes' is 'read' by the reader but it is generally accepted that the reader's eyes should cover all the text. In this new medium, this will not be a priority either, as much of the hypertext may be specifically only for those who have difficulty with certain aspects of the text, or who are interested in a particular part of the text.
Hypertext is fundamentally different from traditional text. A s well as the read/write control being placed in different hands, in many cases hypertext itself participates by recording how the 'user' has interacted with it. Already mentioned is the facility of some hypertext to check its own spelling, for instance.
These participatory features provide some very exciting new opportunities for the humans using the computers. What the 'user' does can yield some amazing insights into what the user understands, what the user values; the computer with these features is like a 'window on the mind'. The possibility to provide different 'levels' of text with which others can interact by reading or writing as they, 'the audience', choose begs the question of the role of the 'written' word in the infrastructure of knowledge.
There is another sense in which the two forms of 'text' differ. Computer text which is an object, symbolic, representative at one moment can become an actor at another. The text which is contained in computer programs as we know them today is an example. What is not so obvious is what programs, or text, will look like in the future.
Inevitably, the gap between text as representation and text as program will become narrower, as programming comes out into the main stream of computer use (computer users often program texts without knowing that is what they arc doing, often using macros). In a broader context, programming is becoming an everyday activity, eg pressing the accelerator of the car, turning on the washing machine.
In summary, computers as tools will be less and less merely electronic replacements of the tools of the past, What is at one moment a word processor can at another moment be a games machine or the controller of a security system, the conversion being achieved simply by a change of program. Being programmable, the·computer becomes a reconstructable tool and, as has just been considered in the context of texts for conveying messages, images, the user can be empowered to interact with the 'text' which defines the tools. The tool can be built so that It can be explored, refined, modified at the whim of the user, not just under the control of the original constructor.
This new type of tool can be 'custom crafted', made so that the user has control over it and can adapt It to her own purposes. The program 'text' can be intelligent, increasing its own repertoire of knowledge and skills as a result of user interaction. Such computers will extend dramatically the range of ways in which the infrastructure of knowledge can be constructed, In the same way as knowledge has been encapsulated in the traditional texts, knowledge can be re-formed into the new forms of text, including both expressive and operational texts (programs). The mind can be supplemented by the computer in this scenario and knowledge can take on new forms.
Sunrise is ...
So far there have been many excursions into ideas which form part of Sunrise. While it is not feasible to provide a summary definition of Sunrise, it might be useful at this stage to gather together some of the ideas which have been or will be canvassed.
It is tentatively proposed that Sunrise is:
- an emphasis on constructionism over instructionism
teachers work to encourage awareness, evaluation and reconstruction of knowledge so that moments of transmission will happen when students are learning-ready and have a suitable context for what is to be transmitted ' - computers as a medium for dialogue within the learning environment
this dialogue is used to provide interaction with other students' ideas, embedded transitional objects, the structure of knowledge (the forms of and connections between ideas), experts' knowledge
- knowledge as processes
the discourse of reconstructable tools is used to promote the notion of knowledge as editable processes and students arc encouraged to work on transforming their 'activated ignorance' (intuitive knowledge) by negotiating it with their 'inert' knowledge (school knowledge)
the computer medium provides the formalism in which the negotiation takes place and in which the product is developed
knowledge is not a static structure to be refined into a monological unity but a complexity of processes which are evaluated and activated dynamically according to the context and the purpose
knowledge is used differently in different modes of performance and these differ according to the subject domain and context (and also lots or others ways which we would like to be able to control) - knowledge as a public utility rather than a commodity
teachers and students work. in collaboration with each other and their computers, freely exchanging knowledge because it will be useful to another
students use teachers' knowledge of a domain to guide them towards more useful and robust knowledge in the domain, not as the arbiter of the quality of their knowledge
evaluation of knowledge depends on its utility in a range of contexts and from a number of perspectives right/wrong is replaced by more subjective criteria
literacy and numeracy based on the computer instead of text of the traditional sort this provides a new infrastructure for thinking/learning - awareness of moments for reflection
the development of a disciplined approach to ‘noticing’ is used to promote awareness of moments which are rich in thinking opportunities and choice - what might be called critical moments for reflection involving rules and judgments (either of which might be the subject of the exercise)
for teachers this is focussed on teaching moments; for students, on learning moments and for researchers on theorlslng moments - a new set of facilities for learning.
enough computers and computer based activities for the learning environment to be really computer based and the ways in which the computers are used to be representative of the future
a situation in which ownership or computers is such that students are able to think of the computers which they use as personal computers as opposed to school computers.
Conclusion
To establish the concept of Sunrise, we must be prepared to explore in greater depth the elements of the new schooling. The forms of organisation, the discourse, the activities, the relationship between these and schooling as we know it and the ways in which teachers can become involved in the new schooling must all be dealt with in ways which make the adoption of the Sunrise vision operational.
CHAPTER 3 Sunrise - a frame for currlcula
Computer lntelligence and natural learning
It has been suggested that in some cases what happens in schools is based a failure to recognise the real learning potential of students, that schools suffer more from crowded curricula than ones which are pitched too high (bored more than stretched - Papert). If we watch how the students acquire skills in other fields in which they want skills, skate-board riding, hotting-up car engines, and so on, we begin to discern that among many of our 'school wider-achieving' students, there is a capacity for diligence and high standards of performance. There appears to be a mis-match between what might be called natural learning and school learning. Higher achievements in learning appear in the former when they are absent in the latter (think of the maths in Brazil, street skills, etc, Cumming, etc..).
There have been a number of educational innovations which might have solved this problem. In the last decade in Australia there was the use of 'outdoor education' as a context in which to encourage students to do 'natural' learning of their 'school' knowledge and skills. There was a lot of effort put into this innovation and, as with many other experiments of the type, it was shown that students have cmonnous polenlial for learning in the 'right' circumstances.
But these innovations have not lasted (see literature on use of innovation by teachers). In almost all cases there is an imbalance which finally wins through. At the end of the day, while it is not difficult to find plenty of writing and drawing activities for the students, It is too hard to maintain the level of work required to find sufficient abstract mathematics or chemistry in say, the outdoor learning environment. The overheads involved in sustaining the presentation of suitable activities prove to be too high for the majority of teachers on a long term basis,
In many ways the computer is just one more innovation but one way in which it might be distinguished is the way in which it offers a solution to the problem of sustained activity generation. If there are enough engaging activities in which the computer is the natural tool for achieving some purpose and for which mathematics, for instance, is required, it does seem feasible to think about having students naturally doing mathematics.
The computer has created a whole range of entirely new activities; video games, programming for communications, for controlling robots, automata, graphics objects are in this category. If students' learning of physics involves work with robots, automata, and screen objects, for instance, and so does their work with language and music, and to do this they have been programming, they are likely to have also done quite a lot of mathematics and language work along the way, naturally,
Within physics, or music or whatever, the students, for the same reason, can be given far greater choice of goals and ways of achieving them than previously. We can anticipate a situation in which in satisfying their own purposes, students can be involved in activities in which 'school' knowledge and skills are an integral part. They can be, as Papert said, doing math because they need to use it now, not because they will need it some time in the future.
It is precisely because many of these activities involve programming, that they are more likely to have this attribute. Building robots depends obviously, on programming the computer. In doing this the students depend on mathematics, In doing the mathematics they can be assisted in appropriate ways by the computer. The doing of mathematics becomes possible and necessary by virtue of the computer's participation in the activity,
It would not be sufficient to engage the students in many activities in which they are likely to learn 'things' naturally without some sense of what it is important for them to learn. Nor would it be reasonable to be satisfied with a sense that they have learned a lot, no mailer what. A school curriculum frame must give some bounds to what is to be the focus of the students’ study, at least. In doing this, teachers and schools will adopt different strategies but at the end there must be some integrity for the sake of all involved.
Presumably, once an area for study is identified, it will be the goal of the teaching to increase the students' expertise in that area. It should be useful to look at the research regarding expertise. If we do, we find that the emerging theories suggest that novices and experts alike use many strategies, often the same ones, when they work. What is thought to distinguish them is the way in which the experts in a particular field seem able to select the right strategies and to apply the right knowledge while the novice, who may well use the same strategies and similar amounts of knowledge, will fail to combine them in the correct way, (diSessa, Kuhn, Rowe)
What was thought of as mis-conceptions in much of the early work about children's science, for instance, is emerging as a body of inappropriale knowledge which gets activated by a problem for which it is not productive. The novice's choice and range of problem solving strategies, applied to this irrelevant or impoverished knowledge, fail to produce the desired result.
All that is known is that novices compared to experts are in some way impoverished in terms of knowledge with respect to the particular thing for which the expertise is required. It does not suggest that the novice has immutable incorrect strategies and or ideas so much as that what is there is inadequate when activated in particular circumstances.
From this follows the theory that the way to correct the deficit is to activate all that is there so that new pieces can be properly located and inappropriate pieces re-formed. This is not the same as merely adding more knowledge or strategies. It is not a transmission model but a construction model. Students need to be given opportunities to activar.c all their knowledge in con1exts wlllch will help them to evaluate and augment it to better match that of the experts in the fields in which they are learning (d!Sessa).
Constructionism
Sunrise is about 'constructionism’. It aims to provide students not just with legitimacy for what they have constructed in the way of knowledge, a recognition that that is the only knowledge they have, but a way of promoting their construction of more of the required knowledge. It aims to go beyond the usual forms of constructivist education and provoke the students into construction mode in a particular learning context.
Following this line of argument, it is not surprising to find that the emphasis is on the provision of learning environments in which to generate a need for instruction, and that sustained activities are likely to be preferred to isolated tasks. In a suitable learning environment, the range of tasks which can be undertaken to achieve a shared goal is increased. For example, whether a student is building and programming a windmill or a rocket, many of the things they do will be equivalent and they will be able to share their developing skills and knowledge.
Some features of an environment will make this more likely. If the students are working with a common formalism, a programming language for instance, they will be more likely to have equivalent experiences and problems. Similarly, if the formalism or medium in which they are operating has special qualities which make it inevitable that in using it the students will run across various concepts, no matter what they are trying to do, obviously this will make for more common experiences.
In the case of Logo with the turtle, this happens frequently. Whether students are trying to get the turtle to plot a function of some complexity or simply to draw a picture, there are some things with which they have to engage to achieve their purpose. If, in this intersection, something is placed which is really powerful as a challenge to developing knowledge, then no matter what the students think they are doing, they will be engaging that part of thcir knowledge which needs reformation if it has not already been correctly formed (diSessa's transitional objects).
There is another type of question which might be asked o fthe environments in which Sunrise students work which are derived from the work of Higginson.
In arguing for mathesis, Higginson proposed that:
Any humanistic educational system should provide its learners with the opportunity to become:
- coping persons, individuals who can make enlightcned autonomous decisions;
- socially-aware persons, individuals who are conscious of the factors which influence the society in which they live, understanding persons;
- self-aware persons, individuals who appreciate the factors which make them what they are, tolerant persons;
- humanistic persons, individuals who utilize and value the essential attributes or humanness, persons who are compassionate and curious;
- self.fulfilled persons, individuals who have actualised their potential in some area or areas, persons who obtain emotional and intellectual satisfaction from the way they spend their time (unpublished doctoral thesis, 1973, British Columbia, p 101).
His paradigm suggests some domain specific criteria which can be illustrated by consideration of the POLYSPI microworld. Given the following simple procedure:
TO POLYSPI :LENGTH :INCREMENT :ANGLE
FD :LENGTH RT :ANGLE
POLYSPI :LENGTH + :INCREMENT :INCREMENT :ANGLE
END
the Logo turtle can easily be commanded to (draw the following image:
Following Higginson, some criteria suggested by Nevile and Jones for evaluating this microworld in terms of potential richness are:
- access: can learners at many levels easily find problems which they are capable of investigating
- breadth: will different learners probably pose different types of problems
- depth: is there a range of problems associated with the microworld, in terms of complexity
- connections; are the links between problems of differing complexity, and of different types, identifiable
- generalisation: can initial problems, seen in retrospect as particular and limilcd instances of problems, be generalised
- pattern-latency: are patterns of varying levels of complexity inherent in the microwor!tl
- concrete representations: does the microworld lend itself to representation in other, not necessarily computer-based, representations among many more.
- empiricism: do the problems in the microworld lead to conjectures,many of which are testable and provable, within the mlcroworld
- identification: is the mathematics inherent in the problems posed, and the mathematics in solving them, easily identifiable
and
- symbolism: is the learner, in dealing with the problems in the microworld likely to, and easily able to, create symbolic representations of ideas. (See p 149 MAV 1987 proceedings.)
Computers as just one of many reconstructable tools
In a Sunrise environment, students will think of their computers as just some of the many reconstructable tools they might use. They will learn to think of many of the intellectual tools they use as objects which, however constructed initially, are to be critically evaluated and if necessary reconstructed. This process is common among experts in a field and 'being like experts' is a priority for the learners.
Making this commonality of approach (to intellectual tools and computer tools) explicit is deliberate. The purpose is to make the ways in which students use the computer tools relate to their utility in the. circumstances more than some extrinsic goal as demonstration of their use. The same should be seen to be true of intellectual tools. Knowing how to do long division is only a small part of the exercise. Knowing when and why to do long division and actually using it in appropriate circumstances to achieve some goal are also important.
The critical use of tools makes more sense in a craft environment, where the products of the use of the tools are subject to critical evaluation. This attitude to process and product is constructive. It liberates the students from concentration on the tool as such and brings into focus the place of the tool in the context in which it is being used. It also expected to increase the likelihood that the tools will be used within other contexts and thus to free the tool from its original context.
Tools (ideas and strategies) which are less tightly context bound are more accessible for use in other circumstances. The design of tools for one situation is more likely to benefit from the previous design of tools for another situation where the tools have been evaluated widely in the first situation. The construction of all the computer tools in the same (programming) language makes them even more likely to be used across a range of circumstances. (This is not understood to be the same as 'transfer' because it depends on the tool being developed within the wider set of contexts, not taken from one to another.)
For these reasons, the metaphor of the classroom as a knowledge ‘craft centre’ has been suggested by Sunrise. The relationship between intellectual and computer tools is deliberately suggested in the effort to develop a sense of tools which are not immutable but which should be constantly revisited, re-evaluated, and re-designed if necessary. Both sets of tools are to be promoted as reconstructable.
Computers as personal tools
So far learning environments have been related to and described in terms of computers. This is not accidental. The sort of learning environment being advocated could not exist without computers in abundance all the time. This means circumstances in which all students and teachers have personal computers.
The concept of personal computer means more than merely one each. For a decade schools which have been fortunate enough to have the computing equipment they want have nevertheless almost always been operating with what might be characterised as school computers with a school purpose. Students have been sat in front of large electronic objects, sometimes in special rooms to which they are not normally admitted, and required to do simultaneously, or very nearly, things which will help them learn to master a particular piece of software which has been selected for them and for which they have been given a function. At its worst this exercise has made many students and teachers develop a most extraordinary meaning for computing but even at its best it has been hard to avoid the 'school' aspects of this.
For reasons of security, economy, equity, parental pressure and other such things schools have had to resort to strategies which have given students at least nominal access to computing and this has brought to bear the very pressures which have made the exercise a nonsense.
In times when computers are cheap and portable and all students have them, many of the other aspects of school computing will disappear. For instance the purchase of carefully selecled software for use by all will become a thing of the past. In the same way as schools now merely specify 'a pen', in the future word processing packages, which often will have been adapted to suit personal styles and purposes after purchase, will be the responsibility of the students. It will no longer be necessary for the school to select and buythe equipment, pay for a custodian of it, pay to have the teachers and students taught to use it, and so on. These functions will be incidental to the daily work of the school, not the focus of it.
It will also be a very different world when students take their computers with them where ever they choose. The difference between a pen and a computer will be significantly blurred when both are available almost all the time. Similarly, the difference between a book and a computer will become blurred.
This idea of personal computing is one which in Sunrise is given priority. It impinges on the way in which students and teachers will come to understand their computers and therefore to use them. It also means that computing will not be something which students can choose to like or otherwise. Just as with reading and writing at the moment, computing will be something which it is the responsibility of all schools to have all students engaged in. This is likely to present us with problems which we cannot anticipate at this stage but also with many which have already emerged with respect to students and their feelings about certain sorts of computing.
There is another aspect of this. What has been advocated for the computer is a rolein which the computer is an intelligent participant in many of the activities within the classroom. In this sense the computer will not just join the pencil and the pen because its intelligence will distinguish it from them. As the students work with their computers and teach them to do more things, the computers will become more like pets, or associates, than pens. There will be something personal about each student's computer and they will not be interchangeable randomly with those of others. Without their own computers, the students will be without a part of their self, their second self.
This impinges also upon the effectiveness of conventional tests in the Sunrise classroom. It would not necessarily make sense to have the students working in this way and then to administer assessment instruments in the traditional form expecting the students to have made the leap from what they did in the computer-based learning environment, with their computers, to work in another formal system without their computers.
A content framework for Sunrise
The development of the 'matter' of any classroom exercise cannot be adequately specified externally to the class and teachers but some suggested perspectives have been developed for Sunrise from the work done by the Learning and Epistemology Group at M.I.T. They were developing a curriculum for a public zoo project and in doing so were trying to provide the promoters of the project with a way of understanding the curriculum which they could use. In the case of Sunrise, this has been modified to pay attention to the multi- cultural nature of the Australian classrooms and to provide what was considered a more suitable content emphasis for use in upper primary, lower secondary situations.
The curriculum brings three main educational principles to bear on the study of any topic. They are: the principle of context, that the student's cultural context must be considered alongside the schooling context; the principle of connection, that any subject can be learned best by connecting it to other subject matter, and the principle of constructionism, which has already been described.
The three principles can come together In themes and three suggested as illustrations are those which merge in what Papert describes as an 'interest' world.
Within interest worlds, students engage in self-guided discovery, often moving from one microworld of themes and activities to another. Leaming comes to resemble play...
Studying animals for instance can serve as a springboard into broader intellectual development... ·
Initially, there will be a coherent set of three themes; movement; environment and change. Overtime, many more themes will be developed. The three themes are designed to be mutually reinforcing in their similarities, yet be very different in one crucial respect - one that will influence the entire learning environment.
They differ in their scale of interaction.
In the first theme, movement, we see that movement makes life possible, but in itself it is an individual act and its study focuses on movement of lndividua1 objects.
The second theme is environment; how objects and environments interact. Here we are dealing with phenomena that go beyond the individual, but can still be studied as interactions between pairs or small groups of individual items.
The third theme is change, where we deal with objects on the level of how whole systems interact with each other and with their environments. Here we, are dealing with phenomena of a larger scale.
Altemative titles for the three initial themes could be:
'acting': the study of the movement of animals, people, objects, ideas, disease; focus on the individual;
'interacting': the study of environments and ecologies: focus on the, group:
'Interrelating'; the study of change: focus on the system.
Each of these themes is then set to be approached from four viewpoints: the naturalist's, the engineer's, the humanist’s and the artist's. These viewpoints were selected by Papert for their constructive nature.
In general... these viewpoints will be represented in the curriculum as follows:
- naturalist's viewpoint: emphasises observation of the world, directly and indirectly through use of data bases;
- engineer's viewpoint: emphasises simulation and model-building;
- humanist's viewpoint: emphasises observation of human behaviour and communication, and
- artist's viewpoint; emphasises artistic interpretation and representation,
This approach represents the curriculum on three dimensions: principles (context, connectedness and constructionism), themes (movement, environment and change) and viewpoints (naturalist, engineer, humanist and artist). Behind this classification into three dimensions is an integrated view of knowledge. (From 'A developing Sunrise curriculum’, Nevile, 1988.)
Tensions between the old and the new
In trying lo find ways of comparing the more conventional forms of schooling and those which he seeks to inspire, Papert developed the metaphor of a time traveller (WCCB, 1990). He asks the question, what would the time traveller be able to recognise and what would be so different it would be unrecognisable, as a way of quantifying the changes which might have taken place since the time traveller's original place in history and the present.
Papert has used the operating theatre and the classroom as two situations to be compared in this way. He suggests that the time travelling teacher from the last century would, in the classroom of today, generally find most things fairly much as they were in her time and be able to relate to most of the activities taking place. In the case of the surgery, he argues, the time travelling 'surgeon' would have no idea what was happening or how, should the modem surgeon leave the room for a moment, to carry on as a temporary surgeon,
Papert argues that the surgeon's theatre and practices have been radically transformed by modern artefacts whereas the classrooms have almost not changed at all. He asks whether this is because teaching is a natural act while surgery is dependent on technology or for other reasons. He concludes that while learning is a natural act, teaching should be a technical one and for this reason there should be great changes within the classroom.
Adopting Papert's metaphor gives us a way to measure the changes he advocates. This is the quantity of change which Sunrise expects too. It is not merely a matter of introducing a few new activities, it is a matter of having completely different sorts of activities. It is not just a matter of getting teachers to modify their practices, it is about having them change their role within the classroom community.
In addition, the demands of the new type of relationships being formed between students and their computers result in another sort of tension within the classroom. It is not just the skills of hard mastery over the computer which the student must develop but also those of soft mastery(see earlier). The development of a suitable relationship with the computer is a priority in the Sunrise classroom.
What has been written already suggests new types of activities in the classroom. It is also likely that there will be different subject-matter contained in those activities. In the working world, many fields of endeavour are changing radically as a result of the introduction of computers. Some human endeavours, and mathematics provides a good example, as being fundamentally recast in the world of computers and many aspects of mathematics will simply become irrelevant in the future. Not all these changes will be relevant to schools as not all the aspects which are changing are dealt with in schools but there are some obvious exceptions. What cannot be ignored are the cases where the relationship between humans and knowledge in the domain in which they arc working has fundamentally changed. There are many examples of this but the most popular, it seems,is that related to chaos theory.
A curriculum for change
So much for visions of the future and calls for radical changes. Without some strategies for advancing the future, little can be expected to change according to plan.
For teachers, making curriculum decisions is inextricably linked to their views of pedagogy - that ls, the manner in which teachers teach and learners learn. They are guided in their orientation to curriculum by their fundamental notions of these processes. Whether thinking about text: the medium or curriculum communication; context: the milieu in which the curriculum is delivered; or pretext: the rationale underpinning the curriculum; the teacher is (to borrow a word.from Grundy 1984) 'tethercd' to his or her own world view. This is not to imply that such a view is a dogma, fixed or static, but rather that it acts as a complex means of framing the decision making. (See Coming to terms with computers In schools. Deakin, 1987, p. 27)
The curriculum for the Sunrise Classroom has been described in terms of these three components – text, context and pretext. What is needed is a strategy for making these things change.
Kemmis suggests that three useful registers of change in this context are discourse, organisation and practice:
Change is a process, not a product: to sustain the process of Improvement, we must monitor changes In language and discourse, activities and practices, and social relationships and forms of organisation, and, in the light of reflection on the tentative products of change achieved so far, steer our next steps in the continuing process o f change, We may treat the domains of language - discourse, activities-practices, and social relationships - forms of organisation as 'registers’ of improvement By monitoring change in each register, we can analyse the nature and consequences of our efforts towards improvement. We can analyse whether our language is becoming more coherent and forming a more orderly discourse, whether activities are becoming established as better informed and more justifiable practices, whether social relationships are becoming organised in structures which better meet our educational aspirations, whether our discourse and practice are consistent, whether our discourse and organisalion are consistent, and so on. (Deakin report p 305) ·
In order to stimulate change, these are made features of the Sunrise modus operandi and emphasis is placed on the three major components, language, activities and social interactions. The language of 'craft' has been chosen, activities which have a common formalism underlying them (LogoWriter) are suggested, and the roles of students as collaborators and teachers as facilitators are recommended.
Strategies for change
What is missing is a strategy for helping teachers seize opportunities for changing their practice. discourse and organisational patterns. The strategy recommended is known as the ‘discipline of noticing’· (Mason & Davis, Open University).
Mason claims that 'only awareness is educable'(Cattegno). He argues that it is not possible to change teachers, it is only possible to make them aware or the opportunities and to support them in their endeavours to improve their performance. In the case of a team of teachers trying to implement Sunrise ideas, the most appropriate way to do this is with participatory research techniques so that what is being developed can be evaluated at the same time as the development is supported.
Mason's work is concerned with helping teachers become aware of teaching moments in mathematics classes through the discipline of noticing. Teachers learn to give 'accounts-of’ moments in their classrooms when they think there was a significant teaching moment. At first these are generally missed opportunities but the aim is that in time they will be anticipated and acted upon.
When the teachers give accounts-of the moments they are encouraged to find ways of doing this which allow others to engage with similar moments from their experiences, identified by the resonance between the two different moments.
Once the group have shared accounts-of moments, they are, in fact, working with abstractions of the moments and can start to form accounts.- for the moments, drawing upon theories and practices with which they are familiar. The group can consider the moments from a number of perspectives and so enrich them. In the end, the particular moments become snippets of images which bring to mind the richness or the discussions which were generated around them in the same way as a few bars of a tune can re-kindle memories of the circumstances and rendition of the whole tune.
'Moments' are refreshed when similar incidents in the future resonate with the snippets of image which have been remembered and the discussions are revisited and enriched. Within a short time the amazing memory phenomenon takes over and similar incidents seem to occur ever so often. 'Noticing' starts to become a conscious activity. Teachers find themselves starting to anticipate similar moments in the classroom and they are ready with a suitable teaching strategy when the opportunity arises.
The process works by increasing the teachers' awareness of their behaviour and that of their students. It is a technique which yields valuable research data as it progresses. It makes maximum use of participants' time by deliberately providing opportunities for reflection and re-cons1tucl.ion of practice which are very economical of teachers' time.
In all forms of research, and learning to teach, the problem of documentation is often raised. In the discipline of noticing, this is deliberately kept to a minimum as teachers are encouraged to look for the essence of what they observe. The use of words for images is generally frugal and carefully employed. It is the task of the participants to watch their language so they can use it to serve the purposes or the discipline. Participants in research need to guard against developing ways of articulating what they would like to be doing while they are in fact doing something else. The precise use of language within the discipline of noticing helps 1n this way.
Another aspect of the recommended technique is that it appears to be amenable to telecommunication. Participants do not need to communicate many words, most of the thinking happens within themselves, as always. What participants discover about what they are doing becomes better informed as their facility with the process increases. They develop a common format for sharing their work with colleagues in local or distant locations.
The final reason for recommending the discipline of moments is that it rests upon a model of increasing awareness which is as useful to the students as it is to the teachers in other contexts. The students also need to increase their awareness of opportunities to evaluate and reform their practices with respect to knowledge. The discipline of moments is easily adapted for use in such circumstances.