September 1998

Wire All Schools? Not So Fast...

The jury is still out on how valuable computers are for education--so let's not succumb to political fashion and rush to wire all our students.

By Michael Dertouzos

A few months ago, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu explained to a group of politicians and computer professionals how he wanted to provide a quarter-million of his country's toddlers with interconnected computers. Netanyahu was concerned because he had had trouble funding the project. I turned the tables and asked him why he wanted to do so in the first place. He was stunned, since it should have been obvious to anyone-especially to an MIT computer technologist-that computers are good for learning.

Throughout the world, droves of politicians, led by those in the United States, are repeating this fashionable mantra as they proclaim that millions of children in thousands of schools will soon be interconnected. You can feel their rush: "Isn't it so responsible and oh-so-modern to put an emerging technology to work toward the noblest of social goals: the education of our children?" Not quite.

After 35 years of experimenting with computers in various aspects of learning, the jury is still out with respect to the central question: "Are computers truly effective in learning?" That's what most educators who experiment with computers disclose, as I have steadily heard them say, for example in the Technology-in-Education Conference held in May in New York.

Certainly the promises of computers for learning are impressive. Simulation, for example, is already a proven winner. Besides pilots, tank commanders in the Gulf War who spent a great deal of training time on tank simulators attest to the success of this approach. Simulation can be nicely extended to other kinetic and quantitative tasks such as learning how to drive, ski, swim and sail, and, someday, even perform surgical operations. But we may be unable to build simulators for more qualitative situations, such as teaching a manager to handle a disgruntled employee, through a video simulation of the encounter.

Stand-alone computers can also help people write, compose music, generate designs and create new artifacts by bringing to our fingertips approaches, techniques, forms and patterns that have been successful in similar past endeavors. Machines are particularly effective as literacy tutors for adults who don't have to feel embarrassed as they read aloud from a primer to a machine that listens to them and corrects their mistakes. Computers can also be used as "tutors," for example by students who learn French by interacting in French with an adventure game in which the goal is to rent an apartment in Paris. The bolder notion of computer apprenticeship, where a Frank Lloyd Wright simulator analyzes your architectural drawings as the great master might have done, is still in the imagination stage.