Chemical Education Today
Editorial
The End of Education As We Know It? The recent fuss over Napster, the Internet company that helps others share/steal (depending on one’s point of view) MP3 music files, is the tip of a virtual iceberg of issues that arise out of widespread use of electronic communication. Even more liberating/insidious (again depending on one’s point of view) may be TiVo and ReplayTV. These two services promise investors that they will revolutionize the television industry by making all programs, even those being broadcast live, behave as if they were recorded on a super VCR. The technology enables a viewer to skip over commercials in a live broadcast, can store tens of hours (and eventually, as computer memory becomes less expensive, thousands of hours) of recorded programs for repeated viewing, and can even construct a library of video based on a viewer’s preferences. Not only would the viewer watch the TV, the TV would watch the viewer (shades of Big Brother!) and, based on what it observed, cater to the viewer’s every whim. The word “insidious” can be applied to such a service not only because of the Big Brother aspect, but also because it might very well turn a multibillion dollar industry on its head. Some argue that it means the end of the mass market (1). The technology also allows advertisers (or rather TiVo or ReplayTV, which will charge for the information) to know in considerable detail who is watching what, and to tailor their ads to very specific viewer interests. In place of a technology that delivers an ill-defined audience of 20,000,000, there is now a technology that can target precisely an audience of 200,000 or even 20,000 that is really interested in the message the advertiser delivers. The alacrity with which TV networks and other media companies have invested in TiVo and ReplayTV attests to the potential profitability of this technology and to a belief that once a technology like this has been developed, it is certain to be used. The question is not “Will this technology change how people watch TV?”, but rather, “When that change happens, what other changes will there be, and how do I take advantage of them?” Technology offers similar insidious capabilities to us as teachers. Technology exists that could divide my 350-student, mass-market class into small groups or even individuals, and cater instruction to each of their needs/whims. Placing the course on the Internet would greatly widen its potential audience—perhaps enough that it would even become attractive to certain advertisers. Even with a huge audience, the course could tailor itself precisely to each student’s background and maturity. There could be a broad range of approaches to each item of content: a biomedical approach, an engineering approach, an earth-science approach, or much more narrowly defined approaches. For each of those, software could interact with a student and quickly adjust to that student’s pace. The software could also collect and store data about the student’s rate of progress through the material and whether the approach suited the student. On the basis of this information, subsequent instruction could be more closely adapted to that particular student. Not only presentation of content, but also assessment
of achievement could be adapted …technology that to each student’s individual characteristics. Properly programmed tests could present follow-up might put us out of questions based on a student’s rebusiness is being sponse to an initial question, determining much more accurately than most current tests the level built; someone will of the student’s understanding. come and use it. Writing assignments could be assessed by students with a system such as Calibrated Peer Review (2). All this could be done for large numbers of students without excessive cost, provided that computers and communications technology handle most of the work. To create this kind of learning environment is a daunting task—far bigger than writing a textbook or preparing a multimedia lesson. It will require a tremendous investment of time and effort and cannot be done by any individual. I am concerned that we teachers may be in a situation analogous to that of the TV networks: technology that might put us out of business is being built; someone will come and use it. Will we participate in shaping the future of chemical education, or will we allow others to control our destiny? Do we have a chance to affect our destiny? If we do nothing, we will never know. Our financial resources are insignificant compared with those of the TV networks, but we do have human resources that can be invested to help secure our future. If properly organized, those human resources can accomplish a lot. Just look at the impact that National Chemistry Week has in bringing knowledge of chemistry to the general public. One of my main goals for JCE is that it should serve our profession by helping organize the human resources of chemical education. One example appears on p 1375. David Whisnant has created a new way to help students tie together concepts from disparate parts of an introductory course: Webdeliverable Multimedia Problems. He was able to draw on work of literally dozens of others who had created videos of chemical reactions, apparatus, and techniques. These were available in JCE Software’s Chemistry Comes Alive! series of CD-ROMs—a digital library of videos. Thus JCE was able to mediate development of a new learning aid that might not have been possible for one individual to create. This is but one small step toward the rich learning environment that I envision, but a lot of people developing a lot of new materials can begin to make a real difference. I encourage you to collaborate with JCE to achieve this goal. Literature Cited 1. Lewis, M. Boom Box, The New York Times Magazine, August 13, 2000, p 36. 2. Russell, A.; Chapman, O.; Wegner, P. J. Chem. Educ. 1998, 75, 578.
JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu • Vol. 77 No. 10 October 2000 • Journal of Chemical Education
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