Learning Needs to Be Interlinked and Interactive

Although schools everywhere are clamoring for more computers, some skeptics have asked whether they, in fact, help children learn. Microsoft Chairman and CEO Bill Gates made the case for computers in education in a speech last week at the National Educational Computing Conference.

The personal computer is an amazing technology. Every year it gets faster, somewhat cheaper, and over 80 million of these personal computers were sold worldwide in the last 12 months. In the next 20 years, the same rate of improvement will continue and we’ll use that increase in power to make this device much easier to work with, to make it pervasive, to make it understand what our interests are. It will become the ultimate communications tool.

In the long run, the greatest impact of this technology will be in education. And that’s why all of us should strive to see how we can make this a reality as soon as possible.

Certainly there are some challenges here. The rate of change is very, very fast. In businesses it’s typical to replace computers every three years. That certainly doesn’t work for schools. The limited budgets, the difficulty of not only wiring up the school but connecting it out. The challenge of getting this all incorporated into the curriculum for common access, and even the expectations that people have that all of a sudden this will just magically make such a big difference.

The reason that I’m so optimistic about this is that I think interactivity, where you have access to all the world’s knowledge, really is something quite fundamental. The ability to reach out and not only find information but also find other people who have the same interests.

What does a class look like as kids go out and explore and come back and talk about what they found? How does it fit in with textbooks? These are the types of things that we need to be experimenting with today.

Technology has a role in student learning despite the fact that, historically, technology, whether it was the TV set or computers that did drilling sessions, really didn’t deliver much.

One of the key elements here is to prepare students for the future. In the course of a single generation, we will go from very, very few jobs involving computers to the vast majority of jobs, certainly the most attractive jobs, involving using the computer as part of the daily activity.

Making information available quite broadly not only transforms the workplace but also transforms education. How do teachers who work on a common subject and have new ideas find each other and share their best ideas? How do they build on each other’s work? In the electronic world, there’s a significant opportunity to do that.

So the vision here is of a connected learning community. The connection between the school and the home is very valuable. Giving parents an opportunity to look in and see what the class is learning, to understand homework assignments, to work with their students to explore whatever information is out on the Internet. Then, to be able to mail that in, or print it out, so it can be shared.

Of course we have to get the computer, the connections, the training, the curriculum, all of those pieces. In doing that, we can really fulfill the vision of schools providing equal opportunity so it’s not just in some schools.

The idea is that each student feels in control of what they’re doing, that they don’t have to stand in line to use the resource. Eventually, portable computers will be inexpensive enough that each student might have their own they can take home.

We need computers that can see where a student is having problems. Computers that know what you care about. You shouldn’t have to go out and try and find things all the time. That information should come to you. And so this idea of . . . customizing the learning experience and responding with targeted instruction.

One thing I can’t emphasize enough is that great teachers are at the center of all of this. All we’re doing is giving them more tools. The personal computer is a tool that some people use in a fantastic way--and that’s all we can hope for.

The full text of Gates’ speech can be obtained at https://www.microsoft.com/billgates/