Technology: Re-placing teachers, not replacing them

By Nick Perkins1
"Learning is a consequence of thinking....far from thinking coming after knowledge, knowledge comes on the coattails of thinking2 One of human beings greatest fears is that of being replaced, of becoming out-dated. We fear that our partners will leave us for a newer model and that our subordinates will supersede us. Teachers worry that one day machines may take our place, and authors fear that their publishers will stop printing books. Technology has developed so fast in recent years that it has become hard for many people to keep-up. We remember when computer games were in black and white, and two vertical lines moving up and down with a square going from one side to the other between them was cutting-edge, when green screens with flashing cursors used to wait for us to type in commands. Some even remember a time before consoles, tapes and floppy-discs, when game code had to be painstakingly typed into the computer, copied from the pages of a book; a time when there was no hard drive or flash-memory and if the machine was turned off, or there was a power-cut, all was lost. Just a decade or so ago many people (this author included) firmly believed that the internet would never begin to replace the printed word; that books and libraries were just too ingrained in our psyches to ever lose ground to electronic media. However, the world has changed. From painfully slow (although they did seem fast at the time) connection speeds delivering limited quantities of information contained on a sparse and largely unlinked and unclassified network of web pages, we now have billions of lightning fast, Google indexed websites in a vast network that contains about 170 terabytes of information on its surface this is seventeen times the size of the Library of Congress3. Every month people spend an average of 2133 years4 using Google; Wikipedia is the ninth most popular website in the world, accounting for 6.3% of all internet use, or a possible 70 million users5; and people have more opportunities to contextualise and personalise learning than ever before.
Nick Perkins is an academic consultant for Pearson Longman. Perkins, D. Smart Schools: Better Thinking and Learning for Every Child, The Free Press, New York, 1992. (No relation to the author of this paper.) 3 Lyman, P., Varian, H., et. al. How Much Information? 2003, http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-muchinfo-2003/ 4 This equates to 779,061 days or 18,697,464 hours. Colombian internet users account for around 3900 days or 93,600 hours of this figure. Authors calculations from data at Berkley and alexa.com. 5 http://www.alexa.com/ and authors calculations.
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Nonetheless one must consider whether these staggering figures reflect a deepening of knowledge, or if the sheer size and rapid growth of the internet have encouraged something rather different: A point-and-click culture of instant gratification where, at the extreme, Blackberry mobile telephones are now used to resolve bar-room disputes with information that is forgotten as fast as it is learned. This paper will use the example of English Language Teaching in Colombia to explore the theme of technology being blended into the educational process in such a way as to guarantee that while students are provided with learning experiences that reflect their use and view of, and access to, technology, they also enjoy the support of teacher/guides who ensure that cognitive processes are engaged that guarantee long-lasting, meaningful learning. Will machines ever replace teachers?
There are many things humans find easy to do that computers are currently unable to do. Tasks such as visual pattern recognition, understanding spoken language, recognizing and manipulating objects by touch, and navigating in a complex world are easy for humans. Yet, despite decades of research, we have no viable algorithms for performing these and other cognitive functions on a computer.6

Although the view that technology may someday represent a threat to teachers does have a certain theoretical basis, for now at least we have little to worry about. Much of what educators do falls precisely into the categories mentioned in the quote above (from a recent paper on Artificial Intelligence7). Things that come naturally to us the product of millennia of evolution are still beyond the reach of even the most powerful supercomputers controlled by some of the worlds greatest computerscientists. However, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is developing rapidly, and in a yet-to-beannounced future there will undoubtedly be machines that are more than capable of higher-level thought processes, and even teaching. Nonetheless, I believe that it will take far longer for human beings to feel comfortable about being educated by a machine. Some commentators may suggest a contradiction between this statement and the ever growing use of the internet, and other e-sources of knowledge. However, there is a fundamental flaw in drawing parallels between the current use of
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Hawkins, J and Dileep, G, Hierarchical Temporal Memory: Concepts, Theory, and Terminology, Numenta Inc., 2006 Ibid.

computers and the internet to acquire knowledge, and a possible future where computers become educators in their own right by using AI to generate educational content and actually instruct and interact with students: Everyone understands that, ultimately, a human being wrote almost every word of all the content we have access to today, and that is precisely what makes it attractive and believable. When the machines we designed and built begin to tell us what we should learn, I do not believe we will find it as easy to adapt to as we have to the internet as a collectively generated source of information. A Blended Approach For now at least, when considering the role technology can play in education, the best choice is a blended approach where teachers and technology co-exist and complement each other. Teachers are the ones who can capitalise on the nuances of language and as teachers, many of us are aware that what we teach isnt exactly the same as what our students learn8; we are the ones who can guide our students and help them find direction. By combining a teacher-managed generalised (macro) in-class curriculum with a more specific (micro) on-line syllabus we can ensure that all learners are given the opportunity to contextualise their learning according to their own personal needs at a given point in time. If a student takes a specific interest in an aspect of language or content presented and debated in class, she can capitalise on this by using the relevant parts of a non-linear online course, and the internet links it provides, to consolidate her new knowledge within the confines of her current linguistic ability (as controlled and presented by the software). The advent of non-linear and modular educational solutions such as Longman English Interactive and My English Lab, allows institutions to adjust to their students needs faster than was ever possible before. This will lead to higher levels of personalised instruction and, consequently, greater student satisfaction. If students are also able to take individual decisions about the content they work with on a day to day basis, they will become more active participants in the learning process, not to mention more autonomous. Perkins (1992, no relation to the author of this paper) wrote of the need to ensure that students think about what they are doing, stating that knowledge does not generate thinking, but that one needs to reflect on the task and/or information to build knowledge. This theory is especially true today. A straw
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OHare, K. Background Learning, ETProfessional, Issue 49, 2007.

poll (conducted at a recent English language teaching conference in Bogot) on the number of websites people have open at any one time produced some interesting although not scientific results. In the 40+ age group the total was 2-3; people between 30 and 40 years old averaged six; 20-30 year-olds reported ten to fifteen; and 18-20 year-olds anything from ten, to a staggering 25 or 30. Although I will not attempt, for now, to explore the specifics of whether processing such a huge volume of information in a short space of time actually leads to the development of any meaningful knowledge, the data is relevant to the topic of this paper in a general sense.
From the moment you were born, your brain slowly learned representations for all the things you eventually came to know. You had to discover that cars, buildings, words, and ideas are persistent structures in the world. Before you are able to recognize something, your brain has to first discover that the thing exists.9

The growing point-and-click, follow the Wikipedia link culture means that any successful attempt at implementing an online or computer-based component of an English language course must include adequate training for teachers and learners alike. Student training should be designed to prevent the English language program from becoming just another one of the 25 websites open on a students PC. Teachers need to guide students through the process of long-term (and long-lasting) learning by managing activities that promote higher-level thought processes and ensure that reflection is involved. If this is to happen, students and teachers need to share lots of largely content-based information. Ideally, students should send their teachers a weekly report detailing the sections of the software they have used, the linguistic difficulties they have encountered and any additional content they have been inspired to consult as a result of their learning. However this is unrealistic in the real world. It is often difficult for students to find time to do their homework, let alone write detailed reports. And teachers would most likely not be able to find the time to process these large volumes of information. However, well written educational software could include some form of tracker that sends the teachers collated data regards the content their students have been accessing and the links they have followed, so that the teachers can more accurately choose topics and plan classes that they know will interest their students. Regards the teachers, from the outset one should not assume any great degree of prior knowledge. During a recent workshop on podcasting at a conference in Bogot, one of the participants seemed to be having difficulty accessing a website. It turned out that she had not put the dots in the address. When it was explained to her that she should write
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Hawkins, J and Dileep, G, Hierarchical Temporal Memory: Concepts, Theory, and Terminology, Numenta Inc., 2006

www.xyz.com she wrote wwwdotxyzdotcom in the address bar. Although this may sound comical to many readers, one cannot forget that in Colombia just 15.8% of the population use the internet, and while one would hope that most English teachers are included within that figure, this is an unrealistic dream. 84.2% of the population (close to 40 million people) do not use the net, many of them teachers, and they need to be taught how it works before attempting anything more challenging. However, there is hope: The lady in question showed great courage in attending the workshop, not to mention a desire to learn something of benefit to her students, and she was a very fast learner. By the end of the session she had managed to record some audio, create a podcast at podcastspot.com, and publish her first episode. Internet use in Colombia In spite of the relatively low current-level of internet use in Colombia mentioned above, it should be mentioned it is growing fast. Between 2000 and 2006 the number of internet users grew by 763%10 and Colombia now accounts for around 0.5% of all internet users. This has huge implications for the online component of an English language course. Some interesting statistics about internet use in Colombia from the internet traffic monitor alexa.com11 are that google.com.co (Google Colombia) is the 82nd most popular site on the entire internet and the third most popular in Colombia; youtube.com (user generated video content) is the fifth most popular website in Colombia; wikipedia.com (user generated encyclopaedia) the ninth, blogger.com (personal comment) the 16th, rincondelvago.com (quick solutions for lazy students) the 28th; and unal.edu.co (La Universidad Nacional National University) the 33rd. From this, one may assume that entertainment (YouTube) comes before knowledge (Wikipedia), and that Colombian students view a cheat-site (El Rincn del Vago) as being more useful, or at least more appealing to visit, than one of the countrys oldest and most respected educational institutions (La Universidad Nacional). Although the final comparison is the one that may cause us the greatest concern it is the one that illustrates the danger of a copy/paste culture overshadowing the gradual and lasting development of knowledge in an internet oriented teaching and learning environment there is much to be learnt from the entire list. If a video entertainment website is the fifth most
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Authors calculations from data at internetworldstats.com, June 2007. Data corresponds to a three month average at June 12, 2007.

popular site for Colombian internet users, then online courses should use video as an integral part of their content. If a user generated encyclopaedia and a blog site are in the top 20, then institutions and publishers should ensure that they make provisions for users to generate some form of content. Conclusions Asking young-adults today (and many not-so-young ones too) to conduct most of their out-of-class study on paper, using a pen, is akin to asking them to switch off their lives. Incorporating stimulating online content as a core course component acknowledges the fact that many people spend a lot of their spare time sitting in front of a computer. The benefits of a blended online course are multiple. At work, part of a coffee or lunch-break, for example, can be easily turned into a learning opportunity that includes meaningful feedback. If any course (or general internet) content viewed at work or at home generates a secondary, more specific interest it can be followed-up immediately. Any queries not resolved online can then be explored more meaningfully in class as they have already been contextualised. Blended learning reduces in-class contact and therefore frees up time in students and teachers busy schedules. By providing a solution that can be called up anywhere and anytime, we are recognising the fact that people no longer live in a 9-5 society, that we can no longer assume that everyone wants to learn at the times institutions decide, nor that they sleep at night, nor that they think and learn at the same pace and in the same way. People have different intelligences and different rhythms, and that educators need solutions that reflect this. With a blended learning approach, study time usually increases as students have unlimited opportunities to practice the parts of language they themselves consider to be necessary and relevant, within the confines of a given stage of the learning process. Teachers act as guides when the students dont notice or understand something, and also manage general coaching and oral practise. The instant feedback provided by the software in question is complemented by the teacher/guides more profound input. As students become more autonomous their motivation usually increases; the experience of working something out for oneself is powerful and satisfying and this can have the added benefit of leading to higher levels of student retention. If teachers become guides, counsellors and resources, rather than the focus (gods) of the classroom the pressure placed on them

by their students is reduced, and consequently they have more time to do research designed to improve their working practices. The nature of any well designed blended learning approach should still see the people involved as being at the centre of the process. The shift towards technology should leave fads to one side and understand that instant access does not mean instant gratification. Learning any subject, especially a foreign language, is a long-term goal that requires the interaction of multiple factors if it is to work. Machines cannot yet think nor speak; people can. Machines can do most of the number-crunching, they can provide some of the inspiration, but En el fondo est la persona (People are behind it all)12.

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Velasquez, O. Opening ceremony of the 2007 National English Language Teaching Conference Information Technology and ELT, Universidad de la Sabana, Bogot, Colombia.

Bibliography Alexa.com Hawkins, J. and Dileep, G. Hierarchical Temporal Memory: Concepts, Theory, and Terminology, Numenta Inc., 2006 Internetworldstats.com Kottler, P, Los 80 Conceptos Esenciales de Marketing, Pearson Educacin S.A., Madrid, 2003 Lyman, P, Varian, H, et. al. How Much Information? 2003, http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-2003/ OHare, K. Background Learning, ETProfessional, Issue 49, 2007 Perkins, D. Smart Schools: Better Thinking and Learning for Every Child, The Free Press, New York, 1992