First, I must confess to a personal bias – I’ve worked toward and still very much believed in the goals I propose above. Despite that, I believe my opinions on the subject, if enthusiastic, are fairly well considered, and realistic.
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Originally Posted by cwes99_03
What drives the individual student to take these computerized coarses?
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Ideally, what will drive them is the high quality and low cost of these courses.
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Will this not lead them to become individuals who don't know how to do anything without a computer? What happens when the lights go out again.
No, I think we've already seen the effect of teaching kids via computers. Look at this years high school graduates. Take away their cell-phones, watches, calculators, computers, tvs, and you'll see a bunch of kids literally go crazy.
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I think cwess is describing the effects of a couple of decades of essentially unplanned, market-only-driven implementation of computer hardware and software. With a different, more considered approach, I believe things would be very different.
Around mid 1980s, the many CAI software development shops, such as the one I where worked, were predominantly funded and governed by various state boards of education and regents, and staffed by state college faculty and students. Instead of the anticipated orderly growth and implementation of the software and ideas developed by these shops, we instead looked on with shock and chagrin as the commercial shops affiliated with IBM, Apple, and a few fringe players established market dominance not only in the business and emerging home sectors, but in classrooms as well. Naive as most of us were, we had not even perceived classrooms as
being a market – our “business model”, had we considered ourselves to have one, was for a modest outlay of state and federal funds to support our shops, which in turn would produce software in the public domain, at the same time that the regular university systems in which most of these shops were embedded produced teachers for those same classrooms.
From a marketing perspective, slaughter ensued. Commercial shops sprung up, from software to hardware sales and support, using advertising and direct sales, and simple seized the classroom market as if we weren’t there. One of my most distinct memories of that period was a conversation I had with my former lab director, who had just spent some a month pitching CAI software to the local county’s board of education. He essentially wound up in a head-to-head contest for the “sale” against a sales executive touting a graphically slick and silly flash cards program running on a 80286, VGA-based PC, vs. our superbly researched and tested, complex branching and “learning” capable smoothly transitioning from basic arithmetic through-2nd year algebra program running on a 6800-based, TV-driving 48KB Apple 2. Our program featured animated movement of numbers, letters an symbols. There’s had animated talking animals that
actually talked, and a
mouse. We were slaughtered.
One factor in the fall of CAI shops like mine was the failure of people like my directory, a Doctor of Education, to so much as consult with a member of the faculty, or even a student, of a Business college. The briefest discussion would have taught him the marketing realities of pricing, which, incredibly to me at the time, include the observation that, given 2 similar products not completely understood by the consumer, one of which is expensive, the other cheap, or free, the consumer will usually choose the
expensive one. So, rather than giving it away, had we sold our software for, say, $1M per county school system, we would have improved our competitive chances.
Now, 20 years later, educational software is, for the most part, utter crap. The criticism leveled at it by such critiques as Cliff Stoll’s
Silicon Snake Oil are as true now as they were when he wrote them in 1995.
Excellent educational software is more possible now than it has ever been. For all the mysticization of the person-to-person, student-teacher experience, the optimal teaching of basic and advanced academic subjects is just another IT challence, and one I believe is within the IT community’s capability.
Just as computers have been a labor multiplier in business, they can be an education multiplier, allowing a small number of excellent teachers to instruct a large number of students. Just as automation of manufacturing was a threat and ultimately harmful to factory workers, the automation of education is a threat to human teachers, and, if widely and properly implemented
Re: Education Part ll
semantics is not always just pedantic quibbling. ~ douglas r. hofstadter
) What's a person to do? Que sera, sera? 
As myself an individual, I learn in such a haphazard manner as to defy a curiculum that teaches what I learned. I teach the same way. Nothing is not connected. Learning & teaching viewed as goals misses much of the point of 'gaining knowledge' & gives an appearence that learning & teaching have beginnings & endings. They do not; on the path of life, learning and teaching is the journey itself. 
A call for CAI to rise again
