Alan Kay: The future of "reading" depends on the future of "learning difficult to understand things"
"A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points"
- Alan Kay
Alan Kay is a cool man, we congratulated him on Habré with a birthday .
I recall the merits of Alan.
We decided to translate his most conceptual article, and then bang, it turns out that the original article does not contain a piece of text. We wrote to the Viewpoints Research Institute, they say, you have a typo. Kim Rose answered us, explained everything, corrected and blessed it.
')
For the translation, thanks to Yana Shchekotova, for the support of the publication - the company Edison (which specializes in the automation of asphalt plants and the development of payment systems and terminals ).
The future of reading depends on the future of learning difficult-to-understand things (Alan Kay)
We are engaged in “reading” when we interpret the meanings of certain phenomena. We read the terrain, traces, sky and clouds, faces, body language, objects of art, books, films and television, sounds, smells and touches, the process of performing some actions by external objects, etc.
Here we are most interested in a cursory reading of the anthropogenic phenomenon called “writing”: natural languages, mathematics, music, old and new computer-based interaction tools, including the user interface, and other systems that seek to capture, transmit and, most importantly, explain the main ideas.
Different representations of the “same thought” contain only a part of this thought and a condition for its “reading”. For example, reading news in prose, poetry and from television screens - all this gives different impressions. Marshall McLuhan once said that "one can argue about many things behind a slick window, but democracy is not one of them." He meant both a dirty window and television (our modern less pleasant equivalent).
Socrates once spoke about writing as follows: “Writing eliminates the need to memorize.” It is the same as a prosthesis on a healthy limb, leading to its extinction. On the other hand, if new technologies are perceived as an amplifier that enhances and multiplies what we already have, rather than replacing it, then we have the opportunity to use writing for its ability to overcome time and space, as well as efficiency and the desire to preserve evidence form that is not applicable in oral speech.
And we can still learn to memorize everything we read! In other words, writing is not the best substitute for memories used in the process of thinking - this is too inefficient - but it is a great way to cover different areas of knowledge and have more food for thought.
Plato must have appreciated the irony of the situation, because his beloved teacher complained about this means of transmitting information, and he used it well to convey the thoughts and character of Socrates’s personality.
Such an idea arose: Socrates was not enough for everyone, but the printing press was able to copy Plato’s Socrates convincing re-creation so that the printed editions of his Dialogues, with the presentation of more mediocre teachers, could affect an entire continent and potentially enrich every reader.
A similar question arises: what part of the great thinking and great thinkers can be fixed with the help of a personal computer and the omnipresent global network, and what is needed in order to learn how to read and write them.
In each century, it was noted that, in general, it was more difficult for most people to learn to read and write than to learn their natural language, which is a little surprising given the correspondence of conversational skills and writing one to one. We will return to this issue later. And now we would like to know whether these difficulties cause inconvenience, or mastering these skills could be useful. In other words, given the abundance of technology, we need to figure out whether the blessing is “ease of use” (corresponds to our current capabilities), or sometimes it is a trap (allows us to be ourselves or lowers our importance).
To read and write fluently, you need to learn new skills and hone your existing skills as we change in the process. Anthropological studies of society show that a competent society thinks differently than where only oral speech is used. Those. literate society is not a “society with a developed oral language and writing system”, but a new ecosystem of ideas and thinking.
McLuhan noted that the most important role in communication media is what we have to turn into in order to use them easily.
The more differences a communication medium has and the harder it is, the less attractive, or even noticeable, it becomes. Another idea McLuhan is that the new means of communication, which generally could take root, first used the contents of older and more well-known media tools. For example, it was important that the printed version of Gutenberg’s Bible resembled the Bible, but at the same time it would look like a hand-made copy of a manuscript. Over time, if a new media tool showed its potential, then it began to be actively used. The true purpose of the press was not to imitate a handwritten Bible, but to stir up new debates about science and politics 150 years later. That's what changed Europe forever, and then America.
Consider the American system, which was formed and maintained its existence only through writing and reading. Tom Paine’s book " Common Sense " was an argument against sanity on the day when "Monarchy seemed something natural." On the contrary, he argued that "we need to form our own management system." The newspapers of 13 colonies argued for and against the constitution. The arguments “for” were given in the publication “The Federalist Papers” (“The Federalist Papers”), and the arguments “against” - in the “Notes of the Antifederalist” (“AntiFederalist Papers”).
The form of government was supposed to be republican (and here we remember Plato again), but its “advocates” should have been elected and, more importantly, rejected by the whole population. This meant that the population of America was supposed to reason similarly to the defenders of this form of government. Thomas Jefferson said:
“I don’t know a safer way to preserve the maximum power of society than the people themselves; and if you think that they are not sufficiently enlightened in the matter of implementing a management process with a high level of differentiation, then the best solution would be not to deprive them of this, but to train them. ” This goes beyond the "stained windows"!
The reading skills among the population, which are necessary to familiarize oneself with such ideas in their original form, are under attack. Assessment 1 by the US Department of Education, the ability of the adult population to read well enough to understand these arguments, found that in 1992 only 15% of people had the right skill, and in 2003 this figure dropped to 13% (and this decline was real, not error of error). This is not enough to support the original idea.
But what do these numbers really mean? America is a country of complex mixes of people from different cultures, many of which are still developing. More informative statistics in the study of the same Ministry of Education show what percentage of graduates after 4 years of college has the necessary skills. In 1992, this figure was 40%. This is amazing. How did the other 60% manage to get a diploma if they could not even read at the “professional” level? By 2003, that number had gone down to 31%, which is even more surprising.
In any case, the reading of structured prose works could be forgotten. It is difficult to find and reflect all the reasons for such changes. The simplest of these is that in the 19th century, people constantly read and wrote if they had to go beyond space and time. As Neil Postman noted, there were no competitors here. Those. when it was time to read or write something, and it was extremely important, then, as it turned out, an impressive number of people had such skills. After 140 years since the invention of the telephone, a variety of technologies have emerged that allow our deep attachment to verbal communication to spread through electronic devices through time and space. Short news and information sharing about the world and someone’s friends no longer require confident writing and reading skills. These 22 minute news on TV (it’s like half the newspaper column) do not convey all the information and put the importance in last place.
On the topic “why reading and writing is harder to learn” than a lot of natural language, a lot of great books have been written. The best of the recent ones is Proust and the Squid 2, an outstanding neurophysiologist and reading expert Marianna Wolfe. It presents a good historical overview of writing systems, some recent discoveries from the field of brain research on reading skills and the ability to learn, as well as the basic principles of teaching reading for the majority of the population who were not lucky enough to be previously “connected” to the process of learning these skills.
Incidentally, the reason why we can quickly learn a natural language from childhood in linguistic traditions, and other animals, and even primates, cannot do this, lies in our brain, which, although plastic in every sense, is not is a clean sheet of paper, and contains structures organized by our genes that help us learn our language. But despite this, this process does not take place in one day, it needs years.
It is rather strange that even the very idea of writing was not so obvious to the representatives of our kind during 200,000 years of life on this planet. As far as we know, this process is only about 5,000 years old, and what should have been the easiest way to organize writing, namely the creation of symbols based on speech sounds and the “recording of these sounds” itself, appeared less than 3,000 years ago.
Why? Because of the effective processes we need for speech, our physiological experience consists of directly recognizing the ear and expressing meaning directly, and is not limited to collecting, in pieces, first sounds, then morphemes, words and parts of speech. But it is also the experience that we get after we have learned to read fluently, or have mastered any other skill: the components of a skill are grouped together by the so-called direct perception and giving meaning.
In order to come to other "strong ideas" it took much more time. For example, mathematical systems based on abstractions, assumptions, conclusions and conclusions were discovered in Greece after the alphabet was invented, and perhaps partly because of this. The Greeks had several true scholars: Archimedes, Aristarchus, Eratosthenes, etc. But still, as far as we know, they did not have “Science” as such. We do not know all the details of the Alexandrian era and the processes occurring in its stunning library, where, as expected, the experts in mathematics and science tried to test each other's ideas using methods that could be called scientific.
For us, "modern science" appeared in the 17th century, and its qualitatively different methods of thinking about the world, about confirmation, knowledge, proof, and even "truth", transformed our world quickly and on a completely different level.
The emergence of science has changed what has already been written and read, and also influenced the realization of what is to read fluently and write quickly. For example, one of the most important books written in the entire history of mankind about important discoveries and conjectures is considered to be Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy . To read it, you need not only to easily recognize letters, but also to be able to read charts and know math. In theory, a modern “literate” person should be able to read this book, but, as Ch.P. Snow (CP Snow) in his essay “Two Cultures” (“Two Cultures”) 3 , what is meant by literacy, has not received proper distribution even among university professors.
Most of those 13% of Americans who are able to read Tom Payne's "Common Sense" cannot read books similar to "Mathematical Principles" (or even simpler, but with a scientific statement). This means that the real percentage of potential voters in the United States who can cope with the problems inherent in our era, in reality, is only a few percent of the adult population.
Another impressive prospect for the development of the world in which we live appeared in the 20th century. And her name is System. Simply put, we humans are interwoven into four large systems of systems : the universe, social systems, systems of technologies, and ourselves : "The systems in which we live and the systems we are."
Such a view of complexity has its own properties, predictions, a set of concepts, dynamics, theories and principles. Many of the most important problems of the 21st century can be productively studied through the prism of system organization and dynamics.
In most systems, there are complex interactions between their parts, which are difficult to understand by our limited mind, even with the help of modern mathematics. For example, many important natural systems (such as climate, epidemics), society (early 20s in Germany, the modern Middle East or the USA), technology (Chernobyl), and our bodies (circulatory system or blood glucose regulation) can probably remain stable for many years, but then suddenly turn into conditions that have a negative effect and are quite dangerous for us.
Today, many of these life systems can be disassembled and made more predictable. At the end of the 20th century, such systems moved into the category of more imaginable objects, because the tool for processing complex dynamic interactions was invented in the middle of the 20th century. And he called the computer.
Some children have already become "competent in understanding the systems." For example, a 10-year-old child can draw a small red typewriter in Etoys 4 and write a script that would allow her to move in a circle.
You can make a copy with the same behavior, and repaint the machine in blue. To see if the blue and red cars collided, and if this condition is met, repaint the blue car into a red one, even a child can write a small program. It can be conditionally assumed that the blue machine is a healthy person, and the red one is sick.
You can create thousands of tiny blue typewriters and just one red, and then launch the program to observe the nature of the spread of the epidemic. The percentage of infected can be calculated and displayed graphically as the program runs.
You can take settlements with a different number of inhabitants. The fewer the people, the more sparse the “village” will be, and the longer the infection will take to spread. Children are fascinated by the inconstancy of "good luck." And yet, all the inhabitants of the village perish. Rapidly spreading infections are like typhoid fever, and slowly spreading infections are like AIDS. And it will be seen that typhoid fever is noticeable for everyone, and AIDS will fall out of sight until it is too late.
The child has created a model 5 , leading to the answer to the question of why it is so extremely important to pay attention to incurable deadly diseases, and it does not matter how it looks on the part of a sane person. Millions, perhaps even billions of adults, do not have these answers, and they die because of their absence. A child can put emulation results on the Internet, on a YouTube-like site for children's projects, while other children can download them, think about these results, make changes, etc.
From the standpoint of this work, we have now revealed a whole new set of ideas that we need to study and think about not only from the point of view of science, but also from the point of view of systems, and also we have added a new powerful and different tool for working with information - dynamic a tool for creative thinking 7 , in addition to reading and writing skills that we need to learn.
What should children learn in order to “write” their own epidemic spread emulator, and what they need to learn in order to be able to “read” the results of this emulation and the results of similar projects from other children? And how can we help them learn new things? Can the computer itself help, and not just be a wonderful new “box for creating the dynamics of various processes”?
You can consider computer as a development of mathematics - it introduces new ways of creating models of various objects of our world, on which we want to concentrate. But we can also objectively believe that a computer is a qualitatively new way of understanding numerous types of complexity (this is how comprehensive the idea is that it constructs its own world).
As Frank Smith 6 pointed out, all “literacy” has its origins in ideas that we perceive as quite important and invest our efforts in them, and we also want to share them and our thoughts with others (and, also important, receive feedback) . This gave birth to writing systems, and then to the processes of learning to read and write, which is strongly intertwined with such ideas. Literacy and literature appeared.
At some point, a sufficient number of new ideas , holding back the current system of thought, will grow into a new thinking space and, often, you have to invent new types of information representation systems, leading to a rethinking of the concepts of literacy and literature.
This brings us to the main idea of this work: the great future of “reading” depends on the future of “learning difficult things to understand.”
Most of the invented "large-scale ideas", such as mathematics, science, equal rights, systems, musical structures, such as harmony and counterpoint, etc., had to be invented , because they are not so clearly embedded in our genetically engineered brains. We can study them to some extent, because we are able to create structures that are a bit like biological brains, from internal images based on languages and the skill of manipulating them. , , , , .
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Of course, the presence of the components does not bring us closer to the simple way of creating a whole picture, especially when the combination is very complex and has many connections. However, in some cases it is easy to see how some particles help others. For example, a good working model of human common sense of the world and reasoning can be used to increase the necessary degree of understanding of what a student is doing, says, asks what he needs. The reasoning unit, as in the CYC 13 system, can rephrase ambiguous questions from students in 3-4 simple questions and ask to clarify which of them was meant 20 .
Many successful tutors modeled people teachers, but this method turned out to be quite expensive and was distinguished by some spontaneity such as, for example, systems built on the basis of ACT-R architecture of Anderson, Ködinger (12), and others. Acuitus 21's carefully thought-out systems recently provided reports with impressive results. The operation of these systems is mainly based on reference situations with thousands of manually generated events, and is quite expensive. However, for subjects of the main mass of consumers, such as early reading, grade 3 arithmetic, grade 9 algebra, initial programming courses, etc., costs can be attributed to the whole nation of students. It is worth doing, because, having reached the appropriate dynamics and good feelings from the user interface, we will discover what needs to be brought to mind, and can lead to more compact, more automated ways of creating such systems. Despite subsequent long-term prospects, the government cannot tolerate investing in such learning curves.
In the course of thinking about these problems, it is important to understand that among all the necessary inventions that contributed to the successful development of personal computers, the key to a billion users was a graphical user interface, which is practical, often pleasant, and is now completely invisible in the layer between the two very different from each other by the world of people and the world that is hidden inside the computer.
Since the ARPA / PARC research community created a responsive graphical user interface in the 1960s and 1970s, the style of the user interface and developments on this topic have not really progressed. Even a seeming interface broker, like Siri , for the most part is a simple extension of user search and notification systems that have been part of a responsive interface for several decades.
The method of communicating people with computers turned out to be quite promising, almost universal, and relatively easy to use. But she has not yet shown all her capabilities and, more importantly, much still needs to be done in this area.
The following qualitative transformation in the user interface of the environment will be: a teacher for each student - user interfaces that can significantly help end users to master new ideas and whole subjects.
In addition to the obvious simple advantages of such a move forward, it is also possible to introduce to the public new inventions that will not have to (a) go along the beaten path for many decades, or (b) strive for the lowest common denominator between education and mental abilities. Part of a new idea, be it an application or how much easier it is to work on a computer, may be a “recommendation to the user interface” on how to help the end user to learn new ideas.
This means that the real computer revolution has not yet occurred .
And also the fact that we will miss this if we do not learn to think beyond the framework of the present, which was created by several inventions 40 years ago. One way to do this is to “cross out the present” and try to go beyond what we think we want to think about, and what we really need . And only after that we will be able to understand the future potential of technology in terms of the main traditions of writing and printing to enhance our best natural parameters and help ourselves to go beyond the genetic cell to meet a brighter fate.
- Alan Kay
Alan Kay is a cool man, we congratulated him on Habré with a birthday .
I recall the merits of Alan.
- He worked in the legendary Xerox PARC, Atari, Apple, Disney, HP.
- He proposed the concept of Dynabook (in 1968), which defined the conceptual basis for a laptop, tablet computer and e-book.
- One of the founding fathers of object-oriented programming (SmallTalk, 1969).
- Participated in the creation of the first personal computer Xerox Alto (1973).
- The initiator of the useful movement "Every child on the laptop."
- in 2001, he founded the Viewpoints Research Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated to children, education and advanced software development.
- In 2006 he threw a defiant challenge to the industry - he announced the possibility of creating an operating system with a graphical interface of 20,000 lines of code.
- In 2016 he joined the Y Combinator .
We decided to translate his most conceptual article, and then bang, it turns out that the original article does not contain a piece of text. We wrote to the Viewpoints Research Institute, they say, you have a typo. Kim Rose answered us, explained everything, corrected and blessed it.
')
For the translation, thanks to Yana Shchekotova, for the support of the publication - the company Edison (which specializes in the automation of asphalt plants and the development of payment systems and terminals ).
Kim Rose answer
Hello back!
Alan Kay's essay, "The future of reading ...."
You can find it. It was found that I had the paper on the text.
The sentence following "The idea of the race" can be tried, it should be read. "Lage" is part of "village".)
We are happy to know how to translate this essay.
If you have further questions, please do not hesitate to contact me again.
Regards,
Kim rose
Viewpoints Research Institute
Alan Kay's essay, "The future of reading ...."
You can find it. It was found that I had the paper on the text.
The sentence following "The idea of the race" can be tried, it should be read. "Lage" is part of "village".)
We are happy to know how to translate this essay.
If you have further questions, please do not hesitate to contact me again.
Regards,
Kim rose
Viewpoints Research Institute
The future of reading depends on the future of learning difficult-to-understand things (Alan Kay)
We are engaged in “reading” when we interpret the meanings of certain phenomena. We read the terrain, traces, sky and clouds, faces, body language, objects of art, books, films and television, sounds, smells and touches, the process of performing some actions by external objects, etc.
Here we are most interested in a cursory reading of the anthropogenic phenomenon called “writing”: natural languages, mathematics, music, old and new computer-based interaction tools, including the user interface, and other systems that seek to capture, transmit and, most importantly, explain the main ideas.
Different representations of the “same thought” contain only a part of this thought and a condition for its “reading”. For example, reading news in prose, poetry and from television screens - all this gives different impressions. Marshall McLuhan once said that "one can argue about many things behind a slick window, but democracy is not one of them." He meant both a dirty window and television (our modern less pleasant equivalent).
Socrates once spoke about writing as follows: “Writing eliminates the need to memorize.” It is the same as a prosthesis on a healthy limb, leading to its extinction. On the other hand, if new technologies are perceived as an amplifier that enhances and multiplies what we already have, rather than replacing it, then we have the opportunity to use writing for its ability to overcome time and space, as well as efficiency and the desire to preserve evidence form that is not applicable in oral speech.
And we can still learn to memorize everything we read! In other words, writing is not the best substitute for memories used in the process of thinking - this is too inefficient - but it is a great way to cover different areas of knowledge and have more food for thought.
Plato must have appreciated the irony of the situation, because his beloved teacher complained about this means of transmitting information, and he used it well to convey the thoughts and character of Socrates’s personality.
Such an idea arose: Socrates was not enough for everyone, but the printing press was able to copy Plato’s Socrates convincing re-creation so that the printed editions of his Dialogues, with the presentation of more mediocre teachers, could affect an entire continent and potentially enrich every reader.
A similar question arises: what part of the great thinking and great thinkers can be fixed with the help of a personal computer and the omnipresent global network, and what is needed in order to learn how to read and write them.
In each century, it was noted that, in general, it was more difficult for most people to learn to read and write than to learn their natural language, which is a little surprising given the correspondence of conversational skills and writing one to one. We will return to this issue later. And now we would like to know whether these difficulties cause inconvenience, or mastering these skills could be useful. In other words, given the abundance of technology, we need to figure out whether the blessing is “ease of use” (corresponds to our current capabilities), or sometimes it is a trap (allows us to be ourselves or lowers our importance).
To read and write fluently, you need to learn new skills and hone your existing skills as we change in the process. Anthropological studies of society show that a competent society thinks differently than where only oral speech is used. Those. literate society is not a “society with a developed oral language and writing system”, but a new ecosystem of ideas and thinking.
McLuhan noted that the most important role in communication media is what we have to turn into in order to use them easily.
The more differences a communication medium has and the harder it is, the less attractive, or even noticeable, it becomes. Another idea McLuhan is that the new means of communication, which generally could take root, first used the contents of older and more well-known media tools. For example, it was important that the printed version of Gutenberg’s Bible resembled the Bible, but at the same time it would look like a hand-made copy of a manuscript. Over time, if a new media tool showed its potential, then it began to be actively used. The true purpose of the press was not to imitate a handwritten Bible, but to stir up new debates about science and politics 150 years later. That's what changed Europe forever, and then America.
Consider the American system, which was formed and maintained its existence only through writing and reading. Tom Paine’s book " Common Sense " was an argument against sanity on the day when "Monarchy seemed something natural." On the contrary, he argued that "we need to form our own management system." The newspapers of 13 colonies argued for and against the constitution. The arguments “for” were given in the publication “The Federalist Papers” (“The Federalist Papers”), and the arguments “against” - in the “Notes of the Antifederalist” (“AntiFederalist Papers”).
The form of government was supposed to be republican (and here we remember Plato again), but its “advocates” should have been elected and, more importantly, rejected by the whole population. This meant that the population of America was supposed to reason similarly to the defenders of this form of government. Thomas Jefferson said:
“I don’t know a safer way to preserve the maximum power of society than the people themselves; and if you think that they are not sufficiently enlightened in the matter of implementing a management process with a high level of differentiation, then the best solution would be not to deprive them of this, but to train them. ” This goes beyond the "stained windows"!
The reading skills among the population, which are necessary to familiarize oneself with such ideas in their original form, are under attack. Assessment 1 by the US Department of Education, the ability of the adult population to read well enough to understand these arguments, found that in 1992 only 15% of people had the right skill, and in 2003 this figure dropped to 13% (and this decline was real, not error of error). This is not enough to support the original idea.
But what do these numbers really mean? America is a country of complex mixes of people from different cultures, many of which are still developing. More informative statistics in the study of the same Ministry of Education show what percentage of graduates after 4 years of college has the necessary skills. In 1992, this figure was 40%. This is amazing. How did the other 60% manage to get a diploma if they could not even read at the “professional” level? By 2003, that number had gone down to 31%, which is even more surprising.
In any case, the reading of structured prose works could be forgotten. It is difficult to find and reflect all the reasons for such changes. The simplest of these is that in the 19th century, people constantly read and wrote if they had to go beyond space and time. As Neil Postman noted, there were no competitors here. Those. when it was time to read or write something, and it was extremely important, then, as it turned out, an impressive number of people had such skills. After 140 years since the invention of the telephone, a variety of technologies have emerged that allow our deep attachment to verbal communication to spread through electronic devices through time and space. Short news and information sharing about the world and someone’s friends no longer require confident writing and reading skills. These 22 minute news on TV (it’s like half the newspaper column) do not convey all the information and put the importance in last place.
On the topic “why reading and writing is harder to learn” than a lot of natural language, a lot of great books have been written. The best of the recent ones is Proust and the Squid 2, an outstanding neurophysiologist and reading expert Marianna Wolfe. It presents a good historical overview of writing systems, some recent discoveries from the field of brain research on reading skills and the ability to learn, as well as the basic principles of teaching reading for the majority of the population who were not lucky enough to be previously “connected” to the process of learning these skills.
Incidentally, the reason why we can quickly learn a natural language from childhood in linguistic traditions, and other animals, and even primates, cannot do this, lies in our brain, which, although plastic in every sense, is not is a clean sheet of paper, and contains structures organized by our genes that help us learn our language. But despite this, this process does not take place in one day, it needs years.
It is rather strange that even the very idea of writing was not so obvious to the representatives of our kind during 200,000 years of life on this planet. As far as we know, this process is only about 5,000 years old, and what should have been the easiest way to organize writing, namely the creation of symbols based on speech sounds and the “recording of these sounds” itself, appeared less than 3,000 years ago.
Why? Because of the effective processes we need for speech, our physiological experience consists of directly recognizing the ear and expressing meaning directly, and is not limited to collecting, in pieces, first sounds, then morphemes, words and parts of speech. But it is also the experience that we get after we have learned to read fluently, or have mastered any other skill: the components of a skill are grouped together by the so-called direct perception and giving meaning.
In order to come to other "strong ideas" it took much more time. For example, mathematical systems based on abstractions, assumptions, conclusions and conclusions were discovered in Greece after the alphabet was invented, and perhaps partly because of this. The Greeks had several true scholars: Archimedes, Aristarchus, Eratosthenes, etc. But still, as far as we know, they did not have “Science” as such. We do not know all the details of the Alexandrian era and the processes occurring in its stunning library, where, as expected, the experts in mathematics and science tried to test each other's ideas using methods that could be called scientific.
For us, "modern science" appeared in the 17th century, and its qualitatively different methods of thinking about the world, about confirmation, knowledge, proof, and even "truth", transformed our world quickly and on a completely different level.
The emergence of science has changed what has already been written and read, and also influenced the realization of what is to read fluently and write quickly. For example, one of the most important books written in the entire history of mankind about important discoveries and conjectures is considered to be Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy . To read it, you need not only to easily recognize letters, but also to be able to read charts and know math. In theory, a modern “literate” person should be able to read this book, but, as Ch.P. Snow (CP Snow) in his essay “Two Cultures” (“Two Cultures”) 3 , what is meant by literacy, has not received proper distribution even among university professors.
Most of those 13% of Americans who are able to read Tom Payne's "Common Sense" cannot read books similar to "Mathematical Principles" (or even simpler, but with a scientific statement). This means that the real percentage of potential voters in the United States who can cope with the problems inherent in our era, in reality, is only a few percent of the adult population.
Another impressive prospect for the development of the world in which we live appeared in the 20th century. And her name is System. Simply put, we humans are interwoven into four large systems of systems : the universe, social systems, systems of technologies, and ourselves : "The systems in which we live and the systems we are."
Such a view of complexity has its own properties, predictions, a set of concepts, dynamics, theories and principles. Many of the most important problems of the 21st century can be productively studied through the prism of system organization and dynamics.
In most systems, there are complex interactions between their parts, which are difficult to understand by our limited mind, even with the help of modern mathematics. For example, many important natural systems (such as climate, epidemics), society (early 20s in Germany, the modern Middle East or the USA), technology (Chernobyl), and our bodies (circulatory system or blood glucose regulation) can probably remain stable for many years, but then suddenly turn into conditions that have a negative effect and are quite dangerous for us.
Today, many of these life systems can be disassembled and made more predictable. At the end of the 20th century, such systems moved into the category of more imaginable objects, because the tool for processing complex dynamic interactions was invented in the middle of the 20th century. And he called the computer.
Some children have already become "competent in understanding the systems." For example, a 10-year-old child can draw a small red typewriter in Etoys 4 and write a script that would allow her to move in a circle.
You can make a copy with the same behavior, and repaint the machine in blue. To see if the blue and red cars collided, and if this condition is met, repaint the blue car into a red one, even a child can write a small program. It can be conditionally assumed that the blue machine is a healthy person, and the red one is sick.
You can create thousands of tiny blue typewriters and just one red, and then launch the program to observe the nature of the spread of the epidemic. The percentage of infected can be calculated and displayed graphically as the program runs.
You can take settlements with a different number of inhabitants. The fewer the people, the more sparse the “village” will be, and the longer the infection will take to spread. Children are fascinated by the inconstancy of "good luck." And yet, all the inhabitants of the village perish. Rapidly spreading infections are like typhoid fever, and slowly spreading infections are like AIDS. And it will be seen that typhoid fever is noticeable for everyone, and AIDS will fall out of sight until it is too late.
The child has created a model 5 , leading to the answer to the question of why it is so extremely important to pay attention to incurable deadly diseases, and it does not matter how it looks on the part of a sane person. Millions, perhaps even billions of adults, do not have these answers, and they die because of their absence. A child can put emulation results on the Internet, on a YouTube-like site for children's projects, while other children can download them, think about these results, make changes, etc.
From the standpoint of this work, we have now revealed a whole new set of ideas that we need to study and think about not only from the point of view of science, but also from the point of view of systems, and also we have added a new powerful and different tool for working with information - dynamic a tool for creative thinking 7 , in addition to reading and writing skills that we need to learn.
What should children learn in order to “write” their own epidemic spread emulator, and what they need to learn in order to be able to “read” the results of this emulation and the results of similar projects from other children? And how can we help them learn new things? Can the computer itself help, and not just be a wonderful new “box for creating the dynamics of various processes”?
You can consider computer as a development of mathematics - it introduces new ways of creating models of various objects of our world, on which we want to concentrate. But we can also objectively believe that a computer is a qualitatively new way of understanding numerous types of complexity (this is how comprehensive the idea is that it constructs its own world).
As Frank Smith 6 pointed out, all “literacy” has its origins in ideas that we perceive as quite important and invest our efforts in them, and we also want to share them and our thoughts with others (and, also important, receive feedback) . This gave birth to writing systems, and then to the processes of learning to read and write, which is strongly intertwined with such ideas. Literacy and literature appeared.
At some point, a sufficient number of new ideas , holding back the current system of thought, will grow into a new thinking space and, often, you have to invent new types of information representation systems, leading to a rethinking of the concepts of literacy and literature.
This brings us to the main idea of this work: the great future of “reading” depends on the future of “learning difficult things to understand.”
Most of the invented "large-scale ideas", such as mathematics, science, equal rights, systems, musical structures, such as harmony and counterpoint, etc., had to be invented , because they are not so clearly embedded in our genetically engineered brains. We can study them to some extent, because we are able to create structures that are a bit like biological brains, from internal images based on languages and the skill of manipulating them. , , , , .
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Of course, the presence of the components does not bring us closer to the simple way of creating a whole picture, especially when the combination is very complex and has many connections. However, in some cases it is easy to see how some particles help others. For example, a good working model of human common sense of the world and reasoning can be used to increase the necessary degree of understanding of what a student is doing, says, asks what he needs. The reasoning unit, as in the CYC 13 system, can rephrase ambiguous questions from students in 3-4 simple questions and ask to clarify which of them was meant 20 .
Many successful tutors modeled people teachers, but this method turned out to be quite expensive and was distinguished by some spontaneity such as, for example, systems built on the basis of ACT-R architecture of Anderson, Ködinger (12), and others. Acuitus 21's carefully thought-out systems recently provided reports with impressive results. The operation of these systems is mainly based on reference situations with thousands of manually generated events, and is quite expensive. However, for subjects of the main mass of consumers, such as early reading, grade 3 arithmetic, grade 9 algebra, initial programming courses, etc., costs can be attributed to the whole nation of students. It is worth doing, because, having reached the appropriate dynamics and good feelings from the user interface, we will discover what needs to be brought to mind, and can lead to more compact, more automated ways of creating such systems. Despite subsequent long-term prospects, the government cannot tolerate investing in such learning curves.
In the course of thinking about these problems, it is important to understand that among all the necessary inventions that contributed to the successful development of personal computers, the key to a billion users was a graphical user interface, which is practical, often pleasant, and is now completely invisible in the layer between the two very different from each other by the world of people and the world that is hidden inside the computer.
Since the ARPA / PARC research community created a responsive graphical user interface in the 1960s and 1970s, the style of the user interface and developments on this topic have not really progressed. Even a seeming interface broker, like Siri , for the most part is a simple extension of user search and notification systems that have been part of a responsive interface for several decades.
The method of communicating people with computers turned out to be quite promising, almost universal, and relatively easy to use. But she has not yet shown all her capabilities and, more importantly, much still needs to be done in this area.
The following qualitative transformation in the user interface of the environment will be: a teacher for each student - user interfaces that can significantly help end users to master new ideas and whole subjects.
In addition to the obvious simple advantages of such a move forward, it is also possible to introduce to the public new inventions that will not have to (a) go along the beaten path for many decades, or (b) strive for the lowest common denominator between education and mental abilities. Part of a new idea, be it an application or how much easier it is to work on a computer, may be a “recommendation to the user interface” on how to help the end user to learn new ideas.
This means that the real computer revolution has not yet occurred .
And also the fact that we will miss this if we do not learn to think beyond the framework of the present, which was created by several inventions 40 years ago. One way to do this is to “cross out the present” and try to go beyond what we think we want to think about, and what we really need . And only after that we will be able to understand the future potential of technology in terms of the main traditions of writing and printing to enhance our best natural parameters and help ourselves to go beyond the genetic cell to meet a brighter fate.
Notes and References
21st Century, National Assessment of Literacy,
US Dept of Education, NCES 2006-470
ii Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid, Harper, 2007
iii CP Snow, “The Two Cultures”, Canto Classics (reprinted 2012)
iv Alan Kay, Etoys, Children, and Learning
Alan Kay, Etoys, Authoring, and Media
These examples were inspired by the work of Seymour Papert, Mitchel Resnick, and several decades of
our own research
vi Frank Smith, Essays Into Literacy, Heineman, 1983
vii Tim Gallwey, The Inner Game of Tennis, Random House, 1974
viii George Miller, The Magic Number 7 ± 2
ACM Nat'l Conf, Boston, August 1972
x Alan Kay, A Dynamic Medium For Creative Thought, Proc Nat'l Council of Teachers of English, November
1972
xi Maria Montessori, The Secret of Childhood, Ballantine Books, 1972
xii OK Moore, Autotelic Responsive Environments and Exceptional Children, Experience, Structure and
Adaptability (ed. Harvey), Springer, 1966
xiii Anderson and Moore, Autotelic Folk Models, Sociological Quarterly, 1959
xiv Lev Vygotsky, Thought and Language, Revised Edition, MIT Press, 1986
xv Jerome Bruner, Toward a Theory of Instruction, Harvard / Belknap Press, 1965
xvi Seymour Papert, Mindstorms: Children, Computers, Basic Books, 1993
Mitchel Resnick, Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams, MIT Press, 1994
xvii John Henry Martin, Writing To Read, Warner Books, 1986
xviii Kenneth Koedinger, The Geometry Tutor, CMU
xix Douglas Lenat, CYC, Cycorp
xx Lenat, D., Witbrock, M., Baxter, D., Blackstone, E., Deaton, C., Schneider, D., Scott, J., and Shepard, B.
(2010) Harnessing Cyc to Answer Clinical Researchers' ad hoc Queries. AI Magazine, 31 (3), Fall, 2010
xxi Acuitus Web Site
US Dept of Education, NCES 2006-470
ii Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid, Harper, 2007
iii CP Snow, “The Two Cultures”, Canto Classics (reprinted 2012)
iv Alan Kay, Etoys, Children, and Learning
Alan Kay, Etoys, Authoring, and Media
These examples were inspired by the work of Seymour Papert, Mitchel Resnick, and several decades of
our own research
vi Frank Smith, Essays Into Literacy, Heineman, 1983
vii Tim Gallwey, The Inner Game of Tennis, Random House, 1974
viii George Miller, The Magic Number 7 ± 2
ACM Nat'l Conf, Boston, August 1972
x Alan Kay, A Dynamic Medium For Creative Thought, Proc Nat'l Council of Teachers of English, November
1972
xi Maria Montessori, The Secret of Childhood, Ballantine Books, 1972
xii OK Moore, Autotelic Responsive Environments and Exceptional Children, Experience, Structure and
Adaptability (ed. Harvey), Springer, 1966
xiii Anderson and Moore, Autotelic Folk Models, Sociological Quarterly, 1959
xiv Lev Vygotsky, Thought and Language, Revised Edition, MIT Press, 1986
xv Jerome Bruner, Toward a Theory of Instruction, Harvard / Belknap Press, 1965
xvi Seymour Papert, Mindstorms: Children, Computers, Basic Books, 1993
Mitchel Resnick, Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams, MIT Press, 1994
xvii John Henry Martin, Writing To Read, Warner Books, 1986
xviii Kenneth Koedinger, The Geometry Tutor, CMU
xix Douglas Lenat, CYC, Cycorp
xx Lenat, D., Witbrock, M., Baxter, D., Blackstone, E., Deaton, C., Schneider, D., Scott, J., and Shepard, B.
(2010) Harnessing Cyc to Answer Clinical Researchers' ad hoc Queries. AI Magazine, 31 (3), Fall, 2010
xxi Acuitus Web Site
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