The Purpose(s) of the Computer in Education

Dewey on Purpose and Significance

The final justification of shops, kitchens, and so on in the school is not just that they afford opportunity for activity, but that they provide opportunity for the kind of activity or for the acquisition of mechanical skills which leads students to attend to the relation of means and ends, and then to consideration of the way things interact with one another to produce definite effects.
John Dewey, from Experience and Education, p. 85

Over the last half-dozen years, great numbers of schools in the US have added computers in classrooms and labs. Technology coordinators have been hired by many schools both to maintain the computers and to teach and encourage faculty to use the computers in innovative, productive ways. The question we take up today is "To What End?"

We'll start with some questions motivated by Dewey's "The Meaning of Purpose," in Experience and Education, and move on to the questions raised by Scheffler's article. For starters:

• Reflecting on your own experience at Brown, can you distinguish impulse, desire and purpose in the Deweyan sense?
• If we add "computer labs" to "shops" and "kitchens" in the Dewey quotation above, how would you describe the difference between experiences facilitated by the computers that are genuinely educative from those that are not.
• Why do you suppose an awareness of means and ends is so important in both Dewey's discussion of progressive education and Scheffler's? discussion of computers at school?

A final question, to frame the Scheffler piece, is whether and to what extent changes in culture inspired by new technologies should change our ideas about what constitutes "purpose", "significance" and education value generally. This is a question we'll have occasion to deal with again later in the term, but for now consider the page I've handed out with Winograd's contrasts between "Library Culture" and "Information-Retrieval Culture" (excerpted from Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Spinosa, "Highway Bridges and Feasts: Heidegger and Borgmann on How to Affirm Technology."

Israel Scheffler's "Computers at School?" (1986)

We'll finally get to Scheffler's philosophical article, led by David Edelson's comments and questions. We'll try to be clear about Scheffler's concerns and arguments in each of the four sections of the paper, and reflect on whether/how the arguments stand up today; the four sections are:

1. The Illusion of Givenness
2. Distinguishing Means from Ends
3. The Uses of Computers at School
4. The Notion of Information in Educational Thought

For next time: Read the 1999 Sviniki article and the selected chapters from Schank and Cleary chapters for Wednesday. Both texts are online, but the Schank and Cleary is also on reserve in the Science Library. Project pages with the revised project descriptions should be up no later than next Wednesday's class.