 WorldNet presents Dialogue, an international televised exchange of ideas. Now, from our studios in Washington, D.C., here is your host, broadcast journalist, Jude Lynn Lilly. Good afternoon and welcome to WorldNet Dialogue. Today, for audiences in Europe and participants in Tel Aviv, we will discuss the use of computers in education. We will look at cognitive as well as intuitive learning skills and talk about how these interface with the use of computers. We have, as our guest today, two authorities on this topic. Professor David Perkins is co-director of Project Zero, a Harvard University research facility. Professor Perkins' research focuses on the use of computers in developing and teaching thinking skills. Professor Perkins is a senior research associate at Harvard University. He is also an associate at Harvard's Educational Technology Center. He has authored and co-authored several books, including Knowledge as Design, The Mind's Best Work, and The Teaching of Thinking. Judith Schwartz is professor of education and co-director of the Educational Technology Center at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is also professor of engineering science and education at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Professor Schwartz' research at Harvard concerns the use of computers in augmenting human intuition as well as cognitive development. He has served as a consultant for various universities, foundations, and corporations both in the U.S. and abroad. Professor Schwartz is the author and co-author of several computer software packages, including the Calculus Toolkit, The Geometric Supposer, Missing Links, and has collaborated in the production of several computer-generated films. Gentlemen, welcome to WorldNet Dialogue. Thank you. Now let's turn to our participants in Tel Aviv for their questions. As a reminder, please identify yourself and your organization. Go ahead, Tel Aviv, with your first question. Hi, I'm Gabriel Solomon of the Tel Aviv University School of Education, presently heading the graduate program in computers and education. I'd like if possible to set the stage with the following premise and observation and then possibly follow from here with a number of questions. A few years ago, computers have been introduced to schools with great excitement and enthusiasm. However, as more and more evidence begins to gather, so the disappointment begins to set in. Many schools, though obviously not all, seem to fail a direction. They don't really know what they should be doing with the computers. And what they end up doing presently, at least, is using computers as supplements to otherwise quite unchanging school practices, a sort of an add-on. I would nearly say a patch on the school, quite an expensive one of that, where computer activities take a low-key road, few things occur there, but still most of the school activities are quite unrelated to what goes on in the computer room. It's a separate curriculum very often, a separate expert running the show. Kids may go to computer classes or use a computer, but this has not yet proven itself to have much of any bearing on the major activities of the school. Provided that my description pertains quite validly to many schools in Israel, as far as I know in Europe, and to a number of schools in the United States, that brings up a number of questions. And let me begin with the first one. What really is the promise of computers today as we know them? What is it in computers that does give us any reason to believe that they could be used as levers for change, rather than just supplements to otherwise unchanging practices? Or maybe we should be waiting a little bit until computers have matured or better developed before we can really be sufficiently confident to claim that schools could use computers to retain some major change. Professor Schwartz, why don't you just go ahead and start? Well, it seems to me that the promise of computers does not lie primarily in the doing what we now do with marginal or incremental improvements. The promise of computers lies in making what I think can be a profound revolution in the nature of education. Let me make the following argument. If one believes that the essence of understanding a complicated and subtle idea is to be able to represent it to yourself and to others in several different ways and to move nimbly among these ways in your explaining it to yourself and to others, then the computer offers a peculiar and special opportunity, namely the opportunity to help someone learn to do that by having the computer assume the role of an expression often used of training wheels for the mind, of mapping between one representation and another so that the learner of whatever age be it student or teacher can explore an action in one representation and the computer can display the consequences of his or her action in the other representations, thus providing a kind of scaffolding to allow the person to explore his or her own understanding. We have seen this happen in subtle areas, in areas that we have never succeeded well in teaching to all but a very small fraction of our students and we have seen it work profound, profound effects on both the understanding and people's attitudes towards understanding. Professor Perkins. It seems to me that one of the principal difficulties in the situation is what computers do not promise. What they do not promise is a free ride. Education tends to be fond of free rides or trying to find them. Like other innovations in the past, computers haven't turned out to be that free ride. Now if we get beyond the free ride concept, it seems to me that the principal potential here is in the development of what you might call constructive environments, information processing environments that allow one to make kinds of things that were previously hard to make. I include programs, of course, but also things like spreadsheets, dynamic simulations, text, easily manipulated and meta-text, as it's called. Now these constructive environments afford an opportunity for the making of things by students and by professionals that was not readily available before. At the same time, those environments by themselves are no free ride either. The evidence is plain. If you simply make those environments available, novices don't learn a lot from them. They don't know what to do with them. I think the promise of computers has not been fulfilled to date, largely because of the free ride syndrome in education and of the belief that providing the vehicle is enough to make a driver. Providing the vehicle isn't enough to make a driver. One has to provide what I like to call the mind-ware as well as the software. And if we can get over that hump and start providing the mind-ware for how to drive these vehicles, we may get somewhere. Good morning, Enshalom. I am Benjamin Feinstein from the Computer Assistant Instruction Department in the Ministry of Education. As you know, in non-English speaking countries such as Israel, we have a permanent absence of high quality of educational software and information resource up to date. Therefore, we try to work to establish an international network of public organizations, schools, universities and others for sharing experiences in the field of educational computing and other subjects, for developers, teachers, and of course for students' levels. Can you give us any suggestions about how such a network could be set up and how it could operate? And what do you think about the possibility of getting out a program of cooperative course for development and knowledge interchange between schools involving several countries? Thank you. Professor Schwartz. It seems to me, as David Perkins suggests, that the software is a necessary but hardly sufficient piece of the problem. In my view, in order to realize the promise of what this new technology has to offer in education, a lot more is demanded than simply the development of software that can be read in Hebrew or German or French or Arabic. What seems to me must be done is to engender a shift in expectations in the school system, expectations as to where intellectual authority lies, expectations of how much authority and responsibility a student is expected to take for his or her own learning, how much instructional responsibility to invest in the computer itself. I, for one, as many of you know, am profoundly uninterested in turning the computer into a surrogate teacher. I think it is a poor use of both technology and of human beings. On the other hand, I think using the computer as an intellectual mirror to allow one to explore the consequences of his or her own probing is a terribly important thing to do. But if one is to do that and have that be an accepted part of what we call schooling, then attitudes of teachers and principals and the public at large toward what happens in schools has to change. And it seems to me that that is much less of a problem of international development of courseware than it is a problem of learning of a school system and of a ministry learning to lead what Socrates called the inspected life. One must ask what one does and why one does it and is that really what one wants to do? Thank you. Professor Perkins. The problem here I think is replicated in the question, the problem I referred to earlier. You think that by providing the resource wonderful things happen. You think that by creating a network consequently good thinking about education will occur. This is another technological fix. It's another perhaps necessary but far from sufficient condition. In Judah's remarks, I think this emerges clearly, Judah is calling for not just the provision of a network facility but the provision of a posture, an attitude, a perspective. In other words, one sort of mind-ware. Now how to provide this well is far from clear but that networking alone will not provide it, I think is amply clear. I am Elad Perled of Ben-Gurion University in Beersheva. Hello and shalom to Judah and David. I would like to ask you first, I would like to ask first about the premise of Judah about the profound revolution that computers may create or may serve. Computers are already in education already I think 20 years and the empirical evidence doesn't show any trends of resolution so far. How can you explain this? Are there reasons or is there any difference between three possible answers? One is that our premises are right but the implementation is wrong or premises are wrong and the implementation is wrong, premises are wrong but implementation follows the premises. Thank you. I once had a teacher who claimed that the cello was a musical instrument that could not be played and he knew that because he tried it. It seems to me that when one points to 20 years of non-profound influence of the computer in education one points to only that. Now can there be a difference? Could the premise be right? Well I would like to argue that the premise could be right if one had important enough and deep enough and substantial enough things to do with this technology. The technology in and of itself is uninteresting. It depends what you do with it. The technology of print in and of itself is uninteresting but I think Elad you would admit that there have been some seminal books in the history of western civilization and that the technology of print has succeeded in influencing where we have been and where we are and where we are going to. If there are seminal uses of technology that is sufficient to establish the validity of the premise. I believe that there are and I believe that we are seeing more and more of them and seeing them at an accelerated pace. Professor Perkins. It seems to me that we can actually quite directly look for existence proofs of the potential of the medium in professional applications. The kind of word processing I do and probably most of you do to get your writing done and the ways in which it shapes the process of writing. What you can do with a spreadsheet, what you can do with a database, what you can do with a statistical analysis package, I suppose many people who are listening to us have done analyses of variants by hand at some point in their life and I doubt if it was a pleasant experience. The very fact that there are powerful and in some ways illuminating applications of computers at the professional level but at levels not that far removed from what might be called foreign school climate, a bit of algebra, a bit of writing and so on, it seems to me shows that the potential is very real. There's more than one premise, premises we're spoken of. One of the crucial premises which I think is mistaken and mentioned before is the free ride premise. If you get rid of the free ride premise and replace it by attention to the kind of mind wear or metacognition or thinking frames that are needed to couple with the technology, then I think that the miserable track record can be revised fairly handily. Let me follow from the answers you have provided. Assume there is quite a potential in computers and profound changes both in the intellectual life of a child as well as intellectual atmosphere and structure of the school is possible even today. And it's quite an important answer you have given because the answer would have been a maybe not and maybe we're jumping a little bit too fast. But assume we are not. Still, with all the powerful tools that are available and even accessible yet not often properly used, with all the software, some of which even quite impressive and stretching the mind potentially, still I would concur here with a lot to tell it, the evidence is quite scant. I mean that evidence suggests that profound changes do take place. But assume they're possible. What would it take in the real world, in the down to earth reality of schools to help schools along to move from using computers as unimportant add-ons and supplements to powerful levers and tools that change indeed the whole educational climate of an institute. Question I'm asking is, maybe later we'll have to answer also the question of do we have real examples and what could be learned from them. But maybe right now we should ask what is it we should do to help schools along Thank you. Professor Perkins. I seem to be harping on a theme, but I would say quite straightforwardly supply the mind where. Let me give you an example from the contemporary research on instruction in programming. One of the early hopes of the computer revolution is that practice in programming computers would somehow train the mind, develop one's cognitive and metacognitive abilities. Now, by and large, the track record in this area is quite sorry. It doesn't look as though it's going to happen. However, several recent experiments have produced positive results. Some kind of transfer from experience in programming to performance in other domains. Why have these produced positive results? It seems that they've done so because of much more explicit attention in the instruction to what aspects of the computer experience might be transferable, emphasizing reflection on the part of students about what they're doing, emphasizing the abstraction of principles, providing certain principles that have leverage in the computer domain and other domains, so that programming becomes a vehicle for the development of explicitly metacognitive transferable skills, provision of mindware. Now, this is very different from the history of experimentation in this area, and it's only now that efforts are being made to provide the mindware that we see results. I'm not saying that computer programming is the best way to develop cognitive abilities. I'm not at all sure it's the best way, but it's becoming clear in the light of recent research that it is a way that it is not a hopeless cause, as might have been said as recently as two or three years ago, just examining the empirical record. So here is one example, at least, where we are seeing a turnaround in the flavor of results in consequence of a more mindful approach. Professor Schwartz. I'd like to take a somewhat different cut to the question of what might be done now, assuming the premises are correct. And it seems to me that an essential feature of using the computer in the way I like to imagine it might be used, that is, as an intellectual mirror in which you can explore your own conjectures and your own theory-building and your own modeling, an essential feature of being able to do that and do that well, is that everyone in the classroom, and that includes the teacher, has to feel that that is a laudable and worthwhile enterprise. And that, it seems to me, requires, in many of our classrooms, both ours and yours, a shift in teacher attitudes. The teacher must no longer regard himself or herself as a transmitter of already codified knowledge. And that be all. The teacher must regard himself or herself as an intellectual provocateur, as someone who stimulates, and most importantly, as someone who continues to learn the very subject that is being taught in that classroom. I, for example, have never had the experience of working with a class of second grade arithmetic students but that I have not learned something about mathematics from that experience. I would like to argue that the teacher who thinks of himself or herself as someone who already knows all there is to know about the subject that he or she is charged with teaching is doing the children a disservice in a deep and lasting way. Now, if indeed we are to look for this sort of shift in attitude and identity on the part of the teacher, then it must be supported. And it must be supported by the educational environment within which that teacher and those students live. And that means that the building principal or headmaster, and that means that the superintendent and that means that the ministry must begin to formulate a different approach toward what it means to teach in a classroom and toward what it means to be a successful teacher. It means that assessments of what is successful classroom experience, both for students and teachers, must do shift toward a new definition of what does it mean to learn. To learn means to construct knowledge and no one, no one, should be denied the glory and the thrill of that experience. Benjamin Feinstein again. I think that the CAI must be an integral part of the teaching learning process in each level. At the classroom level, for example, the teacher must use the computer as part of a total configuration of learning materials to produce an intended pedagogical effect. As educational software improves, computerizing could begin to apply some kinds of textbooks or part of textbooks as, for example, drill books or drill activities. Good software could be tailored to meet individual students' needs more quickly, in my opinion, and can be inexpensively than textbooks. What are your thoughts about this kind of process? It is a real process and how we could improve this process to change part of the textbooks and really to integrate the CAI in the curriculum and the learning teaching process. Professor Perkins, why don't you take that first? I think that CAI is a very important educational resource. If I'm going to drill on fractions arithmetic or algebra or calculus, I would quite cheerfully do it by computer. Probably rather do it that way and I would be very happy to have the computer requesting to my level of skill and requesting me to redo styles of problems I'd messed up the first time. I think that can be done. It has been done as a long track record of moderate success in that area. At the same time, I have to say that I don't think that CAI is the most interesting aspect of the promise of computing. It's a matter of what the medium distinctively offers. Now, the kinds of exercises that are typically posed by CAI can more or less well be done with pencil and paper. To be sure, not quite with the feedback, not quite with the timing, not quite with the rerouting to different sections of a lesson according to level and style of performance, not quite as well perhaps, but not badly at all. Now, the computer medium on the other hand affords the provision of constructive environments like programming and word processing and database and so on environments that are simply impossible in a textbook, paper and pencil format. Seems to me that while we certainly want to tune up CAI to do as good a job as it can and while it's certainly helpful, at the same time it would be undershooting the potential substantially to view the main move to be made as a remaking in glass and wire format of what we now have tucked into textbooks. Professor Swartz? I can only underline and support what David just said with conviction. Perhaps it would be helpful to think about the following notion. Let me talk about this country. For the most part, we do not have a population of youngsters who are mathematically nimble and their algebra instruction at secondary school level, for example, is not terribly successful. Now, most of algebra instruction is a form of algebraic manipulation, the ceremonial reciting that x is equal to minus b plus or minus the root of, etc., etc. and the ceremonial carrying out of formal problems. Now, posit that we have developed CAI and finally tuned it and posit that we have a nation full of nimble algebraic manipulators, all of whom can perform their algebraic manipulation flawlessly. The problem still remains. The fundamental educational problem that faces us has not gone away. You see, it seems to me that in a simpler world, we could survive with a relatively small fraction of our youngsters being well trained enough to run a much simpler society. We no longer have a simple society embedded in a simple technology. We have a complicated society in which we have much more extensive and properly so commitments to its various members. And it's set in a much more complicated technological surround and in a much more complicated political surround. And we can no longer survive with only 10% or so of our youngsters being well enough educated to run the society. We need to be able to educate in a way that we never have what my mentor used to call the middle 80% of our youngsters. And to do that requires that we do more than having them simply be the rote executors of tasks that can be well done by machine. A CAI program that can lead a student through long division can do long division. How moral is it to invest several hundred hours of a youngster's life turning that youngster into a semi-reliable imitation of a $5 machine? I refer my question first to Judah. I had the impression listening to you now and to your first answer to Gabi that your perception of the student's body and the teacher's body is of a... not the middle 80% but the top 20%. And my question is how do you envisage the curriculum, the strategy of teaching and learning and all over the heterogeneous population both of students and teachers? How the arguments that you argued so clearly and so strongly valid to the top 20 as well as to the middle 80%. Thank you. It seems to me that we have a tendency in schools to homogenize people in long, simple dimensions and not to adequately take into account the complexity and variety of human cognition. Children come in groups of one. People come in groups of one. They are different from one another. Schools should make them more so, not less so. Schools should be institutions that help people learn to develop their peculiar and special and idiosyncratic excellences. Now, am I talking about the middle 80% or am I talking about the top 20%? I believe I am talking about the middle 80%. I believe that we can expect excellence of different sorts and of special sorts that reflect the idiosyncrasies of individuals from each and every student in our schools. And to do less than that is a kind of selling short both of the children and of our societies. We need to have that richness that comes from that variety that you mentioned a lot of teachers and students. And the schools ought to be places where that variety is recognized and amplified. And it is because of that that I have this vision of the kind of use of computers that I keep arguing for. Let me tack something onto that. I think one reason why sometimes educators sound as though they're talking toward the top 20% is because it sounds like it's all theory and don't really want our children to really understand physics and math. But isn't that the kind of thing that's really just for the top 20%? I don't think that's true at all. Certainly my personal commitment as with Judas is toward that middle 80%. That's a wonderful example of mathematical understanding that I picked up over the last weekend from Bob Davis, a well-known math educator. It seems that an adult woman he knew wanted to bake a double recipe of brownies. And so instead of using her usual six-inch-on-a-side brownie pan, I made eight efforts to locate a 12-inch-on-a-side brownie pan and found that she ended up with the thinnest, crispest brownie she'd ever found. Now, there's a simple quotidian example of a very elementary piece of mathematical understanding. You may say, but that sort of thing doesn't really happen very often. Well, I think if you start rounding up the quotidian instances of fairly serious misunderstanding of matters mathematical and scientific, it's quite appalling how often it happens. I think there's plenty to be done toward the objective of understanding, serious understanding, in that middle 80%. I don't think we can really afford to let it slide. That's Gabby Solomon again. Maybe I should be a little bit more provocative. If I may say it sounds as if all we need are minor changes like a change of teachers, mind-ware, and a few attitude changes which really aren't that difficult to come by, and once we have these, the real revolution will take place. I am somehow more suspicious that this is not that easy. Let me elaborate the points a little bit and I think that's a follow-up on Elad's point as well. There's a feeling we are facing here, Vicious Circle. On the one hand, we want an elite-like education with excellence and high quality but spread the thin for everybody. And I feel it's a paradox. The kind of excellence we want in education we derive from a tradition of education which wasn't designed for the masses, but now we want it for the masses. We want to compromise and rightly so. Now we bring a new technology in and we have good reason to believe that it might indeed help us turn the tide and provide this kind of elite-like education to many. As you said, the middle 80%. However, we have also said here that the success of the computer in doing such a job, whatever it exactly is, depends on the proper mind-ware. Now that means we assume the results of the computer influence because I would claim that in many, many cases, both for teachers, administrators and for students, these preconditions of the appropriate mind-ware are there at all. And hence, excuse my expression, some of the best computer software and tools are musculated. We rarely use so much so that there may be fun and games but aren't really well used, hence have little effect, except among those teachers and students who are already equipped with appropriate mind-ware. So we are again back to something if I may say a little bit elitist. Those who have the right mind-ware and the proper inclinations and are willing to change the educational philosophy, lay more responsibility with the students are probably the ones to make the best use of the computers, not impossibly that these are also the least ones who really need it. But the same is true, I'm afraid, with students and we observe it in our research. Some beautiful tools we develop, a few students use them properly in advance with them. Who are these students? The most mindful, the most academically oriented, the ones who care about it. The others abuse the very responsibility you give them. So I face your dilemma. It's not easy to cast it in a simple question form. I'd appreciate your opinion on it. Thank you. Go ahead. It seems to me that you're right, Gaby, in pointing to this dilemma. It seems to me that it is always the case that those who are more interested and better motivated always make better use of a new intellectual tool. And I think it is likely that that will always be the case. But I think that there is a new element in the stew here, potentially, which may enlarge the pool of the people that we think of as motivated and interested. And that is the element that derives from what is, as far as I can tell, a new sort of school activity, namely the active participation in the making of knowledge and not simply in the absorbing of transmitted knowledge. It seems to me that when a student has the experience of coming to school and devising a conjecture in geometry that was not hitherto known, not by that student, not by that student's teacher, not by the author of that student's textbook, not by anyone, so that there is a piece of geometry that that student himself or herself is responsible for, that there is a possibility of A, recognizing that the sum total of human intellectuality is not closed and finished and that B, one can contribute to it. That recognition, that realization and participating in that sort of activity seems to me is a new ingredient in the school situation. Does it have the power to break this vicious cycle? It's hard to say because I think in fact we are just now beginning to see some of the effects of introducing software of this sort. But the early signs are promising, sufficiently promising that I think I will preserve my optimism for a while. Professor Perkins. Gaby, you ask where the mind-ware comes from, essentially speaking. One doesn't assume that it's there. One tries to provide it or provoke it. I think that's a key element in the equation. Let me give you an example. Recently at the Educational Technology Center we completed an experiment where we tried to do exactly that. We had a number of teachers teaching elementary programming, much as they usually did, but folding in something we call a metacourse. A few lessons that were designed to provide some of the missing mind-ware, some of the mental models, strategies, patterns of thinking that students don't seem to evolve for themselves. We were very gratified to find that with this relatively modest intervention we gained half a standard deviation in students' mastery of the computer language in comparison with control groups. There is an example where the only difference was the provision of the mind-ware, but it turned out to be an important leverage difference. A gain of a half standard deviation is considered quite respectable in terms of educational interventions. It's interesting to point out that this was not a whole course intervention, but simply the folding in from time to time of certain elements. It's vehicle, such as the computer, plus mind-ware, I think that is the magic bullet, or as close as we're going to get the magic bullet. I don't really believe in magic bullets in education, but I might be persuaded to believe in half magic bullets. Is Benjamin Friesen speaking? In the article, Schools of the Future, Cipro and others wrote about the future teachers in the schools. They said that it may not be necessary for all of a school staff to be trained in education. My first question to you is, what is your opinion about this statement and about the future schools? Second, all you see, the transformation of the old schools and teachers to the new schools of the future, in concern especially to teacher training and the school organization. Thank you. Would you take that, Professor Perkins? Let me speak just to the first question about the staff being trained in education. I think probably everybody in our audience is aware that training people to teach has always been a very vexed enterprise. And giftedness in teaching, as giftedness in other domains, often seems to be an emergent quality of the individual more so than a consequence of pedagogical intervention. I don't know whether that's really true or not. To me, however, I'm much less concerned whether an individual in the school of the future or today has been well trained in education in the conventional sense that we try to practice that art today. As it is that that person is mindful of some basics about learning. Now, I don't think those basics about the process of learning really take very long to get across for a person who's open to them. Consequently, I would welcome people into the classroom from whatever walk of life. Let us say artists or business persons, artisans, technical specialists, technicians, physicians, physicists. So long as cognizance is taken of the character of learning, of the need, for instance, for models and mental models to convey a concept. To me, that kind of cognizance is worth much more than years of training in the technicalities of the teaching profession. Professor Schwartz? I see that there are some interesting questions around the nature of the school and its activities in the future. And let me play out a scenario which I think has some elements of fantasy but it's more real than most of us credit it with being. And it goes something like this. That increasingly, because of the development of other sorts of technologies, we will have in the society spread about ubiquitous and powerful computing. For example, the home television receiver is rapidly becoming a digital instrument with enough computing power to put to shame most of the personal computers in use in both our schools and yours. This will soon be available everywhere. There are indeed in this country more homes with color televisions than there are with indoor plumbing. And so that one can presume that there will be powerful computing available everywhere driven by an entertainment industry and not by an education industry. It seems to me under those circumstances there will be pressures to provide program material both broadcast and locally runnable that is intended to address educational purposes. Now what sorts of things are most likely to come under that rubric? It seems to me that the sorts of things that are most likely to come under that rubric are the sorts of things that are easily done by a child alone. And what sorts of things are those? CAI sorts of things. And I think indeed they will do their job well and that children will come to school with much of what now passes for the early school curriculum already in one form or another having been absorbed. Now the question becomes so what is the school's agenda? What might the school do? Now that children already know how to read and to count and to do simple arithmetic. Schools will not go away nor should they but it seems to me that schools have to then do the kinds of things that are uniquely done in schools. What characterizes schools? They are collections of children with teachers who provoke and stimulate and challenge and aid and comfort. What kinds of things happen best in social groups? Well I assert that problem solving happens best in social groups. Problem solving is not a solitary activity. Both problem posing and problem solving are quintessentially social acts and that schools I believe will have to move in the direction of becoming places where groups of young people engage one another in the mutual social activities of posing and solving joint problems of joint interest. I think that is the direction that schools are going to have to move in rather than become the kind of custodial institutions that our present practice would seem to indicate for them as a future. It's a lot pellet again. I would like to refer to your question that I have been asked several times by teachers, teachers who work with computers. How would I know that I am successful in the use of computers in my classroom? Thank you. Professor Schwartz? Well it seems to me that this is both a very important question and an old question. How does a teacher know that his or her teaching of Hamlet was successful or that his or her teaching of the French Revolution was successful or that his or her teaching of the Pythagorean theorem was successful? It seems to me that the question does not depend on the tools used but on the ideas internalized and used by the student on his or her own initiative in both finding and addressing problems. So that if in the context of the computer the student was asked to, let us say, build a model that describes the circumstances under which political revolutions build up and take place. Then the question of success, it seems to me, is the question of how well the student can both present and argue the validity of that model. The fact that that model might happen to be implemented in a version of the dynamo-programming language on a Macintosh computer is really quite irrelevant. What is relevant is the intellectual content of the student's activity with whatever tools the student has used. Now, that is not a new problem. That is an old problem. It requires, however, focusing attention on the intellectual content and not on the tools. I really don't think I have anything to add to that. I'd subscribe to that. It's Gabby Solomon again. Since we have a few very short minutes left I would want to make a suggestion. Maybe there's a question or two you would want to ask us. I would like to ask a question. It seems to me, just judging by the tone of the questions and not judging by my mental models of what each of you, Benny, Alad and Gabby, think about computers, it seems to me that by the tone of the questions our answers are providing a certain level of discomfort. And I would like to understand whether or not that is in fact true. It takes Gabby Solomon and I take the liberty of answering very briefly. No, your answers are very encouraging and since we do cooperate through other means except for a word net we know of each other's work. However, being close to schools among other things I personally feel right now that we face a dilemma or a point of choice sort of a watershed period where it is time to quit talking about promise and showing some and not on the level of the individual students but on the level of the institution because I come to believe more and more that institutions will make the difference rather than the individual student or teacher. Now there is no disappointment in my voice, there is more I'd say concern. Thank you. As we conclude today's program I'd like to thank our guest, Professor David Perkins and Professor Judah Swartz for being with us today as well as our participants in Tel Aviv. As a reminder, credit for today's program will be given to WhirlNet, the television service of the United States Information Agency. I'm Judah Nile for WhirlNet Dialogue.