I am not mathematically minded, so when I started watching Conrad Wolfram talk about math I wasn't very excited until I realized what he was suggesting. This idea of using computers to help students get to a deeper level in a subject and grasp real world ideas while achieving higher level thinking is actually quite brilliant. I believe that what Wolfram was suggesting is to let computers do more of the computation for math problems so that students can dig deeper into the meat of the subject and learn how to be practical when it comes to doing problems by hand. Like Wolfram said, it's okay that students are learning how to compute by hand, but we're spending so much time on that, that we're missing out on some great stuff that comes after the tedious stuff that computers can knock out quickly. Even though he talks about math, I can see how his message can apply to other subjects because what the computer is really doing is the work that is tedious so that students can begin to go much deeper into a subject. I also think that computers are a great tool to help students get to where we want them to be and don't "dumb down" material if they are used to catapult us somewhere else.
If I were to take this idea and present it to teachers I would probably ask them why they teach the subject they do. I would also want to know their personal thoughts about using computers as a tool to get students thinking in more complex ways. I would hope that they could see the value in letting computers do some of the work that we try to get kids to learn all year long. One thing that Wolfram said that I really like is that this will get kids to "start asking real questions" (Wolfram. 2010). That seems to be the point, right? If we're not allowing kids to dig deeper because we're teaching them tedious things that computers can accomplish then are we really helping them? In order to lay down a foundation of collaboration I might point out to teachers that using technology doesn't mean that kids aren't as smart or that it's cheating, but that technology has improved our way of life and can be used to advance our society. That's how all technology begins quite honestly, and even if there are some opposed to it, they have to admit that computers aren't going anywhere. Instead of resisting it, we need to try and find better ways to use it so that we can push past what we've been doing for years just because it's comfortable to us.
References:
Wolfram, C. 2010. TED Talks. Conrad Wolfram: Teaching kids real math with computers. Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/conrad_wolfram_teaching_kids_real_math_with_computers.html
I remember when I was in school and we had to copy problems from the board and compute them by hand. It was a hard task for me, not the computation, but the copying, as I was a meticulous writer, slow but neat. As Wolfram says about wasting time on hand computing, we really wasted time copying the problems, but that is the way that teacher did it.
ReplyDeleteYes, asking questions is what is so important. Getting to the bottom of what they want to know is so important. When I think about just doing problem after problem is sad to me because the kids do not even know what that means or why they are doing it. I was helping a student Friday doing this and I don't even know why or what connection to real life it had.
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