APA Newsletters
Fall 1999
Volume 99, Number 1

Some claim that we are in the midst of an educational revolution. A pamphlet that recently appeared in my campus mailbox predicts the transition from the "Industrial Age" to the "Information Age" will bring with it a "revolution in learning" in which the "teaching-centred," "provider-driven" education we now have will give way to education that is "learner-centred," where students are "self-informing" "individualized learners" and courses are "unbundled learning experiences based on learner needs." Another educator predicts that

multimedia computing will lead to fundamental changes in the way professors teach, students learn, and content is delivered. No longer will the teacher serve as disseminator of information via lectures and textbooks. Rather, the teacher will adopt the role of facilitator, tutor, and learner. Similarly, the student will abandon the role of solitary memorizer of facts and principles for the role of researcher, problem solver, and strategist (Siegel 1996, p. 2).

Sometimes what is said to be revolutionary about computers for education is their capacity for "multimedia" and "hypertext." What makes a work multimedia is simply that it incorporates many kinds of content—text, static images, moving images, or sound. Hypertext representations are those that allow users to select displayed items to follow up further information about them. Although hypertext is not the same as multimedia, they can be combined to form what has come to be called "hypermedia." When a user is required to click on an image to see relevantly related text, that is hypermedia.

So defined, there is obviously nothing especially new about either multimedia or hypertext, or even the combination of them. Illustrated books and motion pictures are multimedia, and good examples of hypertext include rubrics, book indices, and card catalogues. Even the scholarly footnote is a kind of hypertext. A list of illustrations in an art monograph is hypermedia, as is the index map in the front of better atlases.

The multimedia capabilities of computers are obviously useful when the content to be delivered consists in images, sound, and text combined. But computer multimedia also has its dangers. Digital images are "lossy," and do not approach the resolution of the pen, the brush or the photographic slide. Cathode ray tubes have a much more restricted range of colour and intensity than film. To make matters worse, I doubt it is possible to underestimate the practical legibility for most people of text longer than a hundred words on screen. The multimedia author must learn the art of the sound bite, or eye bite; and Web surfers who happen upon longer documents typically print them to paper.

According one definition, interactive media are user-centred, serving users’ needs, rather than focusing attention on the machine. But this will not do, as many representational media are user-centred, including books and lectures. A standard definition in information science is that interactive media are those that allow the user to control the sequence to pass through content. I call this "weak interactivity" because it identifies interactivity with hypertext. On this definition, books, library catalogues and even television "channel-surfing" count as interactive. There is no difference in kind between the weak interactivity of computer hypertext and a concordance or table of contents.

This is not to deny that networked computers do excel at many weakly interactive tasks. They enable users to search massive amounts of data quickly using sophisticated matching criteria. Hippias, the philosophy Internet search engine, allows users to search thousands of documents on the World Wide Web and Usenet in seconds. An on-line encyclopaedia, such as the philosophy encyclopaedia at Stanford, can be a charm to use. Nevertheless, this is an improvement in technology, not a technological revolution. Moves are afoot to organize content on the Web in a rational and useful manner. An example is the Noesis Project at the University of Evansville, which is organizing philosophy on the Internet in a tree structure.

The paradigm of "strong interactivity" is a game. What is engaging in a good game is that the course of the game—one might say its content—depends on the players’ choices. It is their choosing some moves over others that makes each game unique. (This is why games of chess are not the same game played in a different order.) Games are "strongly interactive" media because their users’ inputs affect the content that is delivered. Whereas in weakly interactive media the user’s input merely determines the sequence in which content is accessed, in strongly interactive media it would not be entirely wrong to say that the user helps create the content.

Strongly interactive media provide an arena for what David Kirsh and Paul Maglio call "epistemic action" (Kirsh and Maglio 1994). Merely pragmatic actions are those whose function is to alter the agent’s physical or social space in order to bring her closer to her goals—gathering food or winning a promotion. Epistemic actions, by contrast, are physical actions that an agent performs to make his cognitive tasks easier, faster, more reliable or more productive. Kirsh and Maglio unpack this notion with a study of subjects playing the computer game Tetris. They observe that "the best way to interpret the [player’s] actions is not as moves intended to improve board position, but rather as moves that simplify the player’s problem solving task" (Kirsh and Maglio 1994, p. 514). In epistemic action, the agent manipulates the world, thereby offloading representational structure onto the world, so that the world preempts the need for using certain mental representations or making certain inferences (Kirsh and Maglio 1994, p. 545). I suggest that strongly interactive media are those that facilitate and formalize epistemic actions. For this reason, they are ideal for certain kinds of learning.

Traditional, non-virtual classroom teaching relies heavily on several strongly interactive activities. Writing, for example, is strongly interactive insofar as choices one makes about structure, voice, inclusion and exclusion, not to mention argument, shape the content of what is written. Taking notes while reading is also strongly interactive, since it makes possible a dialogue between text and reader, in which the reader must bring to bear her own skills and specialized knowledge to interpret the text, and the content of her reading experience depends on the interpretive strategies she chooses to employ. Finally, the best lecturers not only answer students’ questions, but are expert at asking them the right questions—in the way that Socrates’ questions were tailored to fit his interlocutors’ answers. A good lecture is something like a conversation, in which what is said by one party shapes what is said by others. I submit that reading, writing, and engaging in conversation involve epistemic actions, albeit ones of much greater sophistication than a game of Tetris because they involve multiple players. They are all ways of bringing us closer to our own cognitive goals. This is why we use them in teaching.

It should come as no surprise that those who have begun to teach on line have not wished to relinquish strongly interactive activities. On-line philosophy courses generally consist in a set of readings and some mechanism, such as an e-mail list or chat room, by means of which the teacher can engage students in discussion and give them an opportunity to start formulating arguments, objections, and replies. It should give us pause that e-mail and chat rooms are relatively primitive information technologies. They have existed since the dawn of the Internet and they involve neither multimedia nor hypertext.

If we are going to be serious about using computers in new ways to teach, then we should think about using their full potential for strong interactivity. Remembering that games are strongly interactive and that computer games can be very good, it might be helpful to ask whether philosophy can be taught, even in part, as something like a game. Certainly we have been shown the way in strongly interactive computer-based logic teaching by Jon Barwise’s programmes, Turing’s World and Tarski’s World.

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