I recently found a sticky note from around 2004 on which I had written:\u00a0“In the future, artificial intelligence may obviate the need for certain skills, but the act of learning is a very human process that proceeds at human pace.”<\/p>\n
Since then I’ve been puzzling over what exactly I meant by that. (It’s a classic example of obvious or profound?<\/a>) Here’s what I think I meant:\u00a0The rate at which humans learn is essentially limited<\/strong>. Of course, the pace of learning does\u00a0vary somewhat in different situations, but\u00a0this variation tends to be\u00a0within, say, an order of magnitude and there is no known way to get around\u00a0these limits.<\/p>\n Whether by\u00a0impatience or optimism, I frequently forget this. As soon as I learn something useful or exciting, I start trying to rapidly explain it to others, expecting them to learn it using\u00a0far less time and effort than it took me. While in some sense it’s generous to assume that others are such fast learners, it’s also a form of hubris for me to believe that my explanation is somehow orders of magnitude better than the explanation given to me. It would be as if I somehow found\u00a0a magical shortcut that makes teaching and learning easy.<\/p>\n None of this is to say that great teaching doesn’t exist \u2014 it does, and in every domain teachers have worked tirelessly towards making\u00a0learning more efficient and more fun. Motivation, support, curriculum, collaboration, and many other factors help optimize\u00a0human learning. The point is simply that these optimizations have diminishing returns. That is, there’s a theoretical maximum\u00a0implying that it’s impossible to learn all of calculus in one week. (On the other hand, it is<\/em>\u00a0possible to teach in a way that is arbitrarily\u00a0ineffective<\/i>\u00a0\u2014 say, by putting a student in a room with no supplies and yelling at them all day.)<\/p>\n If all of this is true, then\u00a0we would not expect any<\/em>\u00a0educational technology to dramatically improve student outcomes, unless we\u00a0were\u00a0replacing dramatically\u00a0ineffective<\/em>\u00a0prior teaching methods. In other words, to claim that a dramatic improvement is possible<\/em> is to state that the current methods are dramatically poor \u2014 in which case, there are probably plenty of alternative improvements which do not require\u00a0advanced technology.<\/p>\n The only way technology can\u00a0dramatically<\/em>\u00a0“speed up learning” is by making\u00a0certain skills obsolete, so that it is no longer necessary to learn them at all. For example,\u00a0humans in the developed world can get along fine without knowing how to grow food\u00a0or survive in the wilderness (or do long division). Modern technologies have obviated the need for those skills. Some people might still want to learn them, but for those who don’t, the learning time has been effectively reduced to zero \u2014 a dramatic advance! That in turn\u00a0leaves\u00a0time and energy\u00a0for\u00a0learning other things that have become more important (say, computer skills).<\/p>\n This is\u00a0why my focus within\u00a0educational technology has always been toward\u00a0obviating the need for a skill rather than tweaking\u00a0the learning process or transferring existing lessons\u00a0to tablets and smart boards. This is why I’m so interested in Bret Victor’s<\/a> work on graphical tools for math and programming that could obviate the need to learn traditional, difficult methods for algebra, calculus, and debugging. It’s why I’ve spent so much time working on tools<\/a> that\u00a0make it possible to do data analysis safely without learning\u00a0all of the details of statistics and visualization techniques.<\/p>\n But perhaps my sticky note was simply a reminder to have patience for learning. Wisdom is prized precisely because it cannot be short-circuited.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I recently found a sticky note from around 2004 on which I had written:\u00a0“In the future, artificial intelligence may obviate the need for certain skills, but the act of learning is a very human process that proceeds at human pace.” Since then I’ve been puzzling over what exactly I meant by that. (It’s a classic … <\/p>\n