As well as helping with traditional study tasks, computers allow completely new ways of studying.
3.1 Computer-assisted learning (CAL)
On Tuesday evening, Pam was busy developing her number skills using a CAL program. The program tested what she could already do, showed her how to do some new things, and then gave her examples to work through.
This kind of program is interactive, in that it asks you to do something, tells you whether you have done it right, and decides, from your response, what to ask you to do next. It can take you back to learn a point again, give you more practice, or move you on to something new. A computer is a very patient and attentive teacher. It allows you as many tries as you like, and pays immediate attention to your answers. It can also be quite challenging: for example, Pam said that she enjoyed trying to ‘beat the computer’.
But learning on computers isn’t always fun. A computer can be a tiresomely pedantic teacher when the program does not move you through the subject briskly enough, or fails to get to the heart of what you really want to know. If computer-assisted learning makes you feel ‘controlled’ – sent off hither and thither on trivial tasks – it can quickly become very boring. A teaching programme is only as good as the knowledge that goes into it and the quality of its design. Writing good CAL programs is very time-consuming and expensive. Used well, they are a powerful teaching medium, but the quality can be very variable. So, when you come across CAL, give it a good try – but if you are getting nowhere, and the work is optional, give up and devote your time to something more useful.
3.2 Modelling
Computers are particularly good at modelling complicated processes. For example, a computer simulation of the workings of a nuclear reactor can give you a better idea of its internal processes than a filmed tour of the buildings and equipment. The program can answer questions and allows you to
‘intervene’ in the processes involved (for example, by seeing what happens when you change the supply of nuclear fuel). Modelling can even be used to simulate ‘doing an experiment’, so that instead of looking for equipment and space at home, you perform a ‘virtual experiment’ on your computer screen.
Of course, computer modelling isn’t restricted to ‘pictorial’ representations of
‘the real world’. Mathematical modelling, for example, can be entirely abstract (a representation of complex relationships between purely hypothetical mathematical entities).
3.3 Email
If your computer is connected by a modem to a computer network, you can send electronic messages (email) to other computers linked to the network.
This means you can send a message to other students, or to your tutor, at any time of the day or night. For example, if you get stuck on something, you can send off a request for help to your student friends. You can choose whether to send your message to one friend or several. If one of them happens to be
‘logged on’ to the network at the time you might get a reply within minutes, or it might be a few hours, or a day or so, before they pick up your message and reply. However, you can be confident that your message will reach them quickly. (And if, for any reason, your message does not get through, your computer will generally let you know.)
You might decide that you need expert advice, but you don’t want to interrupt your tutor’s evening by telephoning. So you send an email which your tutor can read when he or she next looks at the messages from students. You are not thwarted by phoning when people are out or the phone is engaged. Your message simply joins a queue in the other person’s ‘in tray’. You can ‘attach’
documents, diagrams or tables of data to your emails. Perhaps you could even send a section of your draft assignment to your tutor by email, and receive comments by the same route (although first you should check that this is OK with your tutor). At some stage in the future, submitting assignments and receiving feedback by email may become commonplace. For students studying by distance education, in particular, email opens up invaluable channels of rapid and reliable communication.
3.4 Computer conferencing
A computer conference is an extension of the email idea. Instead of messages being sent from one person to another, all messages are sent to everyone who is a conference member. It works like a shared notice-board. People stick up messages, and whoever reads a message and wants to reply puts their reply on the notice-board next to the original message. Several people may reply to the same message, or reply to a reply. So lots of ‘conversations’ spring up, and everyone in the conference can read or add messages whenever they choose.
A conference can be made up of a group of students and their tutor. So if, as you sit studying, you come across something puzzling, instead of wondering whom to ask, you just post a question on the conference notice-board and everyone else will see it. One or two of the other students might suggest answers – or might reply ‘Yes, that’s giving me trouble too’ and add questions of their own. When your tutor reads the question, he or she may decide that it has already been answered well enough, or may feel the need to offer
additional advice. This is a good thing from the tutor’s point of view because things only have to be said once for the whole group, avoiding the need for lots of individual emails or telephone calls.
The tutor’s answer may lead to other questions. It works like a continuing conversation, spread out over days, with people dropping in to ‘listen’ at any time and ‘speaking’ when they choose. A group can have several conferences
on different topics running at the same time. There might be a conference set aside for assignments, in which students talk about plans for the next
assignment or about how the last one went. The tutor can ‘drop in’ to find out what the students are concerned about and offer advice. Often there is a conference just for ‘chat’, in which people can talk about whatever they like and get to know each other. Chat conferences are very popular. You feel a lot less isolated as a student if you are a member of a friendly group, with shared interests and problems. Busy adults find it hard to make time for socializing with fellow students, but a computer conference allows you to drop in for 10 minutes any time you like.
Once group members get to know each other they can use the conference facility to talk about all kinds of things. One or two students might put past assignments into the conference for others to comment on, allowing the tutor to draw out some general points for the whole group.
The possibilities are endless – the limitation is time. With everyone able to contribute whenever they like, the number of messages can quickly become overwhelming. Agreed rules and some self-discipline are required if computer conferencing is to work well.
‘Netiquette’
The ‘good manners’ of conferencing on the network are known as
‘netiquette’. A computer conference is a kind of ‘social space’: shared, but not located in a specific place and time. Unlike most social spaces, it isn’t
influenced by people’s physical attributes (their appearance, manner, confidence, gestures or accent). However, like any social space, it has to develop its own ‘culture’ if people are to understand each other and get along.
Conferencing and email can be used side by side. Email allows private
communication; conferencing is public. You might, for example, ask your tutor something in private, but then find that the problem is widely shared. Your tutor may then ask whether you would mind copying your question into the conference so that everyone can share the answer. The tutor might even send an email asking permission to save your question on to a disk so that he or she can ‘paste’ it into next year’s conference. Once the computer connections exist, there are countless ways in which to use them.
3.5 The Internet
We have seen how computers can link you to other people, but computer networks can also connect you to sources of information. For example, you’ll certainly have heard of the Internet. It’s a vast computer network – a global collection of people and computers linked by cables and telephone lines – that can put you in contact with people and sources of information from all over the world.
Although complex in technical terms, the Internet is delightfully simple to use.
All you need is a personal computer with appropriate software, a modem and a telephone line. Instead of going to a library to get books, and having to wait if a book is out on loan, there are electronic ‘books’ in electronic libraries that you can ‘download’ and read on your computer screen. Similarly, it is possible to have direct access to data banks of information for research purposes.
However, the Internet raises a number of questions about copyright and payment.
The theft of intellectual property
Information technology has opened up a new world of publishing, one in which information can be distributed at high speed all over the world, in forms so flexible that anybody can ‘grab it’ for themselves. This raises age-old questions about the ownership of ideas and texts, but in a far more urgent form. If you released your ideas to the networked world, you would probably feel rewarded if you found yourself quoted in someone’s book. But what if someone in a far-off place simply copied your work and published it? What if you wrote a brilliant essay to your tutor, and he or she secretly ‘pasted’ it into their next publication? Come to that, why write your own research paper if you can download one from the Internet? Processing and printing text have become so easy that we all have reason to be concerned about ‘intellectual property rights’.
This applies to you too. It is important that you respect the copyright on information made available to you through electronic media. There is no harm in electronically copying a quotation to ‘paste’ it into your assignment, so long as you give a proper reference (see Chapter 9), but:
X you should not copy large chunks
X you must always indicate when you are quoting and give an appropriate reference
X if material is made available under copyright, you should never copy it for use in any context other than your studies.
A mass of information is already available on the Internet, some of it put there by institutions and some by individuals. Anyone linked up can make information available on the Internet (though there are, of course, no guarantees as to the quality of this ‘free’ information). There are also a number of information services available at a price, and depending on your area of interest, there may be much that you would find useful. However, you have to be able to find your way through the electronic labyrinth to the information that you need. ‘Surfing the Internet’ can be a time-consuming and costly business. And if you are a newcomer to an area of study, there is a lot to be said for small amounts of well-structured and carefully explained information, rather than a vast ocean of the stuff.
Yet, as the Internet develops, it will increasingly be used as a medium for delivering education to students – students who may be linked to the network from virtually any point on the globe. Education has always transcended national boundaries in the form of an international community of scholars.
But internationalism enters a new dimension when a student in Brazil can enrol to study a course with a tutor in Australia, ‘alongside’ a student in South Africa and another in Canada; all of them raising questions and discussing answers through a computer conference. No longer will you be restricted to the courses available in your own country. Before long, perhaps, you will be able to enrol with the ‘Global University’.
3.6 CD-ROM
Another way of delivering information electronically is to put it on a CD-ROM. With the Internet, you have to log on, search your way to an
information source, and wait for the information to be downloaded on to your computer. With a CD-ROM, you just put in your disk and the information it contains is seconds away. At its simplest, a CD-ROM is just another way of publishing text. Anything to be found in books can be put on a CD-ROM in vast quantities, the advantage being that you can find what you want very quickly. Say you had a disk containing the published works of Charles Darwin, and you were wondering where he first used the word ‘evolution’.
Your computer could find the place instantly. Or say you had a CD-ROM containing records of disease epidemics. You could quickly find out whether it includes information on outbreaks of food poisoning in your region, and then transfer the relevant data to a spreadsheet to construct tables and charts as described in Chapter 3.
A CD-ROM can be much more than the equivalent of a stack of books or a data bank; it can also store moving images, sounds and computer software.
This takes us to the final topic in this section: multimedia.
3.7 Multimedia
A computer’s extraordinary ability to handle information allows it to bring together different communication media within a single co-ordinated package.
Segments of moving film, animated cartoons, soundtrack segments, text and photographs can be interwoven with ‘software’ to help you explore a subject.
You start from a screen menu (perhaps with music, or a voice-over talking you through the program), and you point to whatever it is you want to investigate.
This takes you to another screen, from which you can undertake a closer examination or move on to something new. You can explore by following your own interests.
Educational packages of this kind are already available on CD-ROM. But the possibilities do not stop there. In principle, at a given moment you could be linked to a database on the Internet, to your fellow students in a computer conference, and to laboratory equipment feeding in data from an experiment.
The technical means of handling this interweaving of communication
channels are still being developed, as is educational software which can make use of these amazing possibilities. However, the great artists and