Portents of Future Learning

New computers, a new magazine and a new kind of literacy

For years, computers have been ballyhooed as a miraculous wave of the future in elementary education. The miracle never arrived. In the 1970s manufacturers spent millions of dollars to develop computers for use in schools, but most of the systems received dismal grades on teacher report cards. The machines were too expensive, their performance unreliable, their programs academically inadequate. But lately, with the advent of the more sophisticated microcomputers, prices have fallen and performance has vastly improved.

Literacy once meant the ability to read and write, and perhaps acquire familiarity with, say, Paradise Lost. Today, children who cannot even decipher a limerick are becoming what is known as "computer literate." Just as Gutenberg's press stimulated literacy in the 15th century, the emergence of the low-cost personal computer of the 1980s is making the knowledge of what computers can do an essential educational discipline.

Sesame Place's foray into sales of computer learning programs (see preceding story) appears to be a portent of the educational future. Another sign of the times is the launching, this week, of a new magazine, Electronic Learning. Put out by the respected educational publisher Scholastic, Inc., Electronic Learning is essentially a nontechnical guide to technical learning aids. Financed initially with $500,000, the magazine is being sent free to 50,000 educators and administrators responsible for buying equipment and trying to evaluate the rapidly expanding and confusing field of electronic learning devices. By devoting itself largely to information on what to buy and how to use it most effectively, Electronic Learning is betting that computer learning aids will some day become as indispensable to classrooms as books and blackboards.

In the present state of the art, electronic learning aids fall into two basic categories: larger and more expensive, and smaller and cheaper. According to Karen Billings, director of the Microcomputer Resource Center at Columbia University's Teachers College, the more sophisticated desktop computers with their TV-like screens, moving images and music have at last changed the negative perceptions of both teachers and parents: the former are tantalized by the possibilities; the latter are astonished that their children can master such seemingly complex devices.

If a school's budget is not up to a microcomputer, there are compact electronic learning aids that can be toted to and from school like a lunch box and cost from under $20 to about $120. Texas Instruments, a pioneer in "talking" computer chips, is the leading producer of these less expensive aids. (Others: Mattel, Coleco, Milton Bradley.) In 1978 TI introduced Speak & Spell, a talking learning aid, which imitated the human voice--questioning, coaching and correcting the user --with an integrated circuit on a single silicon chip. On a later machine, called Speak & Read ($75), a child can complete sentences at three levels of difficulty by pressing letters on a keyboard to spell out the correct words. For example, the machine slowly enunciates, "I want to try to--"and then flashes three choices: "Bag," "Over," "Read." If the student presses bag, the computer gently intones, "Wrong. Try again." The student taps out read. "Very good," says the machine benignly, "the correct word is read."

Almost any school system can afford some sort of portable learning aid. School District 7, in New York City's South Bronx, where every child receives a federally funded free lunch because they are all below the poverty line, has purchased several dozen TI learning aids for remedial students. Helen Giuliano, an administrator in the district, believes that exposure to computers is vital for otherwise underprivileged children: "They are starting behind in basic literacy. Let's not let them get behind in computer literacy." Such logic still fails to persuade some educational administrators. "They see computers as a frill," Giuliano notes, "and we see them as the child's future."

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