Education Challenged by Technology

By Michel Smouts

Teaching will be totally different in the future. Evaluation of people will be totally different. Universities will be totally different. The reason is the progress of technology.
What we understand by technology is more than just using a computer. The progress in the area of telecommunication (increased bandwidth, storage space, reduced communication costs, 100% accessibility to the far corners of the world and also the progress in translation programs, video editing, converting text to spoken language and vice versa) are aspects of technological progress that will make teaching more interesting, smoother, more efficient and more robust.
However, not only the technology will progress. Our human society will start realizing that acquiring knowledge is no longer required as before. What do we need to learn?
We need to be able to intervene much quicker if someone drops out somewhere. We have to deal more efficiently with the very large volume of new topics. We have to ask ourselves what it means if the language and distance barriers have disappeared within twenty years. We have to make education more consistent with the needs of the economy and with the expectations of the individual.
Above all, we have to bring the technology very close to the person, so that it is a relief of the work for the teacher and for the student a personal coach, who follows up to the second how his progress is, so that the teacher only has to follow the main lines.
First, we describe what is expected of an individual, because without taking this into account, progress will be limited and technology will be successful only in the professional world and the games industry. After that we explain how technology can be used.
The technology is not yet mature today and some who already give their opinion might prefer that this continues. Because why change? It is my opinion that some weaknesses of both the printed book and the way of judging can be corrected by making the technology work in the right way. I have developed a proposal to show that it is possible. That it will be processed somewhat differently within twenty years is not important. I would like to see a consciousness emerge that the evolution cannot be stopped and must not be held back, because we will be amazed at the results achieved even though we can only partly predict them today.
It is a book to read critically, apply it to yourself and see many things differently. Would this method of using the technology be beneficial for you?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michel Smouts
• Release date: Dec 7, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463078549

Michel Smouts

I studied Greek-Latin at the secondary school and added an extra year on mathematics. My university diploma is master in electronics engineering.I started as hardware developer at Bell Telephone then still ITT, later Alcatel/Lucent. Project leader of several projects. I spent five years as resident manger of a team installing System12 telephone exchanges abroad. After that head of system design and finally director on international level of the same group. I am now retired.

Book preview

Foreword

In less than ten years from now technology will have advanced to the extent that possibilities will arise which we have not dreamed of up to now. We experience the effect of the smart-phone on our society today and this evolution will not stop. Furthermore, also storage media, translation software, speech technology etc. will evolve. In other words, a whole new set of tools will become available to enhance a large number of human operations, among others: teaching and learning. And if you ask me: learning will benefit more than teaching.

Improvements that I see in learning begin with adapting to the speed of thinking and digesting of each individual. Teaching becomes asynchronous: this means individual per person. Individual help is immediately available. Corrections are instantaneous. Interrelation between topics will be improved. Overall records of performance will be made. The quality of handbooks and teachers is equalized over all schools. The number of subjects can be adapted to the potential of the student. Individual (planned by the student) examinations, partly by the PC, partly by the teacher can be organized. And most important of all there is room for continuous personal encouragement.

In order to allow the largest possible evolution in learning, all the courses should be made available in the form of videos: the so-called e-learning. This is a condition to allow a number of actions that have a very large impact on the efficiency of learning when the technology will become available.

Thus, we assume e-learning as a given, which may provoke a high resistance against my proposals, but the way I see it, it is enough that one country starts with it and all the others will have to follow, because by then adequate translation software will be available.

No doubt a large impact has to be expected on the logistics of a school and especially of a university. And also, we can imagine that the sequence of learning could be turned around: as well on the course level as on the total academic level.

We will build up the reasoning throughout this book and try to convince you that there is no way out and therefore the necessary steps should be taken starting now to prepare this future.

A comparison may help.

In my profession I have seen the rise and development of the GSM (the European mobile phone network) and I participated in it. It started around 1990 and the mobile telecommunications world is still in evolution after 25 years. What worries me and why I wrote this book, is that the world of education is not organized to make a big change. We, in telecommunications, had a limited number of competitors, and we knew we had to work together to achieve this completely new network. Although this was a European joint venture, GSM is later on accepted almost throughout the world as the standard to follow. Something similar could happen in education.

I have therefore described a possible way that could be followed to steer the technology in order to ease the work of the teachers and to make the task of the students more pleasant and efficient. We start from the functions already appearing today and extrapolate them to use them where we see weaknesses or areas for improvement.

This book, however, is not limited to the introduction of a new technology. There is more to do than that. We must wonder what we still need to learn and know in the twenty-first century. We should react much faster if somewhere someone pulls out. We need a more efficient way to cope with the huge volume of new topics. We need to better adapt education to the needs of the economy and the expectations of the individual. We especially need to adapt the technology tools to the needs of the person so that it is a relief for the teacher and a personal coach for the student, a coach, which almost to the second follows, encourages and corrects him.

It is my feeling that some weaknesses both of the printed book and of the type of examination can be corrected by using the technology in the appropriate way. I have developed a proposal in order to demonstrate that it is possible. That it will be worked out slightly differently within twenty years is not important. I'd like that the consciousness arises that the evolution is unstoppable and should not be held back because we will be amazed at the results, as we can only partly predict them today.

You can read this book as a novel at twenty pages per hour and then put it aside and wait until the wind blows over. But you can also read it critically and see many things differently. What I hope is that you read it like a textbook: frequently sit back, identify keywords, write comments in the margin and apply my statements to yourself. Do you agree with them? Is your thinking process the same? Would this way of applying the technology be (have been) an improvement to you? When you finish reading, the ideas of my book will help you to construct a future that probably still looks somewhat different than what I have described. But above all, I hope I convinced you that it is time to act, because a large (re)organization is required to cope with the new possibilities in an optimum way.

My current feeling is though that this organization will not be set up by the education community, because they are too much convinced of their right. It may be more the industrial world which has to get the ball rolling.

We start in Chapter1 with a number of concerns, which all ask the same question: is our present way of assessing people not overly convinced that it is right? We glance at improved performance. We already provide a first approximation of what the technology must do for us.

In Chapter2 we apply the actual knowledge of operation of our brain to the thinking that we have to perform in school. We are talking about strings because our brains are built by means of strings. We pay much attention to the process of reproduction, because you only score if you can play back the acquired knowledge.

In Chapter3, we want to point out that academic knowledge is not enough to be successful later.

Chapter 4 talks about what we should know and be able to do.

And then we will pass in the next chapters to how technology can respond to the requirements.

We found it necessary to describe first what is expected from an individual, because, without considering this, progress will be limited and the technology is more likely to be used only in the professional world and in the computer games, but it will help the student very little.

Chapter 8 explains what country A has done with all my ideas.

Who should read this book? It is mostly aimed at decision makers, because the future of the country depends on good education. Also, electronics and software companies may find ideas that they were not thinking about. Furthermore, in order not to waist too much energy and solve the same problem hundred times a close cooperation has to be set up between education and industry.

Because I started from the needs of the students they will also benefit reading my book. I inserted advice that they may not find in handbooks in such a condensed form. And because reading books is less and less fashionable parents should also read this and make their children aware of the existence of my recommendations.

Chapter1 Introductory reflections

Is intelligence congenital?

Yes of course it is! But this is not the right question! Our intellectual capacities follow a growing process like everything else in nature. For a human being this growing curve flattens around the age of twenty. Therefore, it is important for every individual to know which point he has reached on the curve and how much further his abilities will grow. Let us make a simple comparison.

Have you already watched the leaves on the trees in the spring? When they are in bud, they are all the same size. With the first sunlight they begin to grow on some trees, on other trees they stay several days behind. The day after some leaves are already one centimeter wide, others are still in bud. Some are low and close to the trunk, others farther from the trunk and higher. Some get more juice and grow faster. Then they all start growing and after a few days the first trees are already totally green. Then some leaves reach their final size and others are yet to make it up. Eventually, all the leaves are almost equal, but some that failed to get out from under the shadow of the other leaves, or because they are disturbed by various factors during their growth, stay a little behind.

Since we belong to the same world, a human being grows in the same way. Our mental capacities grow like the leaves on the trees according to a natural process even if we don’t practice (but then our intellectual capacities grow less quickly). So, we need to keep in mind when we judge someone that there are fast-growing and slow-growing people and we may have to allow for more time to grow.

We will elaborate in the course of the book some simplified characteristics of thinking.

Everyone knows people who can make additions and multiplications very quickly or others who can quickly learn another language. Some people may remember during a lifetime poems or songs or can tell the story from a to z of a movie they've just seen.

I once attended a meeting at a customer’s premises along with a few of my colleagues and when we returned to the company one of us had to report to those who had not gone. His summary has lasted longer than the meeting itself. That person had something like a photographic memory and could recount every detail and commentary. Where he had a little more trouble with was to summarize the meeting in a few words.

You will notice in the following chapters that the technology should respond to this strongly.

When we judge the capabilities of a person, the criteria that we use are most of the time: speed and quantity but much less the quality of the final product. We assume often that someone is less intelligent, but in fact he just lags behind in his growth curve.

I always wondered why time for finishing an exam is limited. You will say: it is a practical problem, because the monitoring ends. However, no one will remain on until the end of the day. On the contrary, someone who cannot answer some questions finishes faster. But those who work slowly to avoid making mistakes should have the opportunity to answer all questions. There should not be any pupil saying: I have not had enough time! In professional life, there is hardly any job, when it is done for the first time that is being done against the clock. On the contrary, it is further discussed with colleagues, reworked again and again, further improved and so on.

And if we inform the students that the time is not limited, they are going to start with much less stress (less anxiety) and maybe they will be ready even earlier, because time pressure prevents clear thinking.

Like is the case for the leaves on the trees, which cannot choose their spot on the tree, also for a human being the boundary conditions may be different from person to person and they are very important when we try to use our intelligence in the most efficient way.

-Be convinced of the usefulness (the necessity) of what we do

-Dedication

-Confidence

-Persistence

-Building up coherently

-Work methodically

-Concentration

All these capacities are of course in its basic form inherited, but everybody has the possibility and the freedom to develop them to a level that we need in order to succeed in life.

The experts agree with this and they spend most of their life to prove this statement. We can also form our own opinion by finding cases in our immediate neighborhood of failures if one of the above conditions is not available.

If the teacher says once again that you won’t make it, you will start to believe him. There goes your confidence! However, if the teacher or your parents encourage you, you will start to believe in yourself.

If you neglect a subject because you do not like the teacher or his way of teaching, then you create a backlog that is hard to compensate for. If you have not been paying attention in class because there was something else on your mind then you can best update as soon as possible.

Thus, there is a difference between persons. Some may have received better equipment and mostly better environmental conditions. But we claim that some people are written-off too quickly based on criteria that do not apply anymore later during working life. We claim that anyone who wants to achieve something can do so! (We exclude people with a congenital defect, because they have different capacities). And it will definitely help if, with the help of modern tools, can be indicated how far someone has progressed in his evolution process and how much more distance he/she has to cover till his/her final goal.

Is the material more difficult over the years?

Yes, little man you will not succeed and next year it will be again more difficult.

This seems to be the way to convince someone to choose an easier direction, a more technical one. The person will not be asked whether he likes technical topics. He is not qualified for general education because the achieved figures, which were obtained in the standard way (with a lot of emphasis on speed of execution), were insufficient.

Now you may expect that those who have constructed the content of the courses of the different years, precisely considered that the difficulty level from year to year remains the same, considering the increased intellectual efficiency of the students. So, let us not demotivate the students in this way.

It is also not logical that we recommend anyone who has not reached a 75 percent level in the sixth year of primary school to go to technical education. Shall there not be better students in the technical directions? Of course, yes: we come back to this later after we have discussed the technological tools.

Also, for starting college or university we cannot speak of a difficult or an easy direction but how much energy you have in your tank. You can choose between different faculties, so in that way you can choose the topics that you like. Will you do this with the necessary enthusiasm? Will you isolate yourself during many hours, knowing that your friends at that moment have much more fun?

It is interesting to cite two cases in connection with our statement.

First case: primus in secondary school follows the university degree of engineering. His way of studying meant that he wanted to achieve perfection and he could be satisfied only with results above 90 percent. He has given up after a year because in his striving for perfection he could not handle the greater amount of material. In which part has he failed? We can only guess: maybe his method was not adequate and he probably lost confidence.

Second case: a supposedly mediocre student (only 70 per cent in secondary school) learns that college might be a little too ambitious for him. He succeeds with flying colors. Why is he so successful: his method was correct, he believed in his abilities and has adapted his commitment to the increased demands.

With better technology tools we are better able to measure the difficulty level of the lessons and