Talking Point; Computers in Education

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . don't like them. Some see no advantage in their use or simply can't afford them. But it's becoming increasingly difficult to find parts of our lives that haven't been changed one way or another by the computer. Tonight we'll try and take stock of some of these changes. We'll talk a bit about the frontiers of computing and about the use of computers in schools. We'll take whatever questions you may have as well. Our guest tonight are Roy Campbell. He's professor of computer science at the University of Illinois. He's also a research scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, which is based at the U of I. He's done research in multimedia, video servers, and collaborative environments. He's been an advocate for computer networking on the U of I campus and has also been encouraging local school systems in their efforts to set up educational networks. Also with us is Barry Rowe. He's director of educational technology for the Champagne Unit for Schools. He's been

in that position for three years before that he taught chemistry, computers, and mathematics at Champagne's Centennial High School. He's also a member of expert committees for the National Science Foundation reviewing instructional material proposals and acting as an auditor for grants. Now as we all talk, you should be thinking about the questions that you'd like to ask. We'll give you the chance to do that a little later in the program. And thank you both very much. We appreciate it. I guess I wanted to start talking a little bit about how does we think about computers and their relationship to humans? And I'm a little tickled sometimes at the news coverage that events in the technology we'll get. And I was thinking about that and I went and dug out a recent copy of Newsweek magazine that I had. This was the one that ran after Chest Champion Gary Kasparov played IBM's Chest Computer Deep Blue. It was his second match with the computer. The first time he won and I think he was a bit overconfident because he said to the IBM guys, come back when you have something

better and a year later that they did and he lost and he was not a good sport about it at all. But the cover on the magazine and I don't know if you want it, we can get a shot of it maybe too far away. In any case, the big headline here is The Brain's Last Stand. And that tickled me a lot. Is that the case? Does the fact that now a computer has beaten a human being at Chest? Does that really mean that human beings are done and that whatever made us superior thinkers is gone? Oh, on the contrary. I think it's rather remarkable that we've been able to put together computers that can match our skills at these sort of logical gains. What we're going to be doing in the future is thinking of even more creative ways to use computers and augmenting our own powers to do things. In some sense, I'm kind of glad that the Chest Champion has been beaten because I don't, I find Chest somewhat boring mainly because you just have to sit there and look at this board

and think so and leaps ahead. The amount of creativity, well, I shouldn't say that. I'm sure Chest folks would say it's tremendously creative, but I find it kind of constraining. I think where the humans are good is that open ended problems in trying to face them, trying to tackle them. And what we're going to be using is computers to solve those tools, just using computers to solve those problems as tools. Well, you know, obviously one of the advantages the computer has over the human player is the fact that the computer can think about all the possible moves and do it in the blink of an eye. Two hundred, two hundred million moves a second deep blue can consider. And yet what computers cannot do, they cannot do some of the things that even a child can do, they can't recognize human speech, they can't recognize human facial expressions. Things have turned out to be really difficult problems in computing and yet, you know, even a little kid can do that. Why is it that those sorts of things, you know, the things

that the computers of our imagination can do and the computers of science fiction can do have actually turned out to be so difficult to do. When it's several different reasons, one is they're not really that powerful. They will keep improving in speed and maybe in 20 years or 40 years time they may have as many computing elements as our heads. Now, that's a possibility given the way things are evolving. But we also have a lot of software if you like. We've been programmed for rather a long time to sort of evolution, through the way our society works. And that's a big significant advantage. And if you're going to sit down and sort of program a machine to play deep, play chess, you got to think of all the possible ways that chess game could go and so on. But that's very, very small compared with programming a child to actually live in an environment like we have today. It's incredibly complex task. And so even this

talk, like the British Taliban talks about, being able to capture everything that you see or hear and being able to re-play it. But I actually understand it requires a totally different level of sophistication from what we can do. Involves learning also. The computers that we use for things such as chess playing or balancing checkbooks or keeping accounts are oriented towards one particular thing. Whereas a human being, as human beings, we do many, many different things. We're much broader in our use of our computing capabilities, let's say. And also, we learn. Now, it's true that computers sometimes can be said to learn from their experiences. But it's really just a math problem. And they learn the answers and they learn what happens when some things happen. But it's still still just a math problem. I'm not sure a human brain is like that.

One of the things I want to ask you about was, you know, in your experiences with children, with young people, and they're interacting with computers. And one of the things that we hear all the time is that younger folks take to it very naturally and that when their parents and older people, they sort of balk and they have a difficult time. The kids are enthusiastic and they plunge right in and, you know, if they have a little bit of difficulty, they just work their right around it. They don't get all uptight. Is that really the case? I mean, are kids really that way about it? They absolutely. Have you seen the T-shirts that say no fear? Yeah. I didn't know that that had to actually do with computers. No, that's the reason. They are not afraid of breaking it. They're not afraid of trying things. Whereas adults, you know, computers are pretty good now. They don't break as much. They don't, they do sometimes, but not as much. Well, when I got started with computers, it broke pretty often. And you're, you know, you're kind of afraid that if you do something,

it'll be the wrong thing. So we're more careful as adults, kids, they'll do anything. And it usually works. They just don't have any fear. What sort of things that are, are now in classrooms, in champagne schools and other schools we're going to be too? What sort of things are kids doing with computers? Well, there's many things. We're in a kind of revolution right now. We're going from using the computers to use, to like drill in practice, using it for drilling practice with students, learning your letters, learning English, you know, pronunciation, you know, things like that. And we're going more to using it as an information appliance, where students can find out information that they need to know. They can go out on the internet and get information. They can use CD-ROMs that are available for them. They can run programs that have large databases of information that they can access. And this is happening at ever younger ages. Going back to this issue of, you know, young people and their adaptability

to new technology and the fact that their parents sometimes or people who are older have a little bit of difficult time, why is that? Is it simply an age kind of thing? I mean, it's simply an issue that, you know, one maybe grows up with a certain kind of technology and you're sort of get used to it and something new, you know, it just seems unfamiliar. But if, you know, you were born into the age when that was state of the art technology and you think, ah, nothing to it, you just grab onto it because it's a natural thing to grab onto. I think, I think younger kids of tremendous advantages in being able to think things are perfectly natural and being able to pick up ways to manipulate these computers without really having to work at it. We all sort of have to unlearn what we've already learned about IBM computers or even typewriters and then relearn the new methods. The kids

come to it totally fresh and it's being presented to the kids in a different way. To us, a lot of computer learning was associated with work, whereas what I see now happening is the kids actually learn this as part of everyday living. The games, talking to other kids, communicating, mail, whatever, it's part of their natural environment and so they're much more enthusiastic and there's not this sort of bridge they have to get over in the first place. Well, we didn't have computers at home when we were children and now a large percentage of our people here do have computers at home. So the child sees it from day one? That's a big advantage. There are other issues involved, I think, too, which is not just the computer that's the issue. It's also what you can do with a computer. It's this business about being able to represent every type of media digitally and transmit it anywhere in the globe and I'm not sure that it's difficult for an adult to sit there and accept this. Whereas

a children, the children just seem to be able to, well, they don't mind whether it's coming from Brazil or Africa or wherever. It's just part of their environment. So there's a world in difference in that sense, too. I wanted to ask you to sort of react to a dissenting opinion about the computers in the classroom. It's a quote that comes out of one of the recent books that questions the benefit of computers and the information explosion to us and you know whether that's a good thing or bad thing. Anyway, it's from someone, a man named Alan Kay, who apparently you're familiar with, who was an important figure in personal computing. And that this was a common that he made in testimony to Congress a couple of years ago. He says, perhaps the saddest occasion for me is to be taken to a computerized classroom and to be shown children joyfully using computers. He says, they're happy. The teachers and administrators are happy

and the parents are happy yet in most such classrooms and closer examination, I can say that the children are doing nothing interesting or growth-inducing at all. This technology is a kind of junk food. People love it, but there's no nutrition to speak of. And it's worst, it's a kind of cargo cult in which it's thought that the mere presence of computers will somehow bring learning back to the classroom. Because Alan Kay has some computers to sell, too. But I think the, I think there we would probably agree with them. If you just sit that kids down in front of a computer and keep them happy in front of a computer, that is not what education is about. Education is about is about getting them to actually understand and use those computers more productive ways to do their studies. And Barry and the school districts have been trying to do that. Well, that's the next big step. That's the revolution I was talking about. Now we, like the taxpayers of Champagne, voted a referendum and we're putting a computer in every classroom.

That's the easy part. And that wasn't very easy. But the hard part is getting it so that it's useful for the students and the teachers and the teachers so that they know how to use it. We're moving away from computers as being a almost a course that you go out of the room somewhere else to study. We don't study about computers. We use computers, we hope appropriately, and we use it to, so the students can explore things. We don't use them, we shouldn't use them at least as babysitters. That's not what they're there for. And, you know, I think we find in our school district that we have some tremendously dedicated and intelligent staff members that find ever increasing interesting ways to use computers with their students. Well, how do you really know when you're watching a student working with a computer, whether real learning is going on or whether it's sort of entertainment of a very sophisticated kind? Well, you can't until you assess it. And that's always part of, you know, that's a big

deal in public education now is assessment. And we look at what students are learning. I'm not sure in the long run the technology you will know whether technology affected the students' knowledge. But if the student uses technology to increase their knowledge and their skills, why that's, I think, a good use of computers. Could they have done it without computers? Possibly. But probably not as much. We were beginning to see some research that shows that students learn some things faster, mathematics for one. I don't think we're seeing that the old fashioned uses of computers drill in practice, learning foreign language words and things like that through drill in practice. I don't think those were maybe any more effective than using them with a regular classroom teacher handling it. But there's other ways that the students are learning as well.

That's towards actually treating computers as every day part of life and understanding what you can do with the computers. And even if that seems trivial, now it's not going to be by the time there, 20 years time or whatever, computer prices are going down and computers are becoming more ubiquitous. So we're going to have devices, computing devices in practically everything that we use. And as that occurs, you can obviously think of many, many things to do with them. But it's going to be the children that actually are going to be doing that and implementing that. I'm sure there are imaginations are going to be much, much better at mind at thinking how you're going to piece all these very intelligent sticky pads with computers on and all. Even they're talking about personal networks that you actually make a person a network. And when you touch from one person to another, you can exchange data through the skin by, again, electrical communication. But

how are we going to use this stuff? Or is it useful? Well, the children are going to decide, because by the time all this stuff happens, I mean, our ideas were to solidify it and hopefully we're bringing these children up that they can actually make useful decisions about the computing age and how to live in it. And I think exposing them in this way as the school districts are doing is very important. They can actually make those choices. You think on the flip side, there's lots of stuff about privacy, about whether we want electronic cash, about morality in computers. And in order to have people actually make intelligent decisions, they're going to have to understand all of the deaths of what the electronics are going to be able to do for it. And I don't think, I don't think we're going to come across that very easily. We're going to have to have children growing to adults and think very deeply about this and do PhDs

and various other things in order to have a better appreciation of it. I don't think you have a choice either. I mean, it's not like we can say this school district has decided we're not going to do computers because we do a good job teaching without them. Then your kids are way behind. And we are competing in a global environment and we have to learn about computers and how to use computers and make them a tool. And we have to give that to our children. We really don't have a choice. There are other problems like you have children with computers at home and you have children without computers at home. And you don't really want to make this a big distinction. I mean, you would like every child to have the chance to learn about computers and learn what the new society is going to be like. The information age is going to be like. Unless we actually work at providing these computers to the school districts, I don't see how that's going to be equal.

I think you really touch on a really important issue of access to the technology and it's all well and good to talk about some people being phobic about it and not wanting anything to do with computers. But there is also the issue of cost and it's not something that everyone can have even if they want it. And what happens if we do provide people access to computers or some familiarity with computers in school and then they go out from there and then that's all the access they have. Do you worry, should we worry that we will have a kind of, we will have people who are information rich and technology rich and people who are information poor and that it won't be the kind of broad sort of democratizing technology that times sometimes we get into these flights. Of talking about, we hope that it will be, maybe it won't. Well, I think the schools can't solve all of these problems. You know, you're going to need to have available computers in public

locations. Public housing offices, as a matter of fact, Roy and I were involved with a proposal for a grant to do that in champagne. Unfortunately, I didn't get funded. But the library and the urban league offices and places like that, we need to open the schools at night so that the parents and the community members around can come in and use the computers. But you know, the schools can't solve all of that. And we, you know, we really have no choice as far as keeping up with the technology and making it available for our students. On the other hand, someone else is going to have to take part of the, uh, solve part of the problem by making computers available to people. And as Roy said, they are going down in price substantially now. Yeah, be like confetti soon. Really do, I mean, do you really think that they'll be so inexpensive that, um, you know, five hundred dollars, maybe less? I think you're looking much, much lower prices than that. Really? I think so. You know, you're talking, you know, maybe sense even. And in some ways,

you can even do better than that. Um, people are talking about building biological computers using DNA for computing. Um, when you get in that area, you may actually eventually be able to give someone an injection and that will be a computer in their arm or whatever. That's a bit exaggerated. But you can see that's the sort of direction as people understand how the build computers out of sorts of different substances. Um, it's going to, it's going to make a vast difference in the, in the prices and in the, in the ways people use it. Of course, you're thinking of, you know, a little kind of a broader definition of computers than what we would think of, we would have in our first grade class or something. It's more of a, uh, you know, we, we all drove here in cars tonight that have multiple computers in them and they don't cost very much. You know, I mean, we're going to have computers. I mean, we're already, we're seeing, um, we're handicapped people have computers that are very, very small that they carry with them on their belt and they help them control their muscles or control pain and things like that.

Yeah, it's, it's, it's covering, which is a, you have to feed it and do good things to it. Right. Tom, uh, Gucci is there. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, it, it may indeed be that the, you know, what really matters the most when you talk about computers is the software, what makes them go, but what for most people who are not computer engineers, I think perhaps the thing that sort of enters them is the hardware. I mean, they're sort of interested in, well, what do they look like? And how do I use this thing? And I will, but I'd be able to put it in my pocket and, uh, that sort of thing as, as you, as you think about what's, you know, possible now or imaginable within the, you know, the next five, 10 years. Do you see, what do you see, you know, see, it's, it seems that, that, at least when you talk about, you know, the kind of computers that people may have in their offices or have at home, they have on their desk, they really haven't changed very much in, I don't know, how long, it's in, you know, 10, 15 years probably. I disagree with it. The computer that I have on my desk is probably as powerful as a

cray was 10 years ago. Well, I'm well, in the sense of it's, if it's computing power, yes, but if in, as a, you know, as a physical entity, it's not, it's got boxes, got brains and then it's got a box, it's got a guy keys on it, it's got a box, it's got a monitor in it, and that really hasn't changed. No, but the most important part has its ability to do calculations and its ability, you know, the interface has changed. The software has changed. It's a different way to, to interact with the computer than what we used to have. And of course, it's more capable. That's the important part, not what it looks like, in my opinion, at least. Well, I think you are going to find lots of different interfaces, lots of different uses. We were a bit hung up on the, on the screen and the keyboard and all those sort of things, and it's basically because the CPU powers aren't that fast to, to do some of the things we'd like to do, like, speak for recognition. But that will change. And the big screens will disappear,

you can have flat screens, you may even have paper that's a computer. I mean, if you can actually, I mean, people that this is what people are talking about is to be able to roll up your screen and put it in your pocket and go, you know, this, it's going to happen. If you can get the layers thin enough and you can get them nice and uniform and so on on the screens, you can be able to do all sorts of things. Like those notepads in Star Trek, right? When you bet, you bet. They're pretty close to that now. Some of the, some of the devices that based on computers are pretty phenomenal, like the global position, navigation systems. It's just a small little thing you can keep around, but you can find wherever you are on the earth. I mean, that's, that's pretty important. It's in 10 feet or something, isn't it? Well, I think that it's still, you know, maybe part of the difficulty that people have using the machines is that they're still, it's complicated. And to get them to do what you want, and then if they're not doing it, to figure out why, you know, it can be difficult. You still have big, great, hairy manuals like this,

you have to go through. And sometimes the, you know, the commands, the things that you used to do the computer do its thing, don't make a lot of sense. That may be great understatement. You know, I have to, you have to say, okay, you have to pour through a lot of stuff to get it to do. I guess the, you know, the ideal thing would be where you don't really have to have very much special knowledge that everything is in the machine. And you virtually just have to tell it what you want it to do. And it'll say, oh, okay, yeah, I could do that for you. And you don't, you don't have to worry about why it does that exactly or how it does that. It'll go, it'll take it from there. Exactly. We want more computer science funding research. The national center for a supercomputer Africa is not going to have enough money. Yeah. Okay. One of the things, one of the goals that has been, as state is being very important for a schools as to be connected to the internet, apparently particularly the Clinton administration

setting, I think it's very important for to be hooked up to the internet, have all schools hooked up by year 2000. Is, is that indeed important? What does internet access mean to you? Oh, it's, it's absolutely critical. We, it gives us the opportunity for our students to experience things and to gain knowledge and especially to assimilate information from outside the traditional educational system, meaning textbooks, you know, resource materials that are in libraries, you know, those good old video tapes and movies. It allows us to get out and find information on the internet and especially students that is presents both sides of an issue, perhaps, that is the latest breaking thing. Even, you know, a textbook, we, we and Champagne are on a six year cycle. We replace our textbooks every six years if they need it. Well, of course they need it because no textbook would last six years. But even if you would say, well, let's replace it every two years. You're still going to be behind, be behind on some things. And even if you say, okay,

we're not going to have textbooks, we'll subscribe to journals and the students will read the journals. Well, that's three to six months behind. The internet's right now. When someone discovers something or when they, you know, they, they publish it on the internet right now. And, you know, literally we've had examples of students signing on to the internet and finding out about breaking news stories as they happen and things like that. And so it's a great asset. It is critical. It's something that we need to do. And thank goodness and Champagne, our school board was far sighted enough to, to vote that. You at the, the International Center for Supercomputing Applications, the whole business of networking is something that you're very interested in and have gotten a grant to do research on and thinking about when, when you all there think about networking and what perhaps what's not possible today, but what might be possible. What is it that you're looking toward? Well, well, NCSA is trying to do is to draw different communities together,

different scientific communities together, to, to integrate them and, and to be allow the, allow the scientists to use, um, faster tools, computational anyway, to collaborate and to do better science. And so the networking emphasis is all around trying to enable scientists to do that, to do that work collaboratively, to enable them to reach the supercomputers they need. So a lot of effort has been going into, well, with new developments, we have this package arrangement with multiple different projects all working together through NCSA on different scientific projects, but there's a common infrastructure and that's the network and the supercomputers and that's what NCSA is building up. So from the point of view of networking, the faster, the better, or the higher bandwidth, the better, reduce the latencies across the

networks, improve the tools that are used so that scientists can actually work together when they're in different places. We have a lot of tremendous number of good scientists in America. Um, when they go to get to gathering conferences and so it's a, it's a very fruitful time when you can get them together at a, in a particular, one particular place. It's a very fruitful time, but most of the time it's spanned all over the distributed and if we can just bring them together, aimed at particular projects, um, that will have, that will have accelerating effects on, on their science and of course also in a second way will also show basically what the, the worth of these networks are. That's what the, the supercomputer scientists are using and the scientists using the supercomputer networks are using today. Um, what would help to see out in the schools or government or industry. Let me just, I want to take a moment here to tell people who are watching that

in a moment or two, we will begin taking your calls and indeed if you have questions for our guests, the number to call is three, three, three, three, four, nine, five and if you live outside the two, one, seven code area, you may call collect you, you can start right now. So once we get some folks, uh, line up, we'll be happy to, um, to take on calls. Uh, I guess it in, um, you in champagne within the school system, you have also set up a network. Yes. Uh, and, uh, I think we were talking a little bit before the program that you in had been talking with the folks for the, from the supercomputer center about this whole thing and they were trying to persuade you of the, of the worth of having a network and initially you said, well, you know, what, what are we going to do with that? What do we need it for networking? How that's for, you know, that's for big shots like you guys, not really for us. Uh, what sort of benefits have come for you, just having a network within the, having the schools network, but you must realize that we're in, we're not very far along with our network. Our network is complete. It's up and running. And now, as I said,

here comes the tricky bit, as they say, to help the people learn to use it. But some advantages we have is communications, of course, we can communicate with other people. Uh, our students, uh, out of, uh, 9,000 students, about half of them have electronic mail now, and all of our staff have it if they want to use it. And so they can communicate with each other and with people all over the world, uh, we have the ability to look at information. We could never get on the internet before. My classroom, when I was a teacher, was the first classroom in Champaign to be on the internet. And the students understand the significance immediately. They go out on the internet, they find information, they find programs that they want to run, they find games to play, they do all those things. And so it's been a great asset to us. The example I think that I gave you before the meeting was that, uh, that we were, um, trying to do something with chemistry classes. And we were connecting to, uh, N-C-S-A. It was called the Kimviz Project. We would visualize

chemical, uh, atoms and molecules by sending a file to the supercomputer, and it would send back an image. It was very difficult to do. We really needed the internet to do that. Now it's done all the time. We have students in our chemistry classes that can do that easily because we have that network. It's a, it's a big asset for us. If all of the schools that could, where we got all the schools, we got all the schools linked up to the internet. And on any given day, if all the chemistry classes that were going on, we're doing trying to do the same thing, or what happened? What would there be a collapse of the internet? Well, the problem is the networks, while it's put together with tin tans and string in a sense, it's, it's very immature. A lot needs to go on. And right now, the research community is talking about building a something called internet too, which will be a much more powerful networking engine. And it's trying to get trying to correct some of the problems in the internet itself. And so there's a lot of,

well, basically there's a lot of concern about capacity, about how long it takes messages to traverse that in it, and what happens if you have peak loads. And if you want to send video, and continuous, like audio, whatever continuous media across those networks, because it takes choos up huge chunks of bandwidth. So yeah, we're all, we're all busy thinking up the next generation. But that's what we need is we need video. We need video and audio over the internet. We need to be able to connect to a school in New Jersey, you know, and for the students to talk to each other about things and to see each other and to show each other their projects. Our students get different ideas about things they could do. We need collaboration across the internet. We do have some of that. For example, there's several where they're going on right now where different age groups will check the water purity in their town. And then they submit that to a central office,

and then it's, they're doing actual research. So it's pretty, there's, you know, what we do need that bandwidth, a better network is, but it's still great. Yeah, well you're going to get it. I'm going to put fiber into the houses, you're going to put fiber into the schools, you're going to have unlimited bandwidth. And it's just around the corner, but when? Well, that's, that's, it was going to be sort of be my next question is not, not only so much when is this going to happen, what who's going to pay for it? I guess we can expect that telephone company is going to, well, the telephone company is going to pay for the upgraded system, and then we're all going to pay for that. But, but beyond that, you know, to, to build an internet too, that one of, you know, sort of the interesting and curious things about the way the internet grew is that it just sort of grew, nobody really planned it. It, it just kind of happened, and that as more and more people discovered that it was there and that you could use it, people said, cool, let's do this, and they jumped onto it. And then more people did, and it grew so fast in, in such a sort of random way, that suddenly now we find ourselves with this, this system that everybody wants to use that's

now overburdened. And I suppose some people think, well, it ought, indeed, be the federal government that somehow is responsible for putting up the money to do it. Some people maybe say, well, no, it should be Bill Gates or, you know, somebody like that, you should be doing it. Where will the money come from? Well, I'm sure it can come from an industry. I don't think the government's going to pay for any major net where you'll be far too expensive, but already industry is doing it. And the big telephone companies and even other individuals, like power companies and so on, they're busy laying fiber everywhere. Bill Gates is funding, bring up satellites so we can communicate. I think if you look at the amount of fiber in the ground and the amount of satellites up there and you see the bandwidth, it's going up exponentially just like practically everything else in the computer. So I don't think we'll miss the band. We will have it when we, you'll be late, of course, it will never be enough and we'll use it all, but it'll

be there. And whatever we get, we need 110% of it now. Right. I think that's a rule. I'm curious again to learn a little bit more about what for people who are in the field, the computer scientist and the people who really can't give their imagination free range. What it is that they, you, would like to be able to do and is sort of within reach, but not quite. We're in reach, but not quite. Well, there's a lot of stuff which is in reach and it only takes money to be able to do it. One of the things is to be able to have collaboration across the country, be able to have video, audio, all the graphics and everything else all sort of interacting in a nice way. What's limiting is pretty much is what the network would take. Right now it's very difficult to get a high bandwidth connection from NCSA or from

computer science department across to the California because somewhere in the middle of the country there's a bottleneck. Once that goes you're going to see all sorts of applications come up and from the human side you're going to see the country shrink. We're going to be able to put together organizations that stretch across the country and have good sort of personal relationships with people all the way across the country simply because we can see them every day on the face-to-face, maybe across the video camera, but face-to-face and that's going to change the way we think about the love. You already have. What you would like to be able to do, you're talking about virtual conferencing and being able to have a symposium where the members are scattered around the world would be able to see one another, talk to one another, even exchange complex kinds of data and to be able to do all of that in real time. Absolutely. Right and you can draw on all sorts of facts. Imagine what it would happen to a news team.

If you have your reporters out but they could all provide you instantly video or whatever from wherever in the country, you could pull that together, make up an instant story about something that's happened today, aggregating huge amounts of information across the country into that particular news story, and you wouldn't have to drive one of those big trucks with a big antenna, and set it up. A few minutes ago, there was such and such happened, but we missed it because we were setting up our truck, but they could just be walking down the street and because of the computational and networking abilities, they could say, oh, look at this and pull a little camera out and say, you're seeing this robbery happening live, something like that, and that's, I think, bandwidth, we've got to have. And then you're going to see all sorts of other apps. Well, other ways you could use that sort of connectivity. For example, if we have disasters, or hurricanes hit, or we have earthquakes, or we have volcanoes, or whatever,

just the response time that we could deal with, the accuracy, which we hand out medical aid, or whatever could be improved vastly. I mean, it's a bit like actually the way the arm is using computers these days. You're going to have pinpoint accuracy, allocating resources, or whatever, to whatever's needed, because you actually know about what's going on. And that would have tremendous benefits. It could just be a science project, it could be humanities project, it could be anything you want. But all of a sudden, we're using very intelligently all resources we've got, more intelligent, I don't know, humans will ever use everything, very intelligently. Well, that gets at a question, and then maybe you both have some thoughts about it, but I want particularly to ask Barry, because you're a teacher. You know, one of the things that the contrarians, those people who are not, perhaps all that enthusiastic about the

information explosion say, is that it is true that now we have access to unprecedented, unprecedented volume of information. However, it hasn't made us any smarter. We're no wiser, and because an awful lot of it is of questionable value, maybe even junk. And you know, you probably both of you know as well as I do, that surfing the net is a great time-waster. You can spend an awful lot of time and not have too much to show for it. And that, you know, particularly when you're trying to look for something very specific, you can take a long time to find out what you really want. How do you go about educating your students in all these young folks who are coming up in this age of information explosion to sort through the junk to get to the gyms? I personally think it's an asset to have a large amount of data available, because I think we all as human beings have to sort through the appropriate information and the true

information and the false information and what it used to say call something true facts. Well, you know, I mean, you take a look at it and there is a lot of information that's out there in textbooks and periodicals and of course in the internet that is simply not correct. And so then it's a skill that everybody needs to know is to how to determine whether something is appropriate for them to study. I mean, does what they look up on the internet, does that fit with the assignment? You can see that all the time with kids. They try, like, if they do a search on the internet for something like, let's say, peanuts. And they're doing, it's for a class, let's say, homework and they want to know about the nutritional value of peanuts. But they get the peanuts, you know, cartoons grow. Well, that's a learning experience for that student. They say, well, now, animate, this isn't what I want. You know, and as a teacher, why you help to focus

the students towards the appropriate things. I think that's an asset. On the other hand, there is a vast amount of information out there. And one thing that we need that I hope the computer science people will give us is better search engines that are faster and will allow us to find information better. The latest is the search engines are beginning to look at more than just over the internet. They will search other areas too. Data bases, things like that. I'm an auditor for an NSF project that is a chemistry class. It's done on computer. And what's really interesting is it's database-based, meaning it has a large amount of information stored in a database so that the students can look up information about elements and compounds and things like that. And so then they can access that information and they can graph it and they can look at it. That's a great use of the technology. And that's, I think, the direction we're moving is to be able to use all that information and assign it to students to use it appropriately. They've got to learn that skill. This business of, you know, using the internet

to get what you want is it seems to me to be a central sort of problem, particularly if you, you know, it can be a great resource, but if you make a very general query, you know, you can get 100,000 hits. And it may and be somewhere in there is what you're really looking for. How well are we doing? Or is this just sort of, again, a matter of time that we'll be able to design search mechanisms that will be, you know, so you can get them tuned to the point where you can really say very specifically what you want and just get that and not have to sort it through a lot of stuff that you don't want. Well, search engines are double-edged sword, the more intelligent they are, the more they may guess what you want. The answer is clear, we're going to get better. And there are a lot of research results that show you can, you can improve the search engines. On the other hand, you know, the question is really the thing. In science, if you know,

if you really know what the question is, you're almost found the solution. The question's the problem. And I think what we're going to have to do is get better at asking questions. I think we train our students to do that. I think, and in fact, I think it's another asset. I think that the frustration of going on the internet and getting 100,000 hits helps a student learn to focus there, to ask the right question, to focus it on more, instead of searching for peanuts, search for peanuts and nutrition. And the students learn that skill by the way they learn it faster than we do, why they get pretty good at it. We have a caller. We have to take some other folks too. If you have comments, questions you'd like to be involved in the conversation, that's welcome. 3, 3, 3, 3, 4, 9, 5, that's the number if you'd like to give us a call. We do have someone to talk with in Champaign, line number one. Hello. Hi, my question is,

what can we do to keep kids from accessing things on the internet while they're at school that they shouldn't be accessing? For parents, that's also another issue that they're concerned about having some control over what kind of material their kids can get out. I'm sure that it's probably also a problem within an issue within schools. We're very concerned about it in the Champaign schools and while I can tell the caller what we've done and I think it's, we explored this for a long time because we were very concerned about it. What we decided to do was we put into effect an acceptable use policy for a student to access the internet using our school computers. They have to have parent permission. They have to agree to follow the rules and they take a test over what those rules are and then they're supervised by our staff and we expect, you know, our staff, that's what they're, they do best. I mean, that's their job is to supervise and do that.

There are other alternatives. One is to intercept inappropriate material. There's, it's difficult to do that and do it effectively because you tend to lose the richness of the internet and it can easily become censorship, you know, so it's a difficult thing to do. In our school, if a student access is inappropriate material on the internet and especially we're thinking here of things that are pornographic or violent, I'm not going to say that we will catch them 100 percent of the time but our staff will catch them most of the time, mainly because some other student will laugh and point and say, oh, look at that and then we will catch them and they will be disciplined. You know, the first time it's a mistake, you know, an accident, you know, if they go somewhere and that can happen. The second time, it's a pattern and they can lose their access. So we're very strict about that in, you know, for, but we haven't adopted filtering programs and the reason is because it's difficult, they're difficult to write and what they end up doing is

you either filter out, you only let in the sites that you know you want, we call that censorship. And what ends up happening then is that the richness of the internet is lost. You, you know, there's a lot of wonderful things out there that you're saying, well, we didn't know about that site so you can't see it. That's not a good idea. The other alternative is to lock out the sites that you know are bad, but those sites move. And if a student comes in with, you know, with the location of a pornographic or violent site on the internet and it's not in the ones you're filtering out, you've done no good, you know, they'll still get into it. And our attitude is that we're going to teach these students to use the internet appropriately and that's what our effort has been. Let's go on. We have another campaign call. This is line number two. Hello. Hi. I have a question for Barry. You asked earlier how he helped with what skills are being

taught students to allow them to separate out good information from bad information on the net. And he used the example of doing a study of peanuts and finding the peanut comic strip is opposed to some articles about peanuts. But how do you teach them if they find two articles on peanuts? Which one has good information and which one might have bad information? I think that's a great question. The difference is that in prior years when you used an encyclopedia or a book on peanuts or a nutrition from the library or a textbook, you just accepted it. Whatever that book said was accepted as being the truth. Now we're in a situation where you need to look at if you have two sites that have differing information on them, which I think this is a learning experience by the way. You need to find other sites. You need to evaluate whether the site is something that is perhaps a government-produced site or an industrial-produced site or whether it's

Joe Smith and his ideas on peanuts. That has a lot to do with it. And you also need to look at other sources of information off the internet. And I think it opens up the idea that the student has to be careful when they look at their information. And I think it spreads to more than just internet information. It spreads to you have to look at information and compare it among your sources, meaning in the libraries and textbooks and things like that. We shouldn't think that textbooks were always accurate or are always accurate. That isn't always true. And I know I learned a lot of things when I was in school that simply weren't the truth, but they were in the textbook. I give an example of I never knew until I got to college that we had the detention camps for the Japanese. I never knew that. It wasn't in the book. Well, it would be on the internet. Just to return to the issue of parents and their concern about what their children can see.

And I'm thinking, I guess, in the home context, there has been a lot of discussion about where the control should be imposed. Should we try to impose some control on the internet? Or should we say each individual at their point of access? That's where they need to decide what they want to have and what they don't. Are there good devices, programs, mechanisms, whatever, so that if parents are concerned, and they have computers at home, they have internet access. So parents are concerned with having some control over their children's see, that they could be pretty sure that those will work well. When there are programs that would do that, and they can do keyboard searches on the material coming back, they can lock out particular sites that you get the information from. But they're not going to be 100% effective, but they would be a reasonable way to do it. I like the approach that families can decide basically what their children should be able to see. I think that's a reasonable approach. But how well we can do it? Well,

as Barry pointed out, if you're not careful, you start actually getting rid of some of the stuff that you would like your children to see as well. A classic example is one of the programs kept the White House webpage off for a couple days. You couldn't access it because it used the word coupled, coupled with something else. And it wouldn't let that be displayed on schools and everything, so you couldn't get to the White House page. They make mistakes too, the filtering. We've talked about networks and the desire of scientists, for example, to be able to interact with one another in real time via network. When you look at now, the way people are using the internet is simply this basically, they're using it like a great big encyclopedia. They're searching for particular kinds of information and maybe having to take a while to get

what they're looking for. Do you think that the internet and the way that it works and the way that people interact with it, regular folks, is going to change and how is it going to change? Well, you can already see signs of those changes. The internet's used for a lot of financial transactions and for a lot of commerce, business decision-making. The internet really is becoming indispensable for a lot of companies in the way they manage what they're doing, in the way they move money. I think there's going to be a lot more use for that kind of purpose, financial transactions, share its stock market. And as that happens, we're going to think this is a natural to go through your computer, is to go down to your stock broker or go out to best buys and buys the computer. The network is going to be environment in which we probably do

all this. And it's probably going to save us a lot of time too. Yeah, I ordered went to LA this summer and we ordered our airline tickets over the internet and our rented our car over the internet and it was so easy. And we got a better price than through our travel agent, did it ourselves. I mean, that's just the start. And we're going to be able to deal with the security issue, because that's, I think, the thing that's got people worried, obviously. You know, that somebody else will have access to you and your financial information and your credit card number and so forth. Well, there's no such thing as absolute security, just letting us, no such thing as living forever. You can make security very, very good though. And it's just a matter of how much do you want that security. And when there's a lot of financial assets involved, it's going to become more secure and we'll all benefit from that. We'll be able to use those

mechanisms. But it's a misunderstanding to think that it was secure before. You know, if people, you know, certain groups of people and, you know, businesses, they had access to the information about us. We had part of me for example, about we're at the end of the time and we're simply going to have to leave it there. I'm sure that's a topic we will come back to. We also want to say, thanks very much to our guest, Roy Campbell, Professor of Computer Science from the University of Illinois, and also Barry Rowe, he's Director of Educational Technology for the Unit Four School, Champion at Four Schools. Our program, Talking Point, will return in two weeks. That'll be September 4th. We'll be marking Labor Day by talking about the state of organized labor in the United States. In the meantime, if you can, tune in for our radio talk show. It's Focus 580 weekday mornings at 10 on our companion station AM 580. For now, thanks for watching and good night. To purchase a VHS copy of this program using Visa, MasterCard, or Discover, call 1-800-528-7980.

Please have the credit card number and expiration date ready. To order by mail, send a check for $2495, payable to the U of I, WILL TV, to videotape sales, WILL TV, 1110 West Main Street, or Bana, Illinois, 61801. Please allow 3-4 weeks for delivery.