COLLOQUY Responses
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COLLOQUY Responses
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 One of the disappointing aspects of the "technology revolution" is how much of it is only marginally adding value to the educational process. By that I mean that the vast majority of computer use at our college (and, I suspect, most other educational institutions) is devoted to uses that do not in any fundamental way change what students (and faculty) are doing and learning. By way of example: word processing is techno-intensive writing; it has advantages over other ways, but nothing is fundamentally different. E-mail is a convenient and inexpensive (for the individual) merger of letter-writing and phone-calling. Research on the Internet is the use of a huge, very diffuse, and generally poor quality library. Power-point supported lectures are still just lectures, but with the glitz of computers substituting for acetate transparencies or, for truly archaic instructors, the chalk board. While all of that is convenient, and that convenience justifies some financial investment, it hardly qualifies as a "revolution," nor do the limited educational gains justify turning campuses upside down. There are, of course, the marketing aspects of playing to the population of education consumers, but that is another line of argument. Mush less frequent, but much more exciting, are those nuggets of application which use the computer to approach topics and ways of thinking that would be and have been impossible to tackle without the technology. The one with which I am involved, system dynamics, uses the process of building and manipulating computer simulation models of complex systems to stimulate and oblige our students (and us as faculty!) to critically and explicitly identify and explore the building blocks and interrelationships of complex and often interdisciplinary systems. The computer's ability to keep track of those linkages and to define the evolution of that system over time (its dynamics) and to allow the students to challenge the underlying mental models of those systems and to perform and analyze "what if" experiments and sensitivity analyses are all powerful opportunities for learning that could not exist without the support of and convenient student access to computers. There are, no doubt, other comparable uses of computers that open fundamentally new avenues of learning. Only when these begin to spread widely and begin to take center stage will the educational "computer revolution" fully justify its label.
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