Robot Teachers

Class notes: where have we gone with this 2 sigma question this semester?

What I want to know is: are computers really the answer? Do we believe that? It seems that's where all the research has gone ever since Bloom's 1984 article - we automatically assumed "Well, that's easy. We'll make robot teachers."

Which means, of course, that the science fiction authors were all right! Right?


Do you like my disturbingly gross over-simplifications? That's actually my only talent here.

Dr. Wiley's first topic - Anderson's work in intelligent tutors. "Reflctions of the Environment in Memory" - Anderson and Schooler - basically, frequency, recency and pattern determine what we keep in our memories and what we throw away. Because this is the way our environment is structured, this is the way our brains have decided to store information. Very interesting.

So what does this have to do with robot teachers is what I want to know. Oh good, he's getting there.

Carnegie Mellon's Open Learning Initiative - uses "mini cognitive tutors." A study shows that students who use these online tutorials in hybrid mode learn faster and better than students in face-to-face classes. My next question, though, is - how do the hybrid students do compared to the online-only students? And this is where I think the sci-fi authors really missed the mark.

What did they think we'd have by the year 2010? Robot teachers, right? Automated teaching machines. Computers that talk to you and ask you questions. Pills that taste like food so you don't have to eat. We don't have any of that, though, do we? We failed! But what do we have? We have Wikipedia. And Omega-3 enriched eggs.

Here's what I say, though - Wikipedia is way cooler than robots. We outdid the sci-fi authors. Why? Because computers are dead and lifeless and can't simulate the human brain. But when you put the human brain - no, 153 million human brains - in computer skins, then they can do cool things. The hybrid is doing things that the machines will never do.

OK, off of the tangent train. Back to class:

The Open High School (Dr. Wiley's specialty) - There are two things a tutor does: 1. information provision (broadcast function), 2. Q/A, diagnostic help, support
#1 is automated - one teacher writes one lecture, makes it available online, rather than giving 6 lectures. #2 is partially automated in terms of data analysis, who's doing what, etc., the actual teacher is doing the 1-on-1 connection

Again - the hybrid human/machine is doing more and doing it better than a human alone or a machine alone can do. This is fun! Class is over though. Remind me to come back to this.

(Get your robot teacher to send me an email or something)