Email may be sent to comments@DavePosner.com
An interactive applet
to help explain the associative law of multiplication.
Number Lab is a collection of Java Applets for helping elementary school students explore the meaning of numbers and operations on numbers.
My name is Dave Posner and this is my vanity web site. All the content here is concerned in one way or another with education, either policy or content. I have been happily employed designing and implementing computer software for many years. I thank God that I live at this particular point in history. I love computers and all the associated technology and I believe that this technology will be of great benefit to humanity. But the machines also scare me.
People often talk about the exponential growth of this or that but as we know, the speed and memory capacity, and quantities of intelligent devices along with data transmission rates, and the accumulation of knowledge in electronic form have literally been increasing exponentially for over three decades now and the growth rate shows no sign of decline. In the past thirty odd years we have gone from 8 bit microprocessors executing a few tens of thousands of integer instructions per second to 32 and 64 bit microprocessors capable of executing hundreds of billions of floating point operations and teraflop processors are on the way. We carry in our pockets computing power that dwarfs the combined computation power of every man woman and child on the planet. Any capability that exists anywhere in any lab today will be available in less than a decade to anyone anywhere for a song. Transmission rates have gone from 300 baud to megabaud and soon enough gigabaud and I suspect terabaud will come eventually (if I’m not already behind the times.) We can see a time in the not very distant future when all interesting data of any form will be converted to or collected in electronic form and will be available anywhere in the world instantly.
There are lots of things to be afraid of in this cyber culture we are creating. There are huge opportunities for abuse and misuse and sabotage, and failures in these systems can have cataclysmic consequences as our dependency on them becomes total. But that kind of thing is not the main source of my fear. My chief concern is in what will the role of ordinary folk become in this new world? Do ordinary people become masters of the technology with access and control of vast resources and capabilities or do we become so much excess baggage with no significant role to play in a world ruled by a technological elite. I don’t think I’m being silly in having this concern. Anyone who believes that his current job or skill set cant be made obsolete through automation is probably the one being silly and naïve[1].
I am not a pessimist or doomsayer. I actually believe that this future will be a boon to human beings. I think there will be wonderful opportunities for all of us in extending and applying these technologies for our mutual benefit -- if we can adapt rapidly
enough. This is the primary source of my concerns about education. In a world where obsolescence occurs in months it is unlikely that any particular set of skills or knowledge will be valuable for very long. In order to succeed in this new world, individuals will have to operate at a far higher intellectual level than was sufficient previously. At this higher level of abstraction we can adapt knowledge to changing environments and modify our skills appropriately so that we are not at the mercy of any particular technology. What worries me is that the prevailing point of view in the education debate seems almost obsessed with teaching very specialized processes and information. This point of view is reinforced by pressures to standardize the educational process and its content and to limit the criteria for success to that which can be measured with primitive kinds of metrics. In addition there seems to be considerable ignorance about what kinds of knowledge will be valuable in a highly technological world. In particular, mimicking the capabilities of machines will definitely not be valuable in this world. I fear that these pressures are pushing us towards an education system based on a manufacturing model and that the products of that process will be entirely incapable of dealing with the rapidity of change brought about by our own technological success.
[1] Vonnegut wrote a story about a time of total automation. In his story one of the last jobs to go was barbering. Before it was automated one of the barbers went to bed each night worrying about whether his job would be automated. In order to fall asleep he would find one element of his job that he was convinced could never be automated. But then in his worrying the next night he would discover a way to automate the previous nights insoluble problem and so have to find another. Of course this continued until he himself had solved the entire problem and automated himself out of a job.