|
|
|
|||||||||||
|
|||||||||||
|
|||||||||||
|
|||||||||||
|
|||||||||||
|
|||||||||||
|
|||||||||||
|
|||||||||||
|
|
North-Holland Publishing Company
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Year | % of Literacy | The annual volume of book publishing (in billions) |
|---|---|---|
| 1897 | 28.4 | |
| 1913 | 0.12 | |
| 1926 | 56.6 | |
| 1933 | 0.49 | |
| 1939 | 87.4 | 0.46 |
| 1946 | 0.46 | |
| 1959 | 98.5 | 1.24 |
| 1970 | 99.7 | 1.36 |
| 1976 | 1.78 |
If the analogies we have drawn are true, then this Table will give us an idea of the dimensions and scope of work to be carried out to prepare the encounter of the world of computers with the world of man.
Mass media, popular science literature and advertising have already imprinted on our mentality, notwithstanding the short age of computers, the habitual image of a typical computer - the screen of a display with a key board, tape drives, the intricate lace of paper tape, endless listings, the blinking lights of the control panel, angular cases stuffed with electronic machinery. Technically speaking, all this is subsumed under a single term: the main frame. If, however, we try to visualize the place of computers in the world of man on the basis of such an image, our ideas will be not only superficial but erroneous too. The computer of the future is not so much a gigantic electronic brain, packed into a spacious and carefully guarded glass building of an international bank or into a no less carefully guarded underground refuge of a command and control post. It is rather a tiny slice of a silicon crystal set into a miniature frame which is entangled in the finest web of wires. Such a detail will be an integral part of practically every industrially produced article.
You naturally understand that it is microprocessors I have in mind. Although they first appeared slightly over a decade ago, they are produced nowadays by dozens of millions annually. Their most spectacular application is in the production of various pocket calculators. But this is only the above-water part of the iceberg. I am deeply convinced that the appearance and development of micro-processors is the most revolutionary technical innovation of the 20th century. It has a number of important aspects and implications, and I shall single out only those which are most relevant for the line of analysis pursued in the present paper.
Considerations of time preclude my going any deeper into these things, although they might have been made the most fascinating part of my paper. Technical literature abounds in the analysis of new problems deluging specialists in the organization of production, planners of working sites, engineering psychologists, designers - in short, all specialists in the field of engineering and technology. Thousands of professions are undergoing a fundamental change. Millions of people - operators, adjusters, typists, bank employees, stewards, librarians, fitters, secretaries, assemblers - acquire entirely reorganized working sites where computers become their partners and inter locators. Even if this partner is friendly and reliable, a fundamental psychological and intellectual reconstruction should take place for a man to preserve his integrity and dignity in the new environment. Even nowadays there are millions of people involved in this process (in West Europe alone the number of terminals and data communication ports is close to a million). In two generations communicating with a computer will become the concern of practically every person involved in social production.
However, there emerges one serious obstacle on the way of this exponential development whipped up by a number of various factors. At present the ability of man to impart his knowledge to the computer is hopelessly lagging behind his ability to manufacture this computer. Whereas the cost of manufacturing a micro-processor is expressed in man-hours, the cost of producing software for it rockets up to man-months. The logistic curve of Barry Boem, showing the dynamics of the ratio of the hardware and software costs in designing an information processing system has become, owing to incessant repetition, so habitual, that it causes no worry. Of course programming specialists are working to the best of their ability to make the programmer's labours more productive. Yet elementary calculations show that even if we accept the hypothesis of a ten-fold productivity increase in software development productivity in twenty years' time it will be necessary to engage all the adult population of the world in programming in order to supply all the manufactured micro-processors with programs.
Unfortunately the majority of the worried organizers of industry nowadays will wave these calculations away as yet another paradox of a type, to which we have become accustomed in our complicated world. Up till now there are many self-confident managers who still believe in the old maxim that demand gives rise to supply and that one can always find a good specialist if one is ready to pay well. A parallel with literacy will help us solve this paradox as well. Says Arthur Clark, who has already been in the 21st century by the sheer power of his foresight: "In future every man incompetent in the sciences will turn out, honestly speaking, to the lacking in education. And if he prides in this lack of natural sciences education, as is the custom nowadays, he will find himself in exactly the same position as the illiterate mediaeval barons declaring proudly that they have secretaries to do the counting and writing."
The mediaeval barons and their offspring do not exist any longer, every man has learned to count and to write, and secretaries have acquired new masters and new obligations.
The same is bound to happen with programming: managers who have no idea of computers and programming will go off the stage, professional programmers will become systems analysts and systems programmers, and ordinary programming will be mastered by everyone. This is precisely what I call the second literacy.
We thus proceed from the world of computers to the world of programs.
Monsieur Jourdain, a character of Moliere, was amazed to learn that he, while totally unaware of the fact, had been speaking prose throughout his life. The advent of computers, having given life to computer science, or informatics, proved an eye opener for the mankind, which, like the fascinated Monsieur Jourdain, has discovered that it lives in a world of programs, and that the productivity of the information model concept adds a new dimension to what St. John meant when saying: "In the beginning was the Word".
Yes, we do live in a world of programming and keep programming most of the time, whether we realize it or not.
It is perhaps open to argument, which is the single most momentous scientific breakthrough of the 20th century. But if we take the top five of even three discoveries, the general consensus will be that one of these is the fact that the development of an organism proceeds as implementation of a genetic program encoded in its genes. While further discussion of this is hardly appropriate here, I'd like to observe, in passing, that the computer science terminology, far from being a metaphor, catches the very essence of the intracellular growth and development processes, for which molecular structures and chemical processes provide some kind of circuitry and instructions repertoire.
The human organism is virtually saturated with programs. Each and every physiological process may be viewed as a vast, involved and carefully checked out program library, where an analysis of program structures (or call graphs - as a computer scientist would dub them) can lead to far-reaching conclusions and predictions concerning the organism's behaviour.
Actually, the entire domain of production relations, especially the production process itself, functions according to certain programs. A stable production process is always internally formalised, its effect being conditional on the smooth running of human-operated programs. Moreover, even in a stochastic process, like hunting or driving, it is only the sequence of events which is random and unpredictable, while reactions to them are nearly always carried out by automatically operated programs.
Take learning, i.e., acquisition of knowledge, or rather, of a capacity to do things - it is also programming. Prof. Seymour Papert, who was among the first psychologists and educationalists to have adopted a programming-oriented approach, convincingly argued in a series of his publications, of a decade ago, that a child learns to do something only after he has fully comprehended how this is to be done. As long as such comprehension has not been achieved, there is no point in repetitive training. Significantly enough, this applies not only to sequences of logically motivated reactions to previously identified stimuli, but also to real-time programs, including all kinds of motor actions (i.e., sports, music, games, etc).
Everyday life, especially that of a city dweller is a program-oriented activity. Anyone who follows a regimen might proudly refer to himself as a programmer, once he backtracks his crammed early morning routines running from the alarm clock sound to the working day start. Just ponder a little over the home tidying-up procedure, and you are sure to realize that creating a similar program would be a major challenge to top professional computer scientists engaged in developing applied program packs.
We tend to grumble over the social ailments of our times, such as escapism and passivity, and call for a more active and responsible attitude to life. But what is it like? Plainly speaking, it is an ability to formulate a program of action and to follow it.
Thus, the world of programs is by no means confined to the stuff fed into computer memories. It is above all the enormous stock of operational knowledge accumulated by mankind, which is being merely actualized now in computers, robots and automatic devices. A still greater amount of programs is stored in the gene pool of all the living creatures: its actualization is a basic task of biology with its new branches, notably of genetic engineering. Developmental psychology and the theory of behaviour are also molding new concepts essentially similar to those of computer science.
Now, given all this, we come to confront the problem of fundamentalized programming i.e., attempting to identify in it certain "natural entities" that might help bridge the gap between the machine world and the living one, between the programs of nature and those compiled by man. If it is our wish to place these natural entities within the conscious command of man, we have no choice but to include them as operational cognitive values into the structure and content of public education.
Let us. consider the premises for, and possible obstacles to, implementing this plan.
So, we wish to teach children the laws of programming. One doesn't need to actually know these, to realize that they would constitute a quite peculiar body of know-how. It is still to be found out to what extent this knowledge can be made accessible to children, yet the general impression is that their intellectual and operational potentials are far from being exhausted. Just think how much younger the technical sports, in particular swimming and gymnastics, have become over the recent years. I am not sure about the West, but in my country cars are still expensive, and more often than not one is, so to say, past his prime by the time he raises enough money to buy a car. A lot of people ask acrimoniously, just how many lives lost in traffic accidents could have been saved if everyone had learned to drive at the age of 14 or 15.
However, it is absolutely impossible to load down children with the condensed experience of the entire mankind. There are other risks inherent in such attempts. There is a children's song familiar to everyone in the USSR, in which the singer Alla Pugachyova humouristically portrays the dismal life of a little school boy who wonders why he has to cope with college level problems in his first grade and has no time for fun at all.
Everyone knows the romantic story by Rudyard Kipling about Maugli, the boy raised by wolves who eventually found his way back to the people. Similar cases sometimes occur in the tropical countries, yet with a much less happier outcome, and psychologists observe what they call a "Maugli effect, or syndrome" in young children unable to regain their faculties ruined by an alien environment or psychic overstrain. This imprinting is a natural phase in a child's development; moreover, everyone of us can be said to be a Maugli of his early years with regard to what happened and what was learned at that time.
Over the past decades developmental psychology has accumulated enough evidence pointing to the crucial importance of the early age in the learning period. Returning to my precious line of discussion, I'd like to remark that the problem of how to teach a child an ability to coordinate his actions and foresee their results is very far from the methodological issues involved, for instance, in the professional training of computer scientists. On the one hand, the setting has to be made natural to a child, while, on the other hand, it has to be rich enough to enable him to create, as the psychologists put it, a "theory" of the comprehended phenomenon.
It is my conviction that laws of programming and information processing do actually exist. They manifest themselves, on the one hand, in the form of operational rules reflecting the immediate experience of mankind. We all happen to know that Latin phrase "Divide et impera", taking it mostly for a concentrated expression of political cynicism. It was not until modern mathematics and computer science embodied it in the branch-and-bound method, that it was recognised as a powerful and productive heuristic tool of solving problems. Thus, on the other hand, the programming laws link up with mathematical education to compose a united, though not yet constructed, basis to foster operational and combinatorial thinking, abstract reasoning and an ability to act.
There is a simple programming problem which always impressed me as a sound example of a transition form knowledge to action. I shall write out the consequent stages of transition from a notation that expresses knowledge to a program that expresses the operations required to raise a number x to the nth degree, where n is an integer (see Fig 1).
| x0 = 1 | x0 = 1 | x0 = 1 | if n = 0 |
| xn+m = xn·xm | xn+1 = xn·x | x2n = (xn)2 | if n is even (xn/2)2 |
| xm·n = (xm)n | x2n = (xn)2 | x2n+1= x2n·x | if n is odd x·xn-1 |
| degree(x,n) = if n = 0 then 1 else if even n then degree (x, n/2)2 else x = degree (x, n-1) fi fi. | |||
I challenge everybody to suggest an interpretation of the facts and knowledge involved here at each stage in the transition from the obvious knowledge to a rather ingenious program. I would say only, that if we were able to compile every program in this way, while making coherent informal comments in the process, that would be exactly the fundamentalized programming we are looking forward to.
The question of whether or not computers should be allowed into schools is becoming somewhat scholastic these days, following the emergence of micro-processors. Computers have already found their way to schools and will pour there in every growing numbers. What is required now is a concerted intellectual and organizational effort to direct this process into a controlled and educationally viable channel.
There exists, of course, an actively professed view that using a programmed computer is little different from having a problem's solution in advance, and that electronic aids encourage nothing but mental laziness. Probably one of the best cartoons the "New Yorker" magazine carried in recent years pictured poor Johnny watching in dismay a heap of pocket calculators in front of him, while the equally exasperated Mammy keeps repeating the same question: "Now, look here, if you have five pocket calculators and then take away two of them, how many will remain?"
Such warnings against the risks inherent in "push button" education had been heard before as well, yet the solid experience substantiated by our work with children of various ages proves the contrary: it boosts the activity, inquisitiveness, and hence, the abilities of a child. However, the major factor here is the actual operational setting which must be stimulating.
Ways and meas of using computers to activate education are infinitely diverse: the only limits that exist here are set by our lack of fantasy or insufficient knowledge of child psychology.
Half the kinds at my local school have memorized the historical dates after a teenage programmer designed a date base of historical dates and set it on a computer, while another one quizzed the school teacher on it and caught her on several errors.
I am not sure which firm it was that started producing a toy computer for checking English spelling. A speech synthesizer pronounces a word, the child types it on a key board, the computer checks it and responds. One cannot expect a good speech synthesizer to be built into a pocket-size toy, yet the designers managed to benefit from its faults making it sound like Pinocchio. You can easily imagine the enthusiasm of a child who hears the voice of Pinocchio telling him "Try again, try again, and don't fail this time!"
Just one more observation of some interest. The school leavers taking entrance examinations at a university were invited to consult a computer information system. Queues kept forming in front of the terminal. Two university lecturers were sent in to help those waiting in the queue. Yet, the young people seemed unwilling to approach them and preferred standing in line to the computer. Their comment was: "We don't care about showing poor knowledge to a computer, but one feels embarrassed to do so in front of a teacher." In fact, the computer proves to be a more convenient source and controller of knowledge for children in many respects. Firstly, it is an all-knowing partner, while, secondly, it is no more than an instrument, a thing. A computer creates a play setting which is all the more precious in training, for opposite to real-life situations one can quit a game without damage to one's self-respect. Examples of this kind can be multiplied.
There are, however, more serious arguments in support of bringing computers into schools. I have already mentioned the work of Prof. Seymour Papert from the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His recent paper "Redefining childhood: the computer presence as an experiment in developmental psychology", generated common interest when he presented it at the IFIP-80 Congress, held in Japan and Australia3. Prof. Papert predicts a total invasion of the child's world by the computer, which is to become an intellecutel tool manipulated by the child as spontaneously as a pen or pencil, but with an infinitely greater variety of purpose. Interpreting the observations made by Prof. J. Piaget, which indicate that a child makes most of his intellectual findings individually, provided his environment is rich enough, Prof. Papert points out that once the environment is computerized, this unprecendented change in operational setting will call for new concepts in developmental psychology. Prof. Papert mentions, by way of example, alphabetic language acquisition being noticeably speeded up, and an earlier development of combinatorial abilities, which will make these fundamental skills available to children virtually before adolescence. Among other positive effects triggered by this shift, is that it may help overcome the infantilism and feeling of dependence, which is so widespread in modern urban societies.
In fact, this positive conclusion made by Prof. Papert could be taken tot constitute the climax of my analysis. No greaat imagination is needed to visualize the enormous shifts in practical education, once this educational goal is achieved.
I opened this paper with a metaphor. Now I can reveal what it implied. We are facing the prospects of an effectively unlimited development and spread of electronic computers in society. A computer is becoming an intellectual tool and partner in virtually every sphere of human life and activity. The need to actualize an informational world model in computer science terms and the evergrowing complexity of the environment make it imperative, and also possible, to greatly enhance the intellectual power of mankind. A significant role in this onward movement of the human intellect belongs to the laws of information processing, ways of knowledge-action transition, ability to write programs and reason on them, as well as foresee what they will lead to. A careful conceptual analysis will yield a sum total of knowledge concerning these items, which, combined with mathematical and linguistic conceptions, will provide a foundation of future general education. A computer will be more than a technical tool in the learning process. It will bring about a renovated intellectual background, a new operational setting to be organically and naturally exploited by the child in his development at home and at school. The opportunities offered by the computer and the new educational tasks will make a profound effect on the very foundations of developmental psychology, as well as on the existing didactic principles and educational approaches. Realization of these opportunities will shorten a child's way to intellectual maturity, increase his activity, improve his preparedness to occupational performance, including an ability to take part in the second industrial revolution precipitated by computers and new automation technologies.
In other words, programming is a second literacy. This is still a metaphor, yet the one which, in my view, brings to a focus the goals and the content of the present conference.
|
|||||
|
|||||
|
|||||
|
|||||
|
