C OMME NT Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, and Computing (Abstract of a talk delivered by Arthur Luehrmann to the Educational Technology Symposium, State University of New York at Stony Brook, September 24, 1973. For copies of the 15-page address, write the author at Kiewit Computation Center, Dartmouth College, Hanover NH 03755.) The promise of technology has always been an increase in productivity. Labor-intensive activities become machine-intensive. It seems likely that this traditional scenario applies to technology and education, probably the most labor-intensive of human activities. New communications technology, new information-processing technology and new systems for creating and validating machine-administered courses of instruction will surely lead to cost reductions and greater personal convenience and individualization. Quite properly, the computer has been singled out as the particular technology most likely to bring about this quantitative improvement in educational productivity. In so doing, however, the majority of educators, computer professionals and federal policymakers appear to have overlooked a qualitatiye change in educational productivity made uniquely possible by computers. The thesis of this paper, put in the negative, is that it is woefully inadequate to expect that the only important educational function to be served by computers is to reduce the manpower required to manage instruction (CMI) or the number of teachers required to deliver it (CAI). While these are excellent goals, they distract one's attention from matters of much greater intellectual profundity, namely the ways in which a student's knowledge of computing might affect the content and intellectual structure of his education. It is the rincipal affirmative thesis of this paper that computin8 is a new a n d fundamental intellectual resource t in the same sense that readln~ and writing and mathematics are fundamental intellectual resources. To harness the power of the computer to deliver and manage instruction, but to fail to teach students how to harness the power of the computer for their own purposes--to do mathematics, to do survey data analysis, to do music, to do art, to do-~hysics--would be a--tragic misdirection of our-efforts. ~ n c e comput-fng is a new intellectual resource, and since, even at schools and universities with computers, only very small efforts have been made to explore the impact of computer literacy on t e a ~ i n g and learning within various subject areas, the need for experimentation here is greatest. Yet, support for such experiments is hard to come by. The reason appears to b e t h a t "productivity" is translated in most minds to mean "cost reduction". CAI and CMI experiments aim for cost reductions by automating and improving the delivery system. In contrast, the computer uses described in this paper are guaranteed to add cost to education. But, it is contended that a knowledge of computing, app~i~[-throughout the curriculum, will add value far in excess of the cost--a situation that is also described by t ~ term "productivity". ACM SIGCUE v7 #4 October

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