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18 Computer science Pen-Enabled Computers for the “Ubiquitous Teacher” samuel kamin What Ubiquity Means The deepest and most difficult kinds of learning require a teacher who understands the student’s struggle to learn. The teacher engages with the student in a beneficial feedback loop, continually probing the student’s progress and adjusting her teaching to the student’s needs. While computers and the Internet make information ubiquitous, they cannot do the same for teachers—there are not enough of them to go around. Making learning truly ubiquitous requires that we make teachers ubiquitous. The research of my student, Chad Peiper, and I is aimed at using two technologies—pen-enabled computers (specifically, tablet PCs) and computer networks—to restore the essential feedback loop that is at the heart of the best teaching—not only for online courses, but for large inperson classes as well. To understand this odd phrase—“making teachers ubiquitous”—consider why one-on-one teaching is so effective (Cohen, Kulik, and Kulik 1982). In this mode, the teacher develops a keen sense of the student: what he knows, what he is capable of absorbing at any moment, how fast he can absorb it, and how best to present it. From the student’s point of view, the individual tutor is “ubiquitous” in the sense that the student never feels her absence: no sooner does a question come to the student’s mind than it is answered; no sooner does he learn one concept than he is presented with another. By contrast, a teacher in a large class—such as one commonly finds in a university—is barely present to the student, even during a lecture. And her absence is keenly felt: questions go unasked; misconceptions go uncorrected; computer science · 207 new subjects are introduced before old ones are mastered. A teacher in an online course, even a synchronous one, is at an even greater disadvantage, as are, accordingly, her students. Being ubiquitous in a class—online or in-person—means the teacher knows each student, not just in general, but right now. She can sense the student’s confusion , misunderstandings, lack of confidence, and disengagement, and counteract them. It is essential to the learning process that the student experience confusion and uncertainty, tries solving problems at the edge of his knowledge and abilities, and formulates questions based on these efforts. The importance of the teacher is in not letting these periods of uncertainty last longer than is helpful. Teaching is a dialectical process: the teacher explores the student’s understanding and provides instruction of a kind and at a pace appropriate to that student; the student attempts to perform as the teacher wishes, expressing, in word or deed, how well the teacher is succeeding; these expressions in turn inform the teacher’s next interaction with the student. Over the course of a lesson, the student becomes a better student, and the teacher becomes a better teacher. The employment of educational technology—more specifically, networked computers—is an attempt to raise the effective “ubiquity” of the teacher. I provide several examples below. But to set the stage a bit more, consider how teachers in noncomputerized classrooms enhance their presence to the students. In traditional classrooms, many techniques have been developed to, in effect, emulate the dialectical process between student and tutor described above. The simplest and most common is the in-class exercise, which can range from a simple question put to the class with a request for a show of hands (a “poll”) to a written problem to be handed in and graded. With in-class exercises, the teacher is attempting to give the students a task they can do, or can almost do, and is hoping in turn to gauge what the students are learning. It is, then, an attempt to recover “ubiquity” in the classroom. However, it falls short of reaching this goal in several ways. The exercises will not be appropriate for all students; this is inevitable as long as there is more than one student present. More fundamentally, in this procedure, the loop is rarely closed: the teacher gets only a rough idea of whether students were able to do the exercise, and if not, why not. If the exercise is a simple multiple-choice poll, the responses probably do not carry very much information (even if a majority of students “vote”); if it is more complicated, it is impractical to tally the answers in class. The exercise is worthwhile in giving...

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