
DATE: Wednesday, September 3, 1997          TAG: 9709030471

SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A1   EDITION: FINAL 
SERIES: Back to School 

SOURCE: BY LORRAINE EATON, STAFF WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:  150 lines

A NEW WAY OF TEACHING CONNECTING WITH STUDENTS IN THE CYBER AGE STUDENTS AREN'T LAZY - THEY JUST LEARN DIFFERENTLY IN THE COMPUTER AGE, A SCIENTIST SAYS.

Virginia's standards of learning have changed over the past 10 years, but so have our children.

Today's youth are often tagged as lazy learners who expect to be entertained in the classroom. But one of the nation's top scientists believes that children in this age of television, computers and video games are actually crying out for a new style of teaching.

For the first time, Virginia's new standards of learning include computer skills including building a Web page and using spreadsheets. Fifty percent of U.S. schools had access to the Internet in May 1996, according to the U.S. Dept. of Education, up from 35 percent just one year earlier.

As the world moves into the cyber age, there are ``very fundamental shifts'' going on in the thinking and learning styles of our children, said John Seely Brown, chief scientist at Xerox and co-founder of the Institute for Research on Learning in Menlo Park, Calif.

The shifts are largely driven by increasing use of computers, computer games and television by young people, Brown said.

As more children have access to computers at schools, at home and in libraries, educators, education reformers and parents should take note of changes in children's learning styles, said Brown.

Most adults grew up in an authority-based education system where a teacher in front of a chalkboard told students what they needed to know. Local students said that a fair amount of that still goes on today.

``Today's students,'' Brown said, ``even those going into our quote-unquote best universities, can't any longer sit still in front of a lecture and have an authority figure tell them information, let alone (absorb) knowledge.''

Brown heads Xerox's elite team of innovators at the Palo Alto Research Center, a place that has been dubbed ``the Mozart of industrial research labs.''

It's where overlapping windows and the laser printer were developed, and it's a place where scientists hire children as young as 7 years old to help them understand how the future workplace should operate.

At the non-profit Institute for Research on Learning, Brown explores how humans process information and how that is changing in the cyber age.

One basic change is that many children no longer respond well to the authority-based learning that was the basis of their parents' education. ``We're finding more and more kids today actually want to discover. They want to try things out,'' Brown said.

Brown is not alone in his thinking.

``I'd really like to see some changes in traditional schools,'' said Alice P. Wakefield, an associate professor of early childhood education at Old Dominion University who studies children's learning styles. She agrees with Brown, that the authoritarian style of teaching isn't the most effective way to teach today's children.

Children today need to do, not to just be told, Brown said. In the old world, homework served the purpose of practicing, or doing. But too often homework became an exercise in how to ``read the teacher,'' a time to figure out what information the teacher would include on a test.

``That taught us a very valuable skill - how to play the game,'' Brown said, but it's not the kind of experimenting that today's students need or crave.

Brown sums up the way young people in the cyber age learn best in a process he calls ``link, lurk and learn.''

Take, for example, a computer-literate student interested in learning about World War II. The student can tap into one of several discussion groups on the Internet and lurk in the perimeter to find out more about the war without joining in the discussion.

``This is the essence of apprentice type learning,'' Brown said.

Then the student can join the discussion, asking questions and viewing images, navigating in and around the information available. ``Now there is this sense of action, being able to find out the information he wants.''

Then another skill is used, one that Brown calls bricolage, a French word for the ability to build something with the materials at hand. Brown has noticed that young people seem to develop this skill on their own. Older people, Brown said, tend to think linearly. Younger people are more apt to ``cobble'' material that they discover together.

Incidentally, this is the same process and set of skills that millions of children use at the neighborhood arcade when they are learning to play a new video game. Linking, lurking and learning coupled with bricolage ``is a very powerful bundle - a set of skills that really is the essence of how kids want to function and how they are functioning,'' Brown said.

These skills are probably more appreciated and nurtured in athletic teams than in the classroom, Brown said. On the soccer fields and gridirons is where some of the best teaching models are to be found.

``The best schools are almost unconsciously picking up more of those models of high performance teams - thinking of teacher as coach,'' Brown said.

But the authority-based teaching model is not totally outdated. ``It's a shift in emphasis,'' he said. ``There is not one right and one wrong way.''

``I'm not arguing that beautifully prepared (lesson plans) don't play a role,'' Brown added, ``but they should be supplemented with experimental learning.''

Local students interviewed recently easily rattled off their good and not-so-good teachers.

Effective teachers tend to be young, and usually don't lecture, they said. One Virginia Beach student talked about a teacher who let her class skateboard through the hallways and roll bowling balls down bleachers to teach the laws of physics. She still remembers the laws and equations.

``Most young teachers do different things, play games, or do something that makes you remember,'' said Kelli Davis, a junior at Indian River High School in Chesapeake. ``Everything is so high tech today. The old ways have kind of played out. We have a different way of learning, or wanting to learn.''

Aside from changes in learning styles, the cyber age will require that students develop entirely new skills.

For example, by the end of eighth-grade, the new standards mandate that each student be capable of researching topics by gathering information from a variety of places in cyber space. Students should ``retrieve and select relevant information,'' the standards say.

In the cyber age, Brown said, these ``selection'' skills cannot be overemphasized. Teachers and parents need to help students develop a new set of reasoning skills that will help them make judgments about what they find on the Internet.

When students surf the Web for information to write reports, the usual institutions that verify the information as correct aren't there. In the age of paper research, students knew that what they read in World Book encyclopedias was factual, or that an article clipped from the New York Times was accurate. There was no reason to question the validity of the information available to them in the public library. A lot of the credibility was based on brand recognition.

``In the cyber age, those institutions haven't emerged yet,'' Brown said. Instead, students are faced with volumes of information from such disparate places as a Shakespeare buff's home page to a chat group about chemistry.

Teachers and parents should ask students, ``Is it true or merely interesting?''

Brown pointed to a World Wide Web incident last month when he and others around the globe were thrilled that Kurt Vonnegut's commencement speech from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was on the Web. Several scientists sent Brown a copy of the eloquent work. Only problem was that Vonnegut never gave a commencement speech at MIT.

``It was a little bit of a hoax, everyone I know fell into this,'' Brown said. ``We need to teach students to make these judgments, to ask `Why should I believe this?' This is going to be an increasingly important skill.''

Both Wakefield and Brown said that there are great teachers out there, but more teachers and education reformers need to roll with the changes.

``I think a lot of students in our graduate programs are really teaching differently, even in schools with traditional expectations,'' Wakefield said. ``They have learned to balance the expectations with what they know is in the best interest of children. That's when you see the magic.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo

STEVE EARLEY/The Virginian-Pilot

BACK TO SCHOOL

Third-grader Brittany Carawan, 8, left, and Anna Gologoski, 6,

search for Anna's first-grade classroom at Christopher Farms

Elementary School in Virginia Beach. More than 177,000 students went

back to school Tuesday in Hampton Roads.

Color photo

John Seely Brown, Xerox scientist