Today, a thought about technological change and
learning. The University of Houston's College of
Engineering presents this series about the machines
that make our civilization run, and the people
whose ingenuity created them.
Let me try an idea on you.
It's about learning, but I'll begin with a
recollection: I saw my first movies, the early
talkies, at the Uptown Theater in St. Paul,
Minnesota. The ceiling of the Uptown was deep blue
with little light bulbs scattered across it. It
felt like an open courtyard under a starry,
moonless sky.
The images on the screen were grainy black and
white, sometimes toned sepia or green to give an
illusion of color. The actors stood still to recite
their lines where the microphones could pick them
up. They spoke in an accent peculiar to the formal
stage.
Today, when the Metro Goldwyn Mayer lion leans out
and roars at the beginning of a movie, I still feel
a ripple of the fear that I once felt for just an
instant back in the Uptown Theater. Everything I
experience at the movies, or on TV, plays against
that primitive dream world of my childhood. Modern
movies and TV can never occupy the same place in my
life as, say, books.
Books, of themselves, cannot trigger the same sense
of wonder and novelty. Their content can, of
course, but that's another matter. I take the
technology of books for granted. Their presence has
been an intimate part of my being, just as it was
for all my known forbears. I can no more imagine
the texture of a world without them than my
grandchildren can imagine a world without
computers. I'll never see the telephone the way my
father did. He was in grammar school before he ever
saw one, and he never did see it as a natural
extension of conversation.
Think about that as new technologies enter our
lives. I was in my early fifties when I got my
first PC. And every time I touch the keyboard I
remember changing the ribbon on my typewriter and
forgetting to remove carbon paper before I made an
erasure.
Last week I watched my five-year-old grandchild
turning on a computer to work a puzzle on it. You
and I are trying to teach our school children about
technologies that changed us from one thing into
another. But our children will never understand
that experience of change when they look at the
same technologies.
The problem runs deeper. For fifty years I've
watched everything I ever knew undergo a downward
synthesis. What I learned at the high end of
graduate school has either percolated downward into
undergraduate classrooms or it's been dropped as
irrelevant. We teachers are left wondering how to
put ourselves in our students' frame of reference
and, at the same time, find ways to display the
novelty that made things worth learning in the
first place.
The problem always brings me back to the Uptown
theater with its stars twinkling in an imitation
sky -- with celluloid images calling my imagination
to provide what they could only hint at. I wish I
could see how to go about teaching cutting-edge
technologies to students who can look at that MGM
lion without feeling either fear or excitement.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
