Well, my name's Dick Clark. Right now I'm
at the University of Southern California, where I'm a
professor of educational psychology and technology and a professor of
clinical professor of surgery at this point. Um,
my psych appointments in education, my surgery appointments in
the med school, but it's mostly for surgical education
. Also co director of center called the Center for
cognitive Technology. And what the center does now basically
is try to, we take on challenges from other
research centers and think tanks and some corporations to try
to answer questions. So one of my real interest
now is in what evidence is there out there?
That would help answer a question often questions that have
to do about what makes a difference. What can
we do to achieve a certain goal? What's the
, what's the weight of the research evidence? Pro
and con either in favor of her against certain strategies
or methods for accomplishing goals. And so we call
it cognitive technology because obviously our interests primarily is an
expertise and cognition and what it is that impacts that
for learning and performance and so on. Great.
I also actually uh you know, like a lot
of people in our field, I think I worked
with a lot of organizations, I worked with companies
, I work with governments, I work with the
military and in all those kinds of projects. I
really am interested in application. I mean as I've
moved in my career, I've come to the point
where I'm very interested in research, but I'm really
more interested in it in terms of how can it
inform practice and once you do decide, what do
you think is the best thing to do, how
do you spend the time and effort and handle the
complexities are involved in actually implementing things and making certain
that they work. So that's what fascinates me now
. So that's all in conjunction with what I'm doing
at the University of southern California. So it's kind
of like what what was it that got me started
in in this career? It's actually nobody has ever
asked me this question before. And um it was
an unusual circumstance. I was going to be a
constitutional lawyer, I mean that was just I was
a historian and a undergraduate history, political science fascinated
with the history of the constitution and constitutional law.
And uh then I began to find out that very
few lawyers ever practiced before the Supreme Court. Uh
huh. And then one day I picked up a
journal, I can't remember what the context was.
I think it was in a course that I was
taking graduate school and the journalist called a VCR audiovisual
Communication review, which was the precursor of the CT
journalists at this point. I think the C T
J. Used to be called A VCR and the
article that I read was a study by a couple
of people on the use of colour versus black and
white to teach people how to how to a NCO
owed transistors at that point transistors, electrical transistors were
coded in different colours and the study has had was
conducted. It was in the military, I think
it was conducted indicated that it did not matter if
he used color to teach colour coding interpretation of transistors
. And I said I can't be if it's a
colour task, if people have to have to be
able to recognize the colors and the colors are indicating
their codes, you have to know about. The
colour must make it to these guys must be wrong
. So I'm gonna go figure out what's going on
here. And I I really I don't know why
it's so intrigued me and fascinated me, but I
really spent a lot of time and I actually found
out that they were right. I mean, I
, I replicated the study, I did a whole
lot of things and then I was hooked. I
mean, frankly from that day forward, and by
the way before that I had been a television director
, I've been a film director. I taught,
actually, taught courses in the history of the cinema
and so on. And uh, even though I
was thinking about going into laws of profession, I
had some, I dropped out of school for a
while between degrees and had spent some time in the
entertainment industry. And uh, I think that probably
there was a fascination that's starting to get hooked by
media at that point. And I think that drove
me to be interested in that question. And then
that pushed me over that and finding out that constitutional
law was probably not something that was going to be
available. That pushed me over the edge to do
this. And really, I've never looked back,
I think it was a great decision. If I
had to think about how I have changed in what
my interests are over time, I see it as
kind of a steady growth. I mean, I
see it as an evolution, not a not huge
gaps or changes necessarily. I I think that once
I decided that I was interested in research, I
never looked back. But that didn't happen until my
doctoral program. I was at indiana University. It's
a great time to be there. I think it
was the largest program in the country. It was
an extraordinary situation. We had the advantage of having
a lot of people from other universities who are really
well known would come in indiana at the time,
had a fellowship program for doctoral students that I was
lucky enough to get into. And it allowed us
to have classes of five or six people that allowed
us to bring in faculty from other universities as instructors
. So we had people from stanford. We have
people from Harvard, we had people from Yeah,
we had people from Oxford. We had people from
great places that came in. And it was a
very exciting context to be a student. And what
happened to me there is that I really bought into
research. I mean, I had been a skeptic
beforehand. I really thought it was a lot of
nonsense. I thought of myself as an artist and
a historian and so on and so forth. And
I began to realize how powerful research was. And
that led me then to begin to think about how
would I make a difference in research and how would
I uhh make a difference by, let's say,
being a consumer of research. I've never been inclined
to be an experimentalist. Actually. I'm sorry it
bores the hell out of me. And yet I'm
so glad there are people that are excited by it
. And I love to generate hypothesis. I love
to look at data once it's available to analyze whatever
happens between the hypothesis and the data makes me want
to go to sleep. So I ended up spending
a lot of time actually reading other people's research.
It's kind of a vampire ish. Kind of inclination
that I have. All right. So, uh
I decided very early that since I had this background
in media and I've gotten fascinated by that color versus
black and white study, maybe I had to go
out and take a look at the media research and
see what was perking there. So my first,
my first effort, really significant effort was to go
and read all the radio research that I could.
I still think I'm doing the same thing. I
just have changed the questions that I'm trying to answer
now. And I actually, while I think I've
got a lot of different directions and explored a lot
of questions in my life, I think the way
I'm going about it has not changed. I hope
I've gotten better at it. I hope I've gotten
, let's say more, not just more skill,
but more insightful about doing it. I'm not sure
that's true, but I do know that I don't
think the evolution is more in terms of increasing skill
rather than a change of direction. Is that fair
? I mean, I can talk about the way
I think it changed and about what I think we're
the big problems that I've tried to solve. But
basically if you ask how is what I was doing
different than how I'm doing now, I think I'm
just doing more of it. Well, there really
have been some changes. I really started out in
this area about 19, I would say 65 I
think was the first time I had a job in
university teaching that's a lot of years ago. And
at that time I think if anybody actually was interested
in research, you are radical. You were,
you were an odd sort of quirky darkie kind of
person. That's number one and number two at that
time, behaviorism, one of the islam is one
of the dogmas was in charge and I was not
interested that much in behaviors and deeply respected it then
and now I was always interested in cognition and you
know what happens in people's minds and how would you
know about that understanding? It's difficult to measure and
so on and so forth. And so um my
take was that, that I wanted very much to
try to understand how learning occurred and that was I
think at the root of all of the questions that
I was asking myself, but when I set out
to do the work on media, the question I
asked was what media are going to make more difference
for learning than others or what kind of learning is
facilitated by which different kind of which medium and what
kind of people work better with, which kind of
media for which kinds of learning outcomes. So that
was really the first question that really intrigued me.
Yeah, sure. I think the ideas that have
uh sort of intrigued me and generated a lot of
growth, um, I think first of all,
it was finding out that that one of the huge
benefits of research was that I had the opportunity to
find out I was wrong. And actually, for
my whole life, I think that's one of the
most important insights for me is that my instincts are
not always correct and and sometimes they're just almost fatally
wrong. I it made me feel more open to
the idea that um it's not about being right,
it's not about being instinctively right, it's like trying
to find the best solution for something whatever works best
is what it's about and not being, having your
guesses about what works best confirmed. And research actually
does pull you up short all the time in that
regard, because you always start out with a guess
and and all the researchers I've ever known in my
life, Very few of them have had the capability
to actually make a totally accurate prediction about what was
going to happen in an experiment never comes out the
way that you expect that it was going to.
So you're always, there's always this opportunity to learn
something. So that's that's number one for me,
is is uh sort of an intellectual self correction process
that you go through, which is one of the
ways that I see research. The second thing is
that, um, I have a sense that there's
a possibility out there and research to actually get huge
and important insights. I think if you are willing
to keep an open mind and to tolerate a lot
of uncertainty and to continue to take in information in
a kind of systematic way by, for example,
reading study after study after study on a similar family
of questions. This this sort of intellectual pattern matching
that we do almost automatically. What happens is a
click happens one day you just, you read a
whole lot of stuff and all of a sudden boom
, it starts to fall into place and you begin
to see that there's a pattern here. That pattern
may just at that point be a hypothesis, but
it's true. It's often an insight that's worth pursuing
. And I've had that happen a number of times
and I think I could count them on my on
one hand, but there are some of the most
joyful experiences I ever had. Uh so that that
that inciting not only being corrected and being self corrected
and having the opportunity to find out what works,
but also secondarily, I think for me to see
patterns in the third area that I think has been
important to me is ways to think. For example
, for about 15 years I spent my first five
years after my doctor at Stanford, I was on
the faculty there. I had this great opportunity to
work with some really bright people. Um lee Cronin
back who was one of terms whiz kids, a
brilliant guy who by the way, is probably the
only person I ever met when he made a prediction
about what was going to happen in the experimented almost
always happen that way. Even extraordinary person and a
Pat Supes and a few other really, really bright
people who nobody remembers their name, I suppose at
this point all the chrome boxes probably somebody almost everybody
knows. And then to work with those people day
after day and to sort of see what, how
they thought and how their minds work. And one
thing I picked up there was what something called aptitude
treatment interaction where there was this whole history we went
through in the 60s, 70s and into the early
80s where we were looking for ways to match people
with instructional treatments that were best for them. I
think we're still trying to do that, but I
don't think that I think actually that sort of died
out in any kind of systematic way. But it
really encouraged me to go beyond thinking about things like
technology or instructional strategies and begin to think about people
and cognition and how are learning mechanisms, interact with
the environments were in and so on and so forth
. After a while, after a long while I
think I decided this after two treatment interaction stuff doesn't
work for a variety of reasons. And that was
another insight, but that came after only a very
long time. Uh, we could talk about why
not, but finding out that it didn't work was
almost important to me, is finding out that it
was there and it might work. So whether something
works or not is not to me important in terms
of an insight, is finding out something that pretty
good evidence and you can try to feel confident that
you can go forward with it until you find better
evidence that it either doesn't work or something else works
better. Uh, what else? Uh, I
think maybe one other thing and that is um,
something that I got challenged for after I published an
article on media and its impact on learning, probably
the one that I'm known best for after all the
years, God help me, because it's actually a
curse professionally to be known for saying something doesn't work
. But um I got an email from a guy
named bob Hynek who was a big leader in the
field back in the sixties and seventies, he had
been the editor of one of the, I think
it was Mcmillan or something, came to Indiana,
was a professor there And after I published that piece
in 1983 where I made the argument that media don't
cause learning that it's. that's probably something called an
instructional method or strategies or whatever you want to call
it, bob wrote me a nice acknowledgement letter and
said, you know, that's really nice insight and
I think actually people are going to gradually come around
to it because the evidence looks pretty compelling, but
he said, you know, Dick, you basically
have talked about what doesn't work and I have a
challenge for you and the challenges what does work.
And it kind of, it was like a,
like a welcome slap in the face, you know
, I thought, you know, he's right,
okay. You know, one of the problems I
think is that research is actually pretty eloquent about what
doesn't work and it's not so able to give you
as much information about what does work, given the
plethora of things that can influence the situation. So
I then actually made 180 from looking at that question
of what doesn't work and began to spend my career
on what does not, that I'm backed off completely
from coming to the conclusion that something doesn't work.
There's a huge number of myths in this field of
education that are embarrassing. Actually, one of those
mrs Learning Styles, you know, four men analysis
and how many reviews in the last decade that indicate
all of them that doesn't work at all. And
yet it's probably taught in most every graduate school in
the country as if it's gospel. Um, I'll
mention a few others. They're all controversial, but
things like constructivism, I don't think that works actually
. I shouldn't use the isM, but asking people
to construct something to learn, it is not effective
or efficient way for people to learn things. So
they're still, it's important to sort of point out
that things that people think work dull. But I
think you really have, I'm now taking on the
responsibility personally to then say, okay, what does
, what does make a difference? And that's not
as easy. I think it's not as easy because
it's harder to provide evidence for that. It's not
as easy because you're swimming upstream against people's beliefs.
People change their beliefs very slowly and tortuously and some
people think not at all Very, very seldom.
I think. Matter of fact, I just wrote
a chapter on change as a tribute to my advisor
during my graduate program. When he retired, I
was an adviser, Gabby Solomon at indiana. And
when Solomon retired, he was working in trying to
make peace in the Middle East. He was running
a big piece center in the Middle East. So
we did a book on change. So I was
challenged to go out and take a look to see
what's the literature and personal change, How what's the
best way for people to try to change change individuals
, Change groups, change societies and so on and
so on. And I came away about as depressed
as I've ever been from that review. I really
think it's very difficult to change. And so now
that's one of the things I'm really curious about is
how do we change conceptual? How do we change
ideas? How do we how do we open ourselves
more flexibly to ideas and to try to deal with
data and evidence and way things rather than constantly look
for confirmation. So it kind of ties me back
full circle to where I started with this research thing
, which was I think the great advantage of it
is that it lets us know when we have misperceived
what might be real itself. It's a self correction
. It's sort of intellectual correction device and one that
you hope operates not just on an individual level,
but on a cultural, you know, they're really
there's so many people, it's hard to choose.
But I I would start out to say probably Gabby
Solomon, my chair had a huge impact on me
. There was a uh Gabby is a brilliant guy
, he's one of these people who uh I mean
it's just talking to us like being in a strong
wind, just like he's a force of nature guy
, was about three ft tall And he had a
colonel I think in the Israeli military as well as
a PhD, got his PhD at Stanford in 18
months. There was a cop, they didn't want
to give him the degree because they figured he hadn't
been there long enough and suffered enough I think.
But they finally relented a really brilliant fellow who got
curious about technology uh, to our benefit, I
think because a lot of what goes on in our
field right now, I think it's due to to
him and his ideas seminars with him were we would
have a seminar that started at two o'clock, was
supposed to finish at 3 30 maybe maybe we would
go home at seven or eight at night and wouldn't
have gone out to eat, we wouldn't have gone
out for anything. Actually, it was that kind
of excitement. It was really terrific. And it
was because this guy's mind really worked in ways that
I think we're very engaging and he both challenged,
he had strong opinions and they were so strong,
you couldn't help but disagree with him and he loved
that. And so it was a constant kind of
debate and dialogue about what worked and what made a
difference to people. So Gabby was a huge,
huge impact. I think secondly, when I left
, my graduate program went to stanford, I think
lee Chromebook was a big, it was a big
influence chrome back, was a statistician, he was
a measurement person and I had not actually done a
lot of work and measurement. And early on I
did not was not a person who loved math.
I learned to because I just took it on as
a challenge. At some point in my doctoral program
, I was doing so poorly and statistics. I
had to slap myself and say stop this. You're
going to go learn statistics. And I did and
finally understood it actually, but at least I think
I did. But crumb back was just one of
those people who he was a great teacher. He
would he get to know you really fast and then
he would begin to think about what was it that
you needed to be better at. That if you
got better at it, it was going to serve
your goals. He would point it out to you
and then he would systematically start to feed you with
challenges that he knew if you were willing to take
them on, you're going to improve in your expertise
, whatever it was and you know, his approach
I think has been totally validated by everything we've learned
about expertise in the last few years anyway. This
work by a K. Anders Ericsson for example,
on what is it that characterizes experts who make original
contributions? His view is that they don't they don't
rest on their laurels, they always are asking themselves
what don't they do well that they did better,
they might be more successful. So like an actor
or an actress who there are bit players and then
there are people that take on a huge variety of
roles and that's that huge variety that makes a great
actor actress. And that was that was uh that
was his view about I think both, that's that's
both Ericsson's view and I think that's basically what what
currently Chrome book was about. Also. Um now
there was also another guy there named Dick Snow who
since has died. But Snow is a psychologist and
he was very interested in this aptitude treatment in our
action stuff. And he was the only person in
education at stanford at that time. He was interested
in technology also and but he had this good idea
, I mean he had a good approach to it
and so he was always challenging. He was probably
the reason why I sat down and did that study
that resulted in the article about the media Don't make
a difference to learning as they make a difference in
cost or time but not learning. And it was
that it was a constant challenge from him I think
to think in a research sense about this that really
made a difference to me early on since then.
And that was really my graduate school years. And
the first few years after I got out, I
was in a university. I don't think I could
count the number of people that have had a huge
influence and there have been many of them. And
I think that if I even started to make a
list, somebody that probably had equal or even greater
, I forget people that had equally or greater influence
. I think people have a huge influence on you
when you're in school because you go there to open
your mind to consider alternatives. Some people go there
to have their their assumptions confirmed. But if it's
a good school that doesn't happen. I think matter
of fact, I used to judge graduate student success
almost to the extent of which they changed their minds
when they were in graduate programs and I didn't care
which direction they changed their mind wasn't whether I agreed
with them or not, It was if you're not
changing your mind, you're not thinking enough, you're
not really looking at evidence enough or else you're the
genius of the century and that's a bit unlikely at
this point. So I think that's where you're most
most influenced after that. You tend to influence yourself
and it tends to be an interaction with people I
think. And there have been many people I've interacted
with. I've tried hard over the years to to
collaborate with people on research. So a lot of
my articles are co authored and those co authors are
co author ships are really collaboration or intellectual collaborations with
people. And I think I would also, I
would include a lot of my students as people that
had a huge influence on me. Um you get
into these relationships with a graduate program with students that
are very intense and they're very intellectual and there are
personal personal relationships too. But the idea you're constantly
exchanging ideas, you're constantly challenging each other. You're
constantly doing things both as individuals and groups. And
I think probably a lot of the most important insights
I've had or when I've been interacting with students,
particularly when I've been trying to explain something to a
student or to make a point and found a student
who found a twist in a that I hadn't thought
about an insight that just blew me away. And
that really started me thinking somehow differently. And I
think actually it's those, it's those settings in those
contexts where I've learned more than anything. So I'd
include almost all of the doctoral students that I've had
over the years. The things that things that have
carried through all of my research in my life is
sort of trajectory that I've been on I think is
characterized best buy first the fact that I don't,
well I don't trust anything absolutely. I trust research
in a more than I trust a whole lot of
other things. I think when bright people sit out
in a as far away as they can to test
ideas and they do that intelligently, I think the
results of those are genuinely worth spending time to understand
whether you agree with them or not is irrelevant to
some extent. It's that there's some kind of absolute
truth in data. I'm sorry. I don't even
believe I said that, but I think I actually
believe it. The problem is to interpret the data
and there is no absolute truth in the interpretation of
the data data is what it is. It came
there by all the forces that actually controlled and your
job is to figure out how it got to be
that way. And I think that's what if there's
anything that's threaded through everything I've done. I really
think that's really important. That may be one of
the reasons why I'm not as dedicated an experimentalist as
a lot of people would be a lot of experimentalists
because they generate the stuff that interests me the most
. They just don't love to do it. Um
So that's a be the kind of questions that interest
me are questions about what makes a difference. And
if I had to pick one thing that I was
most interested in more than anything else, it's learning
. I think we too quickly forget, particularly in
in instructional technology, educational technology, that what we're
about is learning. We're not about technology, we're
not about machines were not about social media, were
not about whatever the newest gimmick is that's out there
were out what makes a difference in the learning of
people at all ages, all stages in all contexts
. Um and we forget that way too often,
especially in our enthusiasm for solutions. So one of
the other things that I think has been part of
my trajectory is to think always about the fact that
um that the temptation is to find a solution and
go try to find a problem that it will solve
. I'm gonna full stop there just for a second
because I think that's a to me that was a
mind bending insight when I had, if you look
at the world and if you look at our field
and you ask yourself what's going on, you'll find
out what's going on, as if people are trying
to sell solutions to other people. I use the
word sellin parent parentheses and quotation marks. It's not
that we're out there trying to get money for them
, although some people are but we're like trying to
convince people that this is a solution to your problem
and we need to turn that around two. What
problem are we solving? Be really clear about that
and then spend time thinking about what solutions might there
be to that problem as you have defined it.
And if you don't find solutions, go back and
ask yourself whether you've actually carefully enough and accurately enough
to find the problem that you're trying to solve.
So that's been a significant part of the trajectory for
me is to try to be clear about the problems
that I want to solve and to be able to
recognize them, to be able to measure them to
be able to know when I've solved them before.
I'm arrogant enough to begin to make some assumptions about
what might actually accomplish that goal. I shouldn't have
to hesitate about what contributions I've made that I'm most
proud of. I have actually mixed feelings about a
lot of what people think are my contributions. for
example, I think if a lot of people would
point to that Article 1983, the and the grocery
truck analogy, which by the way I took from
one of my graduate students who have acknowledged many times
since, but it's very important. Somebody was telling
me yesterday saw bumper sticker that said my other car
is a grocery truck, okay? Um and by
the way, that analogy is what people remember,
A lot of people have not read the article,
it's a legion, but very few people have not
heard the analogy a week after that article appeared in
the journal, the president of Harvard was interviewed and
used the analogy he had read the article and used
the analogy is the reason why he wasn't going to
support the purchasing of computers for the faculty at Harvard
. This is not very appropriate interpretation of the article
, actually. So, uh, the reason why
I have misgivings about it is not because I got
hate mail afterwards and I did, I can't tell
you how many letters I received. It said I
was gonna I was taking food out of people's kids
mouths and so on and so forth with this.
They're gonna let me go, they're gonna fire me
. I think it has to do with it was
a very negative event. It was what didn't work
, I sense have understood that in order to actually
ask people to change their minds about something that they
are, that they're so committed to, that they're
not really open to evidence about it, is to
show them evidence that what they think about it is
not accurate as opposed to handing them an alternative.
At that point, people aren't often open to an
alternative unless what they believe works, they find out
doesn't work. And so I've forgiven myself for doing
something really negative and it was that's actually a negative
event because then it opened the door, I think
more towards the growth of instructional design, because that's
what works in my view or at least some form
of that. Um And while we can argue a
lot about what features of instruction make a difference in
learning. And there are people now that argue that
instruction doesn't matter, the instructive, as constructive as
thing makes me crazy, but there really are people
out there in our field who say that instruction is
not the solution. Um maybe it's their definition of
instruction, but but the whole idea of challenging your
assumption about what makes a difference is part of the
full process of what does make a difference. So
I would say I've tried to work both sides of
the fence when I get a challenge at the research
center to go out and investigate a kind of an
area of research to answer a question about some kind
of human performance or learning or something like that.
Some certain type of learning or certain context. I
often start out with by asking what is that people
think right now? What what's the what's the communist
, what appears to be the most common assumption about
what this is, Even if there's a variety of
points of view, what are they, what are
the most difficult? And then I began to look
to see what's the evidence against those typical points of
view. And often it's there and sometimes it's they're
pretty obviously and people are not looking at it.
And then once I get that, and then I
take the next step and say, well, what
appears to be the most powerful strategy that you could
use in order to accomplish this goal or solve this
problem that uh, that somebody has challenged us has
, and our take is, and I say,
are because there's a team that I work with,
of course our take is that the combination of those
two things is really essential in order to try to
make a contribution. So reflecting back on my own
career, I think it was the media stuff.
First. I still do love media. I have
to say, I mean I want that in history
. I'm a, I'm a media nut. I
love movies, I like, I like video games
, I like everything having to do with visual media
. It's just an extraordinary entertainment experiences. I like
having my sense of reality interrupted. I'm excited about
the fact that media is developed in a way and
it's going to continue to develop in a way that
that removes our disbelief about whether we're in an unreal
situation or not. That's hugely exciting. Um,
and I'm tempted to go off on some tangent here
about what it means to be, have your sense
of disbelief interrupted but I will not give in to
the temptation because to me media is the answer to
some questions but learning is not one of those questions
. Okay, so so that to me was a
contribution. I think the 2nd 1 was, I
have spent a huge number of years trying to characterize
this thing that early only Chromebook and Dick Snow called
instructional method and what they meant by that was some
external support. It's now called scaffolding or I don't
care what term you give it. But some external
support for unnecessary cognitive process that is required for somebody
to learn something and this external support only can or
should happen when people can't or won't do it for
themselves. Now that's that statement is something we've known
since easily since the 60s. And there are people
that claim there are people in 1920s that were saying
these things. Nobody pays attention, I'm sorry to
say, but it really has been there for quite
a while. And in my view I've tried hard
to for example to get people to be really clear
about what they mean by any treatment that they think
influences learning and why. What's their explanation for why
that particular treatment, That particular intervention method, call
it whatever you wish should actually have an influence on
learning should have should have led to whatever variant you
noticed in the outcome of learning study and to try
to talk journal editors into forcing people that submit articles
to actually be clear about what their treatments are.
Half the journal articles, I have more than half
three quarters the journal articles I read, I have
no idea what the intervention was. I mean I
understand what person says it, it was pick almost
anything people advocate today, things like problem based learning
. Well, It's a great idea of problem-based learning
. The problem is there's like 50 different definitions of
operational definitions actually what problem-based learning is and that includes
People whose definition was at 1.3 or four years ago
, but it's changed now, but they're still calling
it by the same name. How do you have
a dialogue when you can't define the terms that you're
having a dialogue about uh, serious games? There's
this fascination with uh, electronic games is because kids
and adults are treated by them select using for education
. Nobody has yet defined operationally defined what a learning
game is, what a serious game is. The
military had a big conference on this a few years
ago, confused just two years ago now, and
they brought in a lot of top people and names
that everybody would recognize in games and educational research and
said, we want you do two things, we
want you to define what they call it, a
serious game is. And secondly, we want to
tell you what we want you to sort of try
to agree on what are the elements of an effective
learning game or serious game. After two days,
this group had not agreed on the definition of a
game and I think that fairly characterizes the whole field
of instructional technology and even I'd go even further to
educational research. We are it we hide from the
challenge to be operationally clear about what we're doing because
the moment we do that, we open ourselves to
criticism and we allow each other to do that so
that nobody comes after us. To some extent,
there has to be part of the motivation here is
to we built this big tent, we allow people
to come in with a whole lot of ideas,
which is absolutely terrific, but we also allow them
not to be clear about what it is that they're
doing. And that to me is something that I've
been very much against them really have tried to change
. I don't think we can advance until we challenge
each other to be precise, as precise about treatments
as we are, about the way we measure learning
. We have this tradition of being concerned about reliability
and different kinds of validity and are dependent measures in
research. We have no tradition about being as clear
and as operational and as precise about the treatments that
we develop and that makes it almost impossible to interpret
the results of educational research. So, who's being
served by that? I ask myself, My guess
is if this video is being viewed 20 years from
now, it's going to still be a problem unless
something drastic happens, it's going to still be a
problem. To me is the biggest problem right now
in the entire field of education, it permits us
to have a huge variety of things going on there
, but it also makes us totally ignorant, practically
of what it is that's making a difference in different
contexts. Well, I think the thing I probably
enjoyed more than anything in my career, I haven't
even spoken about yet except tangentially. I think the
thing I enjoyed most was working with students. I
think everything pretty much everything I learned that was important
to me. I either learned as a student,
working with other students and faculty or as a professor
working with students. Uh, you know, I
always thought people had asked me to pay to do
it. I'm serious, I would have done it
for nothing. I couldn't afford to, it wasn't
independently wealthy, so I had to take a salary
, but it wasn't that great frankly. And what's
more exciting. I never learned as much as when
I had to teach something to somebody else. It
was so selfish. I thought being in a class
as an instructor because I felt I was learning twice
to three times as much as everybody else and so
thankful that was the case and a lot of that
learning had to do with preparation, but most of
it had to do with the interaction that came when
you were testing out ideas with really bright people,
particularly with graduate students who if you encourage them in
the correct way, they're encouraged to say no,
I don't agree, I have another point of view
, even if they don't just to exercise thinking of
different alternatives and thinking of other ways to pursue problems
, not to be adversarial, not to back themselves
into a corner and silo themselves, but to actually
consider alternative points of view and then hopefully ensure that
they're going to be increasingly flexible in their throne thinking
and sort of open to new ideas as they go
on. So to me, I'd rather be remembered
as a teacher, but sort of a, I
don't know, I can't think of a lot corny
way to say. It's sort of a a collaborator
in in the uh sort of distributed cognition, intellectual
growth that goes on when you're in a wonderful university
setting with bright people who are trying motivated people.
More importantly, people are really willing to invest effort
and trying to solve a problem. I think actually
the things that make anybody productive, make scholars productive
. I genuinely do. I don't think it matters
what area you're in, although there are some specifics
that are specifics to every area of expertise, but
the broad strokes are, I think um, you
have to be I think clear about where you're going
and what you want to accomplish. Not not in
the, not in a highly specific detailed sense,
But I think you need to keep in front of
your mind, what do I want to be doing
10 years from now? What do I really,
really, in my heart of hearts want to be
doing? And then I think the second question you
have to ask yourself, and this is the most
important question to me in some ways, was what
am I doing? That's not helping me get there
. And I think that question is critical at every
stage of your life, but I think it's never
more critical than when you're young and when you're you
know, when you're leaving graduate school and getting into
your first, even in graduate school for that matter
, but particularly there because God knows there's a lot
of distractions in graduate school, but if you go
into a university and you're gonna be in that setting
, because that's the one I know the best over
the years. The temptations and the pressures to get
involved in all kinds of silly, ridiculous waste time
wasters is just huge. You have to learn how
to say politely no and to find mentors that will
protect you when you do that. I always I
lived in Indonesia for a while and I always loved
the way that Indonesians don't have a word for no
in their language. And when I learned something from
them and there were, when you ask an Indonesian
something, they'll always be polite and they'll be positive
about what you said. But they'll they'll, if
they don't want to do it, they'll come back
and say, could I wait? In other words
, there's a there's a word balloon in bahasa Indonesia
and it means not yet and not yet means never
. But it's the polite way to say it.
So how do you find polite balloon kinds of responses
to, will you join the dean's committee to decide
how to spend the milk money? You know,
I mean that time burner where you get in the
room, everybody's got something to say. And mostly
it's a total damn waste of time. Sorry to
go on and on about this. But I genuinely
feel that more great academic careers have crashed on this
issue of not knowing when and how to say no
and not being protected by somebody if you're terribly vulnerable
because you see a dean's job is to get you
to do all the stuff that the faculty that can
say no, it won't because you're not tenured yet
. And your job is to re acquaint the dean
with the fact that you're never going to get tenure
if you do that silly crap that he or she
is demanding that you do. So okay, I
won't go on and on with that. Except that
I generally think that that's that's that's really critical.
The 3rd thing in my view is to find associations
with really capable people who are driven like you are
to answer a certain question, but who bring to
the table a different set of skills, a different
kind of background, even a different discipline if it
has to be. Because I think that learning to
think about problems from other disciplinary approaches is a huge
benefit as especially as your, as your first getting
started. And so collaborations to me are very important
to, and being clear about who gets credit for
what turns out to be really critical. I know
a lot of people who are happy to have collaborations
with bright people and we're better known only to find
out that they're doing somebody else's work and they're back
being a graduate student. I'm sorry to go into
that, but I think that's actually a serious issue
. Um what else makes a difference as you're,
as you're going forward and trying to be successful?
I think that you have to think about when you're
publishing something, when you're writing something, when you're
communicating with people about what you're doing, you've got
to learn to be an effective communicator by asking yourself
what do I want to happen in the minds of
the people that are reading or hearing and then hopefully
subsequently thinking about what will get them to really focus
on the the critical thing that I'm trying to accomplish
in this just writing it down, particularly in this
stilted stupid thing we've done in research of this.
I know that you know, I know we have
to give certain kinds of information but this formula we've
developed for a research paper is borderline absurd because it
doesn't communicate except with other people who are not trying
to communicate with often in the first place. So
things to me, I think some of the things
I learned was finding a great metaphor or analogy for
what it is that you're trying to communicate is hugely
important. I mentioned that earlier in the the media
study doing the grocery truck analogy is on everybody's mind
. It won't be forgotten for a very long time
. So that to me is a huge thing.
Can you boil it all down to a bullet point
? Can you boil it all down to an analogy
metaphor or a story of some kind a story about
a real person. But our type of story that
represents the data represents the point but it brings it
down to a human level. So I want people
learn how to be communicators. I think that's so
critical and I'd I'd love to be remembered that way
also that I at least made an effort towards it
. And lately I've been challenging myself not to write
for research journals or magazines. I've been challenged myself
to write for general audiences to write for the,
you know, the F. T. The American
Federation of Teachers Journal and places like that. And
believe me, it's a challenge. Uh and that's
a challenge. I think we all ought to take
on Marshall. McLuhan seems to be very much at
odds with a lot of the things that you've said
. What what did he say that still stands what's
still left as useful from McClure? I think I
think McLaren sort of understood. Um More than a
lot of people how important symbolism is two people and
how the things that we create in a society are
not just they're not just machines and buildings and roads
and so on. Their symbolic of something. And
if you step back from the object itself and ask
yourself, what does it symbolize, you'll get insights
that you wouldn't have Ordinarily. I think the,
my argument, I have an argument with McLaren,
obviously that's what one of the people I started out
to argue with. I don't think the medium was
the message, but I think he understood that most
people think the medium is the message. Why?
Because it's in front of your face, it's obvious
. And it's a it's a very compelling experience.
But it turns out that media itself is not what
happens. It's what's on the medium, that makes
a difference. That's what we have to be concerned
about. And yet it's mastering the mechanism of the
technology that is most up and front and most obvious
. What's not obvious is the hidden stuff, which
is the design of what's in all those wonderful media
experiences that you have, who did that, who
wrote that script, developed that story board, watch
the hidden, completely sexless kind of undergirding structure that's
there, that's connected somehow with my cognition and has
had this huge impact. That's the question we have
to answer. And to me that's why educational technology
risks being obsolete, because we haven't found a way
yet to communicate to people. What we have to
offer is something that's always behind the scenes. It's
always the structure that's controlling all this obvious up front
, wonderful stuff that we experience. It's the difference
between the ad elation that we give to actors and
even secondarily to directors and not to the screenwriters that
made it all happen. We are the screenwriters of
education and we've got to find a way to get
people to respect our craft and our science and our
technology and we've not succeeded at doing that are communicating
about it yet. One of my real interest lately
, and I think it's going to be true now
for the next few years, maybe to the end
of my career has to do with automated knowledge.
I think if there's any insight that I've had,
it was not mine, I got it from other
people, but the one that's been the most powerful
for me in the last 5 to 10 years is
that most of all human knowledge is automated and unconscious
, that what we're actually consciously aware of is such
a small, tiny portion of what we know that
it's that we have to learn more about this automated
knowledge or what some people call implicit knowledge or expertise
. There's a whole lot of names for it.
What we find is that when you ask an expert
how to do something And we actually call it to
70 principle. Now, they are not going to
tell us about 70 of the mental capacity, the
mental operations they have to perform in order to succeed
in their area of expertise. These are operations that
allow them to, to pattern match to see what
kind of problems they need to solve and when they
find a problem that needs solving to know exactly what
steps to take in order to solve it, kinds
of decisions need to be made and so on and
so forth, that when they do this over and
over again, it automates, I think this is
john Anderson's view is the view of a whole lot
of people out there and yet it is not well
understood it generally, despite even the popular books about
it lately blank, you know, and so on
and so on. All these populous is We're doing
this now in the year 2011 2012 and we've just
come through a number of books about advanced expertise that
are popular books because education completely rejects the idea more
or less or at least they haven't yet understood that
your job in schools, if you're going to promote
learning is to try to teach people so that they
can quickly as possible can automate what they learn.
So they don't have to think about it anymore.
So their minds that are free to learn new things
because that's the purpose of our conscious mind, that's
the purpose of working memory. And then I began
to think about all the consequences of the fact that
most of our knowledge is automated, so automated that
we are not even ourselves aware of it. And
one of those things is who teaches experts, You
get people who know something about math. When you
say you go teach math well, they know math
, they don't know anything about teaching. Let's be
clear about that. They don't even know what they
know about math or any other field for that matter
. The third thing about this automated knowledge thing that
I think is critical is a whole series of insights
that are available now in social psychology and almost nobody
outside of social psychology is talking about it, yet
it swept social psych and that is that this automated
knowledge is not just how to do things should you
do it? In other words, its intentions,
its goals, and the view is that not only
are we not in control of much of what we
do, we think we are now, that view
is not just in social psych, it's validated in
neuroscience. I mean for 20 some years we've known
in neuroscience that if you ask a person, you
tell a person, you're going to ask them to
make a decision. The decision could be something as
simple as you put two fingers up and in a
second I want you to move one but don't decide
now which figure you're going to move, now move
it and they will go this and they'll say when
did you disciple? Just now I decided to move
that finger. They can see on an MRI that
you decided the moment you understood what the task was
, you made that decision, but you believe you
didn't make it till just before you moved it.
Well, that's a simple task. Somebody's Slyke it
all excited about that. It turns out that almost
all decisions are the same way and that most of
the decisions we make, we're not even aware of
making. That's number one. Number two is that
we can have very clear goals and very clear values
about what we want to accomplish and something can happen
in our environment that completely changes our goals and we
are not aware of what it was and if we
do reflect on it, we believe that we changed
our minds. But in fact we didn't. This
is a whole lot of literature now and something called
Priming. Okay, okay obvious but not so we're
not so obvious features in our environment that when we
see them or when we more or less scan them
when we take them in a bit have a huge
impact on not only our intentions, but on what
we do cognitively. This automated cognitive knowledge. Uh
, yeah, these things have been out for so
long as a guy named john Barr who had a
book a few years ago about the myth of,
of, of intentionality, the myth of making self
decisions. It got a huge splash and that nobody
paid attention to it. And I think unless we
take into account in education, particularly in instructional technology
and anybody concerned with learning that most of what controls
learning is automated and unconscious and most of what people
learn is only valuable to them or is primarily valuable
if they can turn it into an automated cognitive and
motor routine that accomplishes that goal and then do it
in such a way that it can be general Izabal
that it's not so tied to or specific to the
context where you learned it, that is going to
be the biggest challenge in the next two decades of
three decades, in my view. Yeah, that's
interesting. I thought about that a bit. I
guess you get older, you think about those things
, but I I was just a dumb kid.
I mean I grew up in a farm town,
a couple 1000 people actually was born on a farm
. I went to the city soon after that,
but it wasn't much of a city. The city
was so poor that my first school was a three
room schoolhouse, literally 88 years and three rooms.
That was important to me. It turned out,
I mean, I really, I realized right away
that it wasn't the first grade I was interested in
, I was interested in what the 4th and 5th
graders were doing and because nobody much track you could
go sit and listen to what other kids were doing
and I think I did a lot of that.
The second thing was that my parents were always,
I think they were always willing to give us a
pass on things if we read. So I probably
escaped from a lot of stuff by very early getting
interested in reading. So it was a good reader
and I was the first child in a big family
, which is always a benefit because parents spent a
lot of time with the first kid and when the
third or fourth one comes along, they start to
lose interest. So it's older kids that raise younger
ones, so there was a benefit. Another benefit
was that I had an uncle who was an artist
and who would show up occasionally and we just live
with my parents for six months or so because,
you know, some art thing, he tried failed
or something or he'd been to paris and had gotten
in trouble and had to leave. You know it's
all kinds of reasons. But this guy was amazing
, he was like having a tutor, I'd ask
him a question and he would answer it for three
days and it wouldn't he wouldn't talk at me for
three days for three days, we would explore that
. I was very careful after a while about any
question I asked him but it was like if you
were really interested in something he was there and he
never talked down to us. He was always willing
to it was just an incredible teacher I think never
did much of else in his life. But he
well actually he did. I think he he was
he fought the french underground during the war because he
spoke english and he got inducted into the army when
he was he was in paris when the when the
Germans invaded. And that's another story bites up.
But that was important to me. And then finally
when I was in high school I came down with
a genetic issue something called ankles and spondylitis, which
was nobody knew about it at the time, but
I was in terrible pain for a while. I
couldn't walk. I had to be in a wheelchair
, not for very long, but it got my
attention. And uh I had a family doctor,
was a really brilliant guy. Really nice guy,
was actually the brother of of a philosopher, well
known philosopher at the time. And he got me
aside one day and said, you know Dick?
He said, I don't know what's going on with
you, but I know you're there's something really wrong
with your with your skeleton. I don't think it's
going to kill you, but I think there's a
good chance it's going to cripple you. So I
got, it's got some advice for you and advice
is I think you ought to figure out how to
live with your head, how to live on your
mind ought to sort of live with your buy with
your intellect and not with your hands. Otherwise I
probably have been selling shoes at the local supermarket or
something like that. So I said, oh,
I mean I kind of dealt with it is okay
, that's reality and maybe he's right. And as
a result, I was the first one of my
family ever go to college and I did that because
I said, you know, I think I have
to, I can't go to work for General Motors
. I grew up near Detroit. Everybody I knew
went to work for General Motors are one of the
automobile companies. I'm going to go to college and
I'll work with my mind. And that was a
huge benefit. I think actually you hear this story
from a lot of people who has kids had health
problems. I think that what you realize when that
happens is that you've got a plan for not that
normal life or at least it's going, it's going
to be normal. It's going to be a life
of the mind and not necessarily a life where you
physical, you make money because of physical labor,
you support yourself that way. Take all those things
are really important. And then of course, having
parents that were, I think really willing to let
me pretty much go my own way that encouraged me
to be independent, That was very helpful to.
So that's the best I can do with early influences
. I don't think any of them had anything to
do with what I chose to do in specific terms
, but I think they had a lot to do
with my decision basically to two make my life in
universities when nobody I knew at the time. I
don't think that other than the doctor in the town
and maybe a boyar too had ever been to a
university. My heroes were sports. You know,
there were the usual kind of kids heroes. They
were not great intellectuals, so it was great.
I mean I'm really thankful for all of them.
Um I have this lifelong fascination with antiquities. Um
for example, my, one of my uncles had
a farm every time he plowed, I would follow
the plow and pick up indian arrowheads. We lived
, one of the, our farm was in an
area that had been a very large air coy indian
encampment in michigan and I feel sabar cigar boxes with
indian airlines and that got interested in native americans.
And then from there got interested in pre Columbian cultures
and then from there got interested in neanderthals and from
there got interested in, you know, all kinds
of prehistory so that that actually is not just only
been a lifelong hobby I have on the largest collections
I think in the United States of Neanderthal hand axes
. Um I'm really interested in native american history and
technology at one time convinced myself that my interest had
to do with the history of technology Because stone tools
or something. I'm very interested. I think they
say a lot about different about neanderthals for example who
made the same tool for 500,000 years, exactly the
same tool in all over the world. What caused
that? Why didn't they do in the moment?
We had homo sapiens? The tool use just exploded
into huge varieties. You look at those two facts
and you can understand a great deal about the cognitive
differences between neanderthals who were genetic alternatives to homo sapiens
and what the difference was between the two. I
should think neanderthals had great procedural knowledge. I think
they learned well how to do the same thing and
how to repeat it. But I don't think they
were very creative. I don't think they had good
declarative processes, conscious sort of principle based, process
based knowledge that allowed them to imagine things different than
the way they were. So in that sense there's
a connection to what I've done professionally, but it's
not that that intrigues me basically. I feel some
kind of a kinship with the past. When I
when I, I went to Columbia South America in
the 70s with the Ford Foundation and I got to
know a bunch of archaeologists. They were interesting,
people used to go out on gigs with them because
they knew I knew a bit, I'd read a
lot before I left and being on one of those
digs and watching them uncover stuff that hadn't come to
light and thousands of years. That was, that
made the back of my hair in the back of
my neck stand up. That was really terrific.
So it's sort of us, for me, it's
a sense of being in touch with history. If
I hadn't done what I've done, I probably would
be a dealer slap me, but I probably making
, I'd be trying to make a living at it
by putting actually in a couple of sabbaticals in order
to make up my salary while I was doing research
. I would put together collections of stone tools or
arrowheads or different kinds of things from a certain culture
and location and then I would I would sell them
to people that I would do all of the all
of the research on it. I would write a
description of what everything was and the provenance of everything
and then I would sell it to collectors and I
actually often made a lot more than my salary doing
that. So obviously you had the choice of of
doing it full time in making money at it and
I chose not to because it wasn't what I was
most interested. But that that's I think probably that
more than anything has been my my hobby other than
the fact that I'm just a nut about movies and
tv. I'll go to any and all movies.
I think of netflix. If I didn't have netflix
, I don't know what I would do for example
. So those two things are probably the things that
have most engaged me outside of my family, my
wife and and kids and my professional. Well I
do agree totally that because of the internet and a
whole lot of things that what you have available,
what you can get access to quickly is amazing.
The volume of it. I would like to be
convinced however, that that has led people to be
more open to a variety of ideas and sources and
content. I think the reverse has happened. I
don't know why. Let me tell you why this
is crazy things like libraries used to have open stacks
today. We don't even think alive, we don't
need libraries that we've got the internet. By the
way. That's fine. I don't have any romantic
notion about libraries, but I know that when I
went into a library, what I learned, almost
never the most important thing I learned. Almost never
had to do with what I was going there for
. It had to do with I've never seen that
. Open it up, look through it. Oh
, there's something we don't read newspapers anymore. Well
, when you read a newspaper, you don't say
I'm only interested in a story on X. Y
or Z. You turn the pages and as you
turn the pages, something catches your eye and you
read it. It wasn't because you initially intended to
. It's because they're you happened on the idea.
I don't see easily the possibility of that in the
media because a lot of people are turning to the
internet for news and they only want news in certain
areas and they ignore news in other areas. And
I think that's dangerous. I think it silos us
. I think it makes us narrow. I think
that we lose our kind of overall grasp of things
. And I think if there's anything going on now
in this country right now, it's this, it's
the silencing of points of view narrow, look what's
happened to education, hundreds of difference of journalism.
It's great. We've got a lot of journals.
Is it? No, thank you. Because what
happens is journalists now to find little small groups who
only communicate with each other. There's a journal now
that just deals with a certain approach to online screen
design. I will not name the Germans and the
people who are publishing in that journal and who do
that research have no idea what anybody outside of that
little narrow group is doing this is what they call
silo going, but and maybe it's a reaction to
having too much information available. I don't think so
. I just think we're permitting people to be narrow
and shallow and so on and not think that history
is important, which it always is. So I
would like to see us work harder at advising people
what the best way to approach all of this richness
that's available to them. Like design like this field
that a lot of us are in call instructional design
. It's the it's the plan that you make.
It's the it's the sequence that you go through that's
more important than the technology that you have available.
Or even the ideas. If you don't plan to
be open minded, if you don't plan to look
at a lot of different alternatives, if you don't
plan to be interdisciplinary in the way that you approach
a problem, you deserve the narrow, siloed,
shallow conclusion that you reach on an individual basis that's
not damaging, but on a social basis it's destructive
. And that's my big concern that and the fact
that, okay, I'm going to get on a
soapbox at least just once that we have this society
that is based on adversarial interactions, our legal system
forces all to take these contrary points of view and
then let the system decide which is correct as opposed
to what's going on here. What's the evidence about
all of this? Can we can we decide what
the strategy is and do that without putting ourselves in
two totally opposing camps, which neither one obviously are
ever completely the case. It's all part of this
thing. So we've done great at making a lot
of information available instantly and economically available. I am
overwhelmed with that. I think it's absolutely terrific.
But we have not done great in preparing ourselves for
how to do it in such a way that we
get benefit from it as opposed to the people that
are selling it to us.