Asimov and Knewton

One of two big announcements in educational technology this week was Wiley’s acquiring the assets of Knewton. (The other was the CENGAGE-McGraw Hill merger.) A plethora of news articles have reported on the story. Many of these take the slant that Knewton over-promised and did not deliver on their “mind-reading robo-tutor in the sky”.

What is Knewton? Or what was the promise of Knewton? It’s education buzzword: Adaptive Learning. I mentioned Knewton in one of my early blog posts on technology trends in higher education. Having used a Pearson G-Chem textbook for many years, I was aware of their partnership, which eventually ended last year. 

Knewton may be dead, but the idea of personalized adaptive learning is alive and well. I’ve even coined a term for the approach: pedalogic. And it’s brought to you powered by the latest in A.I. searchbot technology, which I dubbed GooglExpert. Remember back in the day when you searched Google? Well, now Google searches you. For beneficent reasons, it is claimed. How else can learning be personally curated for what you need to learn at just the right level that you’re at right this minute?

The announcement led me to re-reading an old Isaac Asimov short story from 1951. The Fun They Had was originally published in a children’s newspaper according to Wikipedia. You can easily find the text through a Google search. (I particularly like this pdf version.) I highly recommend you read it right now – it will take less than three minutes – before continuing with this blog post.

Finished reading? Maybe you share my amazement of how prescient Asimov was back in 1951.

The year is 2155. Poor Margie suffers through her lessons with the ‘mechanical teacher’ from the comfort of her own home. But the adaptive lessons don’t seem to always be ‘tuned’ correctly. An ed-tech-guy, the Inspector, is called in to make a few tweaks so that the lessons are better adapted for Margie. But then she and her friend Tommy discover a book. A real book. Not an electronic reader. And it tells them about this thing called ‘school’. My favorite part of the story is when Margie is flabbergasted that in the ‘old’ days the teacher was a live-in-the-flesh human being. How could a mere man know as much as the robot-tutor? That seems inconceivable to Margie – and it sounds crazy that kids learned the same thing around the same age.

Margie’s retort: “But my mother says a [mechanical] teacher has to be adjusted to fit the mind of each boy and girl it teaches and that each kid has to be taught differently.” Sound familiar? Robo-tutor in the sky, beamed into your home, through your cloud-connected device? Education of the future?

Perhaps the future is now. Knewton’s day may be done, but there are others who will vie for leadership in the adaptive-learning arena. The ‘fun’ continues, I suppose. While I agree that today’s schools and classrooms are far from perfect, there is something to be said about the value of kids who are roughly the same age, learning roughly the same thing. At least at the elementary or primary levels, the similarities between how kids learn and what they struggle with are likely more than the differences – at least broadly speaking. That doesn’t mean all lessons need to be identical in content, identical in delivery, or identical in environment. The great part about having a human teacher, in my opinion, is his or her human adaptability that meshes with the adaptability of the human leaner. This, I think, is particularly crucial at the early stages of education.

Machine learning is not the same as human learning. Machines learn, but they learn differently from humans. Could there one day be an intelligent machine that passes the Turing “Teacher” Test (i.e., seems indistinguishable from a human teacher)? Possibly. But I suspect that day will not come soon, or worse, that humankind accepts a lesser-form and call it even. Robots will be good at teaching our children how to be robots. A ruling dictator would love that. Humans, I hope will be teaching our students how to be humans. And I hope the teaching and learning will have some fun involved. I don’t know if a robot could have fun in any meaningful sense. If I make it to the year 2155, I hope Margie won’t be the norm.