It was a lovely conference in downtown Vancouver, B.C., attended by thousands of educator presenters and attendees with an interest in educational media and the use of computer technologies to assist teaching and learning. For my part, I was there as a presenter of a paper on the twin subjects of the need for teachers to move beyond PowerPoint in using computers to present educational content, and the ideal nature of Revolution in assisting them in so doing.

And the good news is that I could have held my audience well beyond my half-hour time limit had I not a plane to catch.

My submission was prompted by a growing realization that PowerPoint has become a computer crutch for the emerging cadre of educators who are told that they must incorporate computer technologies in the classroom, but empowered with precious little for so doing.

My own university serves as an example: one course required reports the following implementation of computer technologies for the teacher-in-training:

• Unit portfolios developed in EDSC 304/307 each include the following:
  • Unit Plan (in Word) for implementing the assignments in the unit.
• K-12 Student Multimedia Assignment that includes
• A completed sample presentation (in PowerPoint);
• An Evaluation Tool (in Word) for assessing student work; and
• A Support Tool (in Word) that will help students complete this assignment.
• K-12 Student Newsletter/Brochure Assignment that includes
  • A completed sample presentation (in Publisher);
  • An Evaluation Tool (in Word) for assessing student work; and
  • A Support Tool (in Word) that will help students complete this assignment.

• Teacher Lecture (in PowerPoint) that would be presented to students as part of the unit.
• Web-Based Student Assignment, in which students use the Internet as a research tool to find answers, solve a problem, or complete a project.
• K-12 Student Excel/Timeline Assignment that includes:
  • A completed sample timeline or spreadsheet (in Excel)
  • Several activities created through the Teacher Utility Activity, including crossword puzzles, word searches, etc. that extend the unit and support student learning.
    

This is to support learning activities at the 7-12 (US) grade levels and does little to effectively utilize computer technologies in teaching and learning.

For my presentation, I found inspiration in an observation made by Kendall Whitehouse in 2005. For those of us old enough to remember its context, a good 30 or so years ago the educational cure-all was television. It would transform education from as we knew it prior to TV into something we likely would not recognize. Of course, this assumption, like that made by Thomas Edison regarding the motion picture doing likewise for education, was wrong.

It wasn't wrong so much in that it was prima facie incorrect, merely wrong in its implementation: speaking on the relative successes of such educational programs as Sesame Street and The Electric Company vis-a-vis the positive dearth of similar successes of traditional "TV in the classroom," Whitehouse noted (of Sesame Street etc. )
"They do not use television to replicate the experience of the classroom. They provide a different type of learning, driven by the particular characteristics of the medium."

And what is the medium of the computer with respects to the end-user? Why, it is
interactivity, of course!

Or, as Marshall McLuhan put it, "the medium is the message" and, in the case of the computer and its related technologies, the medium/message is interactivity. Thus, when designing computer tools for learning, it is imperative that one capitalizes on the computer's ability to provide interactivity, not only because it assists with engaging the learner but also because it leverages the characteristics of the computer's medium.

Armed with this insight, one might wonder why educators sometimes place such emphasis on PowerPoint presentations or Word documents/Publisher documents as effective educational tools given the wide variety of digital creation tools that currently exist.

But, of course, the wide variety of content creation tools that exist and are visible from within the educational world are those which are either pedantic office suite tools or are industry standards tools that tend not to be embraceable by the casual user. Indeed, those universities producing "learning objects" that are laudable employ full-time content creation professionals to make such production happen.

However, Revolution, as we all know, is a different breed of cat, so to say. The "casual" user can, and, with sufficient education, will be able to produce sophisticated learning tools that might well be the envy of the full-time production staff.

For those who study the issue of the new/novice programmer, the reasons are clear: Revolution employs a visual environment (thus linking pseudocode with actual code with immediate implementation and visualization of out put) along with a natural-language like programming language that leverages the knowledge of the casual learner (the English language) with respect to producing good pseudocode as well as actual code (which very likely is similar to if not identical with the pseudocode). It's object -> action paradigm further reinforces the nature of the interaction between code and objects receiving actions that activate the code. As my co-author and I say in closing:

When Apple stopped supporting Hypercard, Educators were forced to moved on. Some moved to Macromedia Director or Flash, others to REALbasic, and, increasingly, many others to Microsoft's FrontPage and PowerPoint. But of the latter two, one still requires the mastery of complex language solutions and the second is lacking in interactivity. Somehow, the complexity or limitations of the 'solutions' currently in use by and for educators seem to have put an end to educator's efforts and abilities to develop clever applications for use in the classroom. We sincerely hope that Revolution will re-energize them. The Revolution development environment is a breakthrough for anyone who writes and designs computer software. Revolution enables developers to easily and quickly create powerful Internet-enabled applications and solutions which can be delivered on Linux, Mac OS X, classic Mac OS, Windows, and popular UNIX systems. This makes it ideal for the education market.

It is my hope that together we can partner to produce educational learning modules utilizing Revolution to teach Revolution to new educators. I look forward to partnering with other educational Revolution users in developing and implementing content-production education modules to help prove our thesis.

The full paper can be read here.

--Judy Perry