Education ∪ Math ∪ Technology

Day: April 16, 2012 (page 1 of 1)

A problem with digital books

A bookshelf full of books
(Image credit: Harold Bakker)

When I was growing up, my house had a 50 foot wall full of books which our family had inherited from my grandfather with the house. Whenever I was bored, and the weather was ugly, I would pick a book off the shelf and read it. I devoured books from the shelves, some of which were probably inappropriate for my age, and some of which are considered classics. The library available in my home helped me become a better reader because I never ran out of something to read.

This is an experience my son has now, because we have a library of books in his room (albeit a much smaller library). However, as books become digital, it will be much more difficult for our library to be visible and accessible to my son. Parents will tend to make more choices of what their children should read. Licensing on books that prevents them from being copied means that children will likely have to explicitly ask for permission for every book that they read from their parent’s collection. Books will be selected less at random, and because we will be more likely to select books entirely based on our own interests, we will be less likely to be exposed to new information. Note that it would be relatively straight forward to set up "book servers" in houses that could act as personal libraries, and serve the same function, but current digital rights management on books makes this impractical (not impossible, every DRM has its weaknesses).

We are headed toward a society where books are not visible and accessible in our houses. If the books are invisible, they might as well not be there.
 

Separate science history from science inquiry

Zombie Feynman on Science
(Image credit: XKCD)

It occurrs to me that we have two goals for science education. One is to teach students what existing science is known, and how it can be applied to our lives, or how it is interesting to us. I call this first purpose, "Science History." The other goal is to teach the process of doing science, of thinking scientifically. This purpose, I call "Science Inquiry."

I think we should separate these two purposes into separate courses or domains, because the purpose of the first is diluting the effect of the second. Many children finish school thinking that science is a collection of facts known about the world, and do not spend enough time learning how those "facts" were derived.

Labs are a good start to learning science inquiry, but many experiments done in labs have issues.

  • The labs are rarely designed by students. This leads to underestimate the difficulty in designing a good experiment, and to over-emphasize the paperwork portion of science.
     
  • The labs rarely take more than 30 or 40 minutes to complete. Students rarely have to repeat a lab because of experimental error. They learn from this experience that laboratory science can be easily parcelled into sitcom-like episodes.
     
  • Students do not learn enough about the reasons why we have designed lab reports, and think of the portions of a lab report as blanks to be filled in. Quite often they will fake data so as to complete the boxes faster.

A Science Inquiry course would focus on the process of doing science, and less on the students learning existing scientific knowledge. Obviously students would be likely to find connections between the Science History course and the labs that they design, and hopefully they will also see connections between their Science Inquiry and other domains of knowledge.

A Science History course would focus on what existing scientific discoveries we have made, who made these discoveries, and what are the stories around these discoveries, and how these discoveries impact our lives. It might cover some principles behind the philosophy of science, as well as the connections between science and other domains of knowledge (like math for example).

Right now, many schools see Science Inquiry as optional or even an inconvenience. This suggests to me that some people think that thinking scientifically is an inconvenience or too troublesome to teach, and this scares me. While "thinking scientifically" isn’t the only way to think, it’s an important one, and certainly, we should all learn how to do it. I also think that Science Inquiry is indistinguishable from thinking scientifically. If you remove the inquiry, then it isn’t really science.