Center for Teaching and Learning

In the New York Times book review “The Chess Master and the Computer,” former world chess champion Gary Kasparov outlines the history of chess grandmasters vs. computers and what that history has revealed about humans’ and computers’ capabilities. Some of his observations offer us possible insights not just about chess, but also about teaching and learning.

Kasparov was the world champion who oversaw the dramatic transformation of technology that has lead to computers’ surpassing humans in the game of chess. He has worked closely with programmers both to develop computers’ capabilities and to challenge them. In 1997, Kasparov lost the human vs. computer battle — but to the dismay of A. I. advocates, not via computer self-consciousness.

This difference between computer processing and human reflective thinking has produced some interesting chess experiments. In 1998, Kasparov hosted and participated in a computer-assisted tournament. Each player had access to the software of his choice. In Kasparov’s words,

Having a computer partner also meant never having to worry about making a tactical blunder. The computer could project the consequences of each move we considered, pointing out possible outcomes and countermoves we might otherwise have missed. With that taken care of for us, we could concentrate on strategic planning instead of spending so much time on calculations. Human creativity was even more paramount under these conditions.

Kasparov discovered the extent to which his advantage in chess depended on his having the upper hand in memory and performing calculations with fewer errors. As Kasparov explains of his games with Veselin Topalov, “since we both had equal access to the same database, the advantage [now] came down to creating a new idea at some point.”

We all know that technology levies an equalizing force onto performance. I will never forget exam monitors’ checking the aisles for hidden calculators. In fact, I have a confession. My memories of exam monitors encourage me to refer to the above tournament as “assisted chess,” as if an unassisted game were somehow tougher or a more authentic measurement of capabilities. The real title of the tournament, however, was “Advanced Chess.” And the tournament took place twelve years ago.

Kasparov is discussing a new era, an era in which computer assistance is not cheating — and moreover, is expected. We live in a world not only of ever-improving immediate access to vast information and processing capabilities. We live in a world also in which we demand from each other immediate recourse to more than the human mind can memorize or process. This new era has brought about more than new learning objectives and pedagogies in chess — or in the college classroom. It has promoted changes in the way the human mind performs even an “unassisted” game — or unassisted learning.

Schools of thought have broken down. Bricolage has become the norm. According to Kasparov,

The heavy use of computer analysis has pushed the game itself in new directions. The machine doesn’t care about style or patterns or hundreds of years of established theory. It counts up the values of the chess pieces, analyzes a few billion moves, and counts them up again. (A computer translates each piece and each positional factor into a value in order to reduce the game to numbers it can crunch.) It is entirely free of prejudice and doctrine and this has contributed to the development of players who are almost as free of dogma as the machines with which they train. Increasingly, a move isn’t good or bad because it looks that way or because it hasn’t been done that way before. It’s simply good if it works and bad if it doesn’t. Although we still require a strong measure of intuition and logic to play well, humans today are starting to play more like computers.

This loss of allegiances, norms, or even what an older generation might refer to as “standards of play” has not impeded the younger generation. On the contrary, players reach the level of grandmaster at younger and younger ages — and not because of their unparalleled genius:

Bobby Fischer’s 1958 record of attaining the grandmaster title at fifteen was broken only in 1991. It has been broken twenty times since then, with the current record holder, Ukrainian Sergey Karjakin, having claimed the highest title at the nearly absurd age of twelve in 2002. Now twenty, Karjakin is among the world’s best, but like most of his modern wunderkind peers he’s no Fischer, who stood out head and shoulders above his peers—and soon enough above the rest of the chess world as well.

Technology has leveled the playing field by facilitating access to information. Even in areas where there are not a lot of chess players, children pick up the game online. The normal child whose attention span is not ready for complicated books on chess tactics or theory still learns that information, only now in more abbreviated forms on websites and in podcasts. On their own, children study parts of games. When it comes to study, their attention is limited. But in the name of their entertainment, they assemble those parts into wholes.

What about in the learning of course material for a college class? I’ve known students who watched YouTube podcasts to gleam information they didn’t adequately understand in the classroom. Some have admitted openly to relying more on random, online content than on their professors or textbooks — because they didn’t understand or were bored by those more traditional engagements with the material.

But what about students’ accessing the internet on their phones or laptops during a lecture? What if they’re on Facebook?

I have an interesting anecdote to relate. My sister-in-law is an undergraduate at a different university. One morning she initiated a live chat with me through Facebook by asking a question about a particular philosophy. After telling her that I didn’t know the philosophy but would look it up, I started with Wikipedia and then worked my way up to quick skims in Google Scholar to provide her with a piecemeal answer that at least acknowledged some debate — and then sent her links so she could research the nuances more fully on her own. Our online conversation took less than ten minutes with a lot of extended pauses. When I asked her if she was writing a paper on the subject, she said no, that she was currently in class, the professor had mentioned the philosophy as if everyone knew what he was talking about, and she needed a little more information in order to understand the rest of what he was saying.

This is not an entirely isolated incident. I’ve had multiple law-school friends initiate online chats with me while they were in class — usually to debate about real-time course content because the lecture format prohibited them from immediately discussing or challenging the professor’s statements.

There are a plethora of negative and positive ways of describing these occurrences. Maybe my sister-in-law and law-school friends have grown so accustomed to immediate satisfaction that they lack the attention span for sustained engagements with a lecture. Perhaps their experiences with mobile technology have enabled them to acquire the multitasking skills for multiple, simultaneous engagements with the course content. Possibly they prefer social learning to more solitary experiences like that of sitting quietly in a lecture. Maybe they’re bad students. Maybe they are taking a more active approach to their learning. Perhaps they are developing a more nuanced understanding. Possibly their multitasking is forcing them to miss the overarching narrative forest for incidental trees.

Just as with daydreaming, their online activities might cause them to lose track of the course narrative, a particular theory, or a greater concept. However, maybe they’ll pull their disjointed understandings together when confronted with an engaging objective.

If their attention is limited, but in the name of their entertainment they’ll assemble those parts into wholes, then maybe the pedagogical response isn’t necessarily to restrict “assisted” learning in the classroom.  If we prohibit their digital escapism, then not only do we  increase the likelihood of their mentally shutting down (daydreaming) during the lecture. We also eliminate the possibility of their escaping to more engagements with course content.

Dr. Chris Dede is the Timothy E. Wirth Professor in Learning Technologies at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. His scholarship addresses emerging technologies, policy, and leadership. His funded research includes four grants from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education to explore immersive and semi-immersive simulations as a means of student engagement, learning, and assessment. Dr. Dede’s co-edited book, Scaling Up Success: Lessons Learned from Technology-based Educational Improvement, was published by Jossey-Bass in 2005. A second volume he edited, Online Professional Development for Teachers: Emerging Models and Methods, was published by the Harvard Education Press in 2006. In 2007, Dr. Dede was honored by Harvard University as an outstanding teacher. On September 23, 2009, Dr. Dede presented at Austin Peay State University.

Before his presentation, he and I had a chance to sit down and talk, and I asked him the following question:

If we teachers reorganize our lectures into five-minute chapters in order to facilitate our students’ media-influenced attention spans, are we not forfeiting an opportunity to help build our students’ memories? Will we not ill-prepare our students for the concentration they’ll need in the workforce?

Before he answered the question, Dr. Dede pointed out that often in the workforce, a three-minute pitch to the boss in the elevator is more productive than an hour presentation in the conference room. In other words, effective brevity is just as important as a longer, more comprehensive approach.

He also argued that “concentration” doesn’t mean “concentration on one thought.” A complicated study is a weaving of multiple thoughts, a synthesis. So the pedagogical imperative is not that we teach our students to concentrate on one idea at a time.

With those caveats in place, Dr. Dede doubted the premise of my question. He didn’t believe that teachers should reorganize their lectures into five-minute chapters, even when they’re podcasting their lectures. He argued that students will listen to a speaker or an audio-visual file for an hour and a half if the presentation is interesting. Millennial students do not require soundbites in order to process information.

But they do require an engaging presentation of that information. Due to the wiki-structure of their user-created world, millennial students often do not accept titles like “professor” or “Dr.” as representations of authority. If the rhetoric of a blog is more convincing than that of a news site, millennial students will believe the blog over the news site. Rhetorical power is key to this millennial world of earned, not position-granted, authority.

Dr. Dede suggested that teachers determine their students’ starting places and then move them to the learning objectives. If students have five-minute attention spans, then the teacher might organize the early lectures to suit those attention spans, earn his or her position of authority through rhetorically effective presentations, and expand and complicate the lectures over the course of the semester.

I found Dr. Dede’s answer to be worthy of reflection. Not too long ago, pedagogues shunned the charismatic teacher for emphasizing his or her own likability over the importance of the material. If millennial students rely on rhetorical power to judge authority, do we not have to reconsider, at least in part, the pedagogical value of charisma? Is there a rhetorically powerful way of presenting all of the complex topics in the natural sciences? What are the implications of our having to rely on rhetorical persuasiveness to convince students that they should evaluate sources based on criteria other than rhetorical persuasiveness? Is an easily distracted student merely in an earlier stage of synthesis? Does our modeling the synthetic approach with our lectures and examples really move such a student to that more developed stage?

Both at Austin Peay and nationwide, course redesign has become a popular means of improving the retention of students. The idea behind course redesign is not to lower our expectations of students so that more students pass, but rather to rethink the ways we teach a course in order to better accommodate our students’ learning processes. So how do we brainstorm a redesign proposal? What should we take into consideration?

A standard way we can increase our students’ access to course material is to offer them many points of entry into that material. We can provide visual, auditory, read/write, and kinesthetic options for our students to satisfy each learning objective. Some students have even undisclosed learning disabilities that impose obstacles to one particular learning style. Other students prefer one learning style over another. Often, students require the use of multiple learning styles before they can put all the pieces of the puzzle together. How can we provide these multiple options for our students to satisfy each learning objective?

It is true that most redesign efforts broach differences in students’ learning styles by hosting the course material in a variety of media online — or through purchased computer programs that purportedly resolve those differences. These technological approaches, however, do not always work.

What if a D2L shell becomes a mere repository for uploaded materials? Only those students who are already motivated to take the learning process into their own hands will bother with the uploaded resources. Moreover, not even those more motivated students are guaranteed to benefit from those resources. Without guidance, even motivated students can experience what we might call a “Baskin-Robins paralysis”: When there are a 101 options, many people don’t know which ones to choose and become paralyzed with indecision and inaction. Uploaded materials do not inherently encourage the students’ engagement, especially when those uploaded materials are not interactive.

Let us not forget the social element. No matter how good they are, neither digital resources nor purchased computer programs can resolve learning differences without a teacher’s drawing those diverse digital examples and exercises into class discussions. Most students learn socially. Until they experience other people’s interest in a topic and associate that topic with their own personal objectives (classroom social status or some higher objective), information remains meaningless to them. It lacks social signification.

The simple solution to all of these problems: departmental workshops.

1.) The more faculty members discuss how to encourage students to access learning resources, the more their students might use those resources.

2.) The more faculty members share with each other strategies for guiding students, for teaching them how to choose appropriate resources for their own specific learning habits, the more their students might discover an intimate relationship with learning.

3.) The more faculty members experiment with creating interactive course materials, the more their students might interact with those materials and retain some of that material under their fingernails — and perhaps more importantly, bring it with them, even beyond the confines of the course.

4.) The more faculty members explore how to take students’ solitary learning activities and transform them into social engagements, the more their students might engage the material while alone, specifically in order to interact better with their peers in the learning community.

Regular departmental conversations are important for a successful course redesign.

What if the departmental culture opposes a technologically enhanced course? Neither targeting different learning styles nor any of the four points outlined above requires technology. Technology is a tool, not an objective.

Student engagement with the material is the objective. An increase of student engagement will improve retention and graduation rates and enhance student learning. Brainstorm how to achieve the objective, not how to use technology in the classroom. Both your peers and students will thank you for it.