The augmented worker

Running Moore’s Law backwards through time demonstrates how fast things are moving these days. For example, go back to my days in business school thirty-two years ago. Mine was the last class not allowed to use electronic calculators during exams. I used a slide rule to speed up calculating Discounted Cash Flows (DCF). This is precisely the exercise that led Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston to invent the electronic spreadsheet. No one did much what-if analysis before they brought out Visicalc.

Calculators were banned from exams because they provided an unfair economic advantage. They were expensive. Most students had either a hand-held or a desktop calculator but not both. A hand-held Bomar calculator cost $100, and that’s $467 in today’s dollars. My plastic four-function calculator cost about the same. HP brought out a full-featured, programmable handheld that cost four times as much.

Today students have perpetual access to not only a calculator but also an internet connection, a pocket-sized phone, and, increasingly, a camera. Since life is an open-book exam, I’ve advocated permitting internet access and phone calls to colleagues in certification exams. In Informal Learning, I call these augmented workers.

Ellen Gamerman describes how schools are liberalizing testing procedures in an article in this morning’s Wall Street Journal entitled Legalized ‘Cheating’, Text-messaging answers. Googling during exams. In the Internet age, some schools have a new approach to cheating: Make it legal.

The real-world strengths of intelligent surfing and analysis, some educators argue, are now just as important as rote memorization. The old rules still reign in most places, but an increasing number of schools are adjusting them. This includes not only letting kids use the Internet during tests, but in the most extreme cases, allowing them to text message notes or beam each other definitions on vocabulary drills. Schools say they in no way consider this cheating because they’re explicitly changing the rules to allow it.

These uses of technology are part of a broader shift in academic rules that has been underway for several years. Educators say the concept of “collaborative learning,” which has students working in groups and essentially answering test questions or tackling assignments for each other, continues to gain currency. Its proponents say it can help teach group skills and critical thinking.

A similar argument is being used to support widespread access to the Internet, and even to other classmates, during testing. By some estimates, at least seven million new Web pages are added every day. In a competitive global labor market, where white-collar jobs are increasingly outsourced to other countries, being able to find and synthesize information about the World Bank could be more crucial than memorizing the date it opened. Failing to teach kids how to navigate in the knowledge economy, says Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Frank Levy, “is like putting them on the track with the locomotive.”

While my former teachers and professors are probably turning over in their graves over this, I applaud the courageous educators who favor pragmatism. The time I wasted on memorization in school crowded out lots of reflection. Better that schools teach students skills they can use in the real world.

Original Visicalc screen