Elliot Soloway

Elliot Soloway, professor and principal investigator of the Highly Interactive Computing research group at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, discusses how new expectations for learning will change the look of classrooms and the ways in which teachers teach and students learn. Excerpted from a videotaped interview for the video series Learning with Technology, program #2, Tools for Thinking (North Central Regional Educational Laboratory, 1995) and Collaborations in Education: Highly Interactive Computing (North Central Regional Educational Laboratory, 1995).

"If we follow the naturally mandated guidelines for what classrooms need to look like, we're going to be asking kids to do different kinds of activities than we're asking them to do now. For example, as opposed to reading materials in a book and answering questions at the end of the chapter, what we're going to be asking kids to do is go to the rivers and the streams and collect data. We're also going to be asking them to build models of the data that they collect and visualize then the data. The only way to do those new sets of activities is to employ technology. Scientists use technology to do those kinds of activities, build models, visualize the data, report on their data, report on their theories."

Date posted: 1997