Index / Go on to next event
The Firewall in the Mind (Slide 16) The same trap

So, to move along here, what's the point? The point is, we had people falling in the same trap as the early film-makers. We had software that encouraged people to shoot the scene head on. One of the teachers on my team, for example, doing what to all of us seemed natural at the time, was coming up with content by copying questions from an exercise book into the computer authoring system, into this interface. He was improving on it slightly since he was able to automate feedback in anticipation of correct and incorrect answers. But he was carrying what he did already over into the new medium. The software was encouraging our teachers to convert what they were doing in class to a computer-based format.

The only improvement over a language lab, and we thought it was a significant improvement at the time, was that the lessons could be made as interactive as we cared to plan them out. That was the catch though. It was rather time consuming to have to sit down and write out all those interactions. It was easier to create boiler plate templates that would regurgitate content in a way we came to call 'drill and kill.'