Using HCI approach to learning

Using the HCI approach to learning

The Jakarta Post, Saturday, May 06, 2006
Jaha Nababan, Jakarta

Stopping poor, disadvantaged children from turning into criminals is not easy -- yet the people who do so are rarely honored or awarded. However, SDN 16 Johar Petang, a poor state elementary school in the heart of Jakarta, has done just that for the past 10 years.

Most of the children at the school come from the lowest of the low in society -- if they are not in class they would be out scavenging trash, pushing a street vending cart, busking or begging under a bridge.

At the bottom of the heap, these students are vulnerable and their lives are full of economic hardship. Normally, the idea of getting them any education at all would seem far-fetched to their often-illiterate parents.

Despite them being forced to work from a young age, SDN 16 Johar Petang manages to keep its students in class for six years of elementary schooling, although the cost of higher education means it sends only a few on to junior high.

It its 10-year history, all except two of this school's students avoided a criminal life. Despite this, the Indonesian education system has failed to acknowledge SDN 16 Johar Petang's success because it rates schools on the number of students they send on to higher institutions.

But with the best will in the world, poor parents cannot afford higher education for their children, so something in this system is obviously not working.

Here, an explanation of a concept in computer learning illuminates how education policy could be made to work better. Educationalists here would do well to get familiar with the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) approach to learning.

Don't mistake this article for a technophile's blyth assertion that every complex social problem can be broken down and solved using black-and-white computer thinking. Computer logic, as we know, exists in what is best described as an artificial environment -- where the programmer creates a world as simple or as complex as he or she likes -- a ceterus parabus situation. Real policy design, however, exists in an infinitely more complex universe.

Just to get things straight, HCI is neither about making a fat computer screen into a flat one, nor does it have anything to do with the ergonomic aspects of a computer. What HCI is about, is recognizing why, for example, many personal data assistant (PDA) users prefer to tap their stylus on a small virtual keyboard rather than tackle the PDA's simple handwriting recognition feature.

The key word in HCI is "interaction". HCI is finding out how people gradually begin to interact with a computer; from knowing nothing, to being confident in their ability to use one.

Despite the terminology, what those researching HCI study is the same skill sets people acquire when they learn to use any technology, like say, driving a car.

For the new driver, shifting gears is a careful, conscious process, and for some people it may be full of apprehension. But for the more experienced driver, it is almost an unconscious routine.

Taking this into account, we find that designing a highly interactive computer is not about creating an operating system using a person's local language.

Instead, it is about creating a system that gives users the ability to control their pace in adapting to that system. The longer it is used, the more the system will automatically be customized to a user's current skill level.

Just like a computer, the national education system is a set of complex policies. Using the HCI approach, the education system should be designed to interact with its audience, although the audience may know little in the beginning.

Ben Shneiderman of the University of Maryland introduced the Activity Relation Table (ART) to understand how people interact with computers -- or national education systems in this case.

He says humans learn how to interact in four general steps -- they "Collect, Relate, Create and Donate".

In order to allow poor schools like SDN 16 Johar Petang to compete with wealthy schools like BPK Penabur, whose students have won several International Physics Olympiads, the education system must assist poor schools to "collect" syllabus that "relate" to their visions and missions.

Furthermore the system should be flexible enough to allow elementary schools like SDN 16 Johar Petang to "create" their own systems. In short, if these policies are usable, accessible and appealing to students, and give them an incentive to learn -- again the "relate" idea -- the school should then assist other schools to repeat its success, or "donate".

Although SDN 16 Johar Petang may be able to compete in the national school awards system, it may not be able to win, since coming first at an International Physics Olympiad seems incomparable to fighting neighborhood crime, or giving the underprivileged a hand up. In order to acknowledge this unique success, the system must be capable of measuring a school's educational achievements by the objectives it sets and by judging the school's relative reach of influence. If a wealthy, well-resourced school wins an international Olympiad every year without raising its goals, it could be concluded that far from succeeding, the school is stagnating.

However, if SDN 16 Johar Petang can influence other schools and help them to help their students, it surely deserves an award more than BPK Penabur. SDN 16 Johar Petang's achievement is judged to be worth more than its students competing abroad because the school's influence has had a greater reach.

To develop new policies that positively affect the wider education system, the Association of Indonesian Municipalities (Apeksi) is initiating a Public Service Award in Education.

A portfolio-based award, it emphasizes what a policy can do -- quality and effectiveness -- rather than how many policies are produced.

Schools will be assessed on the effectiveness of their portfolios of regional education policies.

The schools will be assessed against the objectives they set and their local needs using the ART approach -- Collect; Relate; Create; and Donate. This portfolio will then be marked based on its reach of influence.

Such an approach will give poor municipal schools an equal chance of competing with richer counterparts because the assessment takes into account local needs.

If one school starts by influencing its neighborhood, it may end up influencing the world, by donating its ideas into the growing pool of international knowledge.

An idea that could best be summed up as "acting locally, influencing globally".

The writer (jaha@fulbrightweb.org), a Fulbright recipient and a Kelly scholar, is a Boston University School of Education Graduate in Educational Media and Technology. He is currently volunteering to help Apeksi design a Public Service Award in Education. He blogs at http://ilmubebaspakai.blogspot.com.