The University of Chicago is not known for its athletics, so when I entered it as a first-year student I was very surprised that I had to take and pass a swimming test. Despite my parent’s best efforts, I had never learned to swim, and thus had to take a required quarter of swimming classes. Now, unfortunately, I am a slow learner, particularly on the physical side, and I failed my final swim exam that first quarter. I had to take the course again the next quarter.

I went into my first class in the old Bartlett Gymnasium pool that
cold winter day and dutifully lined up at the edge of the pool like my swim coach told me to do, the edge of the pool at the deep end And I patiently waited instructions. None came. He, instead, moved in back of me and pushed me in. “Sink or swim,” he said. I started to swim. I had been taught the strokes, I had been taught to float, I had been taught to kick and to breathe before. Now I just needed to be pushed off into the deep end where I had to use those skills, conquer my fears, and swim. I am still here today, so though I am not a world class swimmer, I do know how to survive in the water and even enjoy swimming.

I think about my swimming lesson when I talk to students, teachers, and others who fear spreadsheets. I want them to get a couple of simple skills under their belt and just jump into the deep end. No practice dogpaddling in the shallow end of the pool, no kicking exercise holding on to the edge of the pool, no holding your breadth and swimming underwater across the pool are going to turn you into a swimmer. If you want to learn to swim, practice breathing in the water, kicking, and using your arms in a crawl stroke then jump into the deep end of the pool, jump in and swim.

The same holds true for spreadsheets, arguably the most important and most feared business technology we have. Practice using a rule on an input cell to put its output into another cell thus creating a function. Use relative and absolute addressing to copy those functions and build models combining them. And start with a parameter table to enable you to ask, “What if…” of those models.

Go to whatifmath.org and click on Tour to see how simple models can enable you to build and do math across the curriculum. So, I say to teachers and students, “Jump in! The water is fine. You won’t drown. And I promise you will learn how to swim in the spreadsheet ocean and come to really enjoy learning math with spreadsheets in this Happy New Year.”

Math Blaster was the biggest hit educational product in the 1980’s, the first decade of the personal computer age. Flying saucer like objects would vaporize before your eyes when you solved a simple math question. It thus gave you immediate feedback and like pinball, it kept score. My friend Jan Davidson designed and built this first in a lineage of educational products.

Today, most of our digital learning programs pretend to be more sophisticated. They deal with multistep problems and less rote practice. Their feedback is less shoot ‘em up, and their interactions are no longer pure gamey response. Yet they remain wedded to the same kind of “artificial” feedback where the computer knows the answer and students guess it. Students may look like they are doing authentic problem solving, but they expect their computers to check each step they take, and with the same artificial feedback keep them on track to solve the problem. The computer now knows not only the answer, the product, it knows a particular process as well, and it tries to ensure that students get the problem right by following that process.

Unfortunately, in the real world outside of schools, we seldom get artificial feedback to help us solve problems. We must learn to use real feedback to keep us on the right track, to help us solve real problems, especially those requiring creative solutions. We need to learn to build real feedback into spreadsheets to catch selection and rule mistakes, so we learn to build in redundant calculations as checks. We make graphs to give us feedback, to see whether all our numbers fit the pattern. Though spreadsheets may seem intelligent, we have to constantly find ways of assuring that we have not made mistakes in the models we build, so if we are good spreadsheet developers we us headmath to check whether our algorithms make sense.

Students need to be learning to build feedback skills into their problem-solving processes and strategies. Artificial intelligence may be an interesting arena today, but our kids need to learn to create and use real feedback and not rely on any program’s artificial feedback if they are to become good problem solvers.

One hundred years ago my father at age 9 entered America. He had traveled from his birthplace in a town in what is now Ukraine across the vast expanse of Siberia on the Trans-Siberian railroad to its eastern extreme at Vladivostok, from there by ship to Kyoto, Japan and then 6 weeks on a tramp steamer across the whole of the Pacific Ocean to Seattle to meet the father he had not known, who brought him and his mother to Chicago to settle in a new land. This immense voyage in space and in time must have been, disorienting, yet that is far too weak a word for the changes he had to confront. He left a town shattered by war, likely without electricity, telephones, or motor driven transport, an agrarian country where farming, as it had been done for centuries, was the main industry and where industrialization had virtually no impact. Transported into a new world by steam railroad and ship to an industrialized world with electric lights, indoor plumbing, central heating, electric streetcars, telephones, and an abundance of food; he would soon see know air travel, radio, refrigeration, skyscrapers, and of course automobiles. During his all too short lifetime of 45 more years, he would travel on a jet plane, use the modern air powered tools of dentistry to save people from the pain of tooth decay, watch television, buy a house in the suburbs, and travel comfortably throughout much of the United States.

To my lasting regret, I never thought to ask him how he navigated such profound changes, changes in technology, in community, in governance, and in economics. He was just 20 years-old when the Great Depression started. He was 33 years-old when, as a brand-new father, he went into the army. And he was 43 years-old when he left the dirty crowded big city to join the suburban green migration. I often think about the profound and yes unprecedented changes he lived through as I consider what we are going through today. Like him, I am, and actually all of us are, experiencing changes we could never have even imagined in our best science fiction, changes in the nature of work, in the technology we use and the capabilities and comforts it brings, in our political systems, our communications, our personal interactions, in who we marry and what we spend our time on. I wonder often how he felt about those last generation changes, how disorienting they were to him and to others, and how that concerned him. I wonder, as I talk with family, friends, and associates, how our disorienting profound and unprecedented changes compare to his. I wonder if the first Americans, who invaded virgin land, faced with unseen animals, unfamiliar plants, and unknown geological challenges. I wonder if we are, after all, so very different, and if as humans we are most fortunate to have the gift of a flexible mind to enable us to change, to meet the challenges of the new.

My father was by most standards an incredibly successful human being. He was happily married, had three boys who have all had their own families and made useful contributions to their communities. Despite coming here with no English and likely little formal educational experience he learned, becoming a dentist, a community leader and in his later years started a second career as a teacher building a revolutionary new program to educate dental assistants. He not only served his new country and his various communities, he played a key role in their growth and transformations. I can only hope his grandchildren and great grandchildren should be so successful.

He managed to do all of this during a time of change in every area of his life. I have, therefore, hope that in our time of amazing change, when our world, our jobs, our technologies, our communities are so profoundly transforming, we take comfort that our generation is not alone. Our forefathers too have, from time to time, succeeded in navigating such amazing periods. For, I am sure my father would agree, these times of tumult are also times of great energy, these times that look so scary are also times of promise, these times when we cannot see the future are ones we can instinctually navigate. I picture my dad riding on a wobbly rail car across the great stretches of Russia comforting his very frightened mother and believing in a better future. This was his gift to me, and it is the gift I pass on to my children, grandchildren, and all my students. It is why I am so deeply sure that technology not only shakes up our world, it gives us the power to reinvent it. It will give us the power to reimagine education and enable all our children to thrive in their new world.

On this 10th anniversary of the iPhone it is worth remembering that this invention, as world-changing as it was, will not be deemed the most important one of that decade. It will, in the long thrust of history, take second place to an event that truly and profoundly changes the course of human thought. For in this first decade of the second millennium we will be most affected by the democratization* of knowledge. Before this decade, knowledge was rare, a scarce and valuable commodity to be bought, sold, and transferred in schools, workplaces, and books. It was owned by the few and sold to the many. Our schools sold knowledge to students in the form of teacher presentations and textbook descriptions. Our workplaces sold it as apprenticeships, training, and professional development. And our encyclopedias, sold these compilations of all knowledge door-to-door, and libraries were handsomely constructed to give all the opportunity to acquire it in printed form.

During the first decade of our new century, knowledge ceased to be owned by the elite, ceased to be rare, ceased to be precious. It is now owned by all, ubiquitous, and, for all intents-and-purposes, free. Wikipedia, a tiny but highly significant reflection of this revolution, began in 2001. Its rate of growth, as we can see from this fascinating graph, inflated around mid-decade and is even now slowing down as it has filled up with much of the past knowledge. And Wikipedia is but one of billions of posts and sites that today freely contribute knowledge in every sphere of human endeavor. For knowledge continues to expand at, what to most of us seems like an accelerating pace. Knowledge for the first time in human history, and for as far as we can see in the future, is now democratically produced and distributed.

From an educator’s perspective, this revolution profoundly changes our job. We can no longer be paid to carefully dole out the precious knowledge, mainly in text form that we acquired from our sweat and treasure, for it is now freely available on the Web. As painful as this may be to those of us who are or have taught, we will no longer be valued for what we know and show, but instead for how we help our students find what they want or need to know.

Applying this to problem solving demands we change our role from telling to asking, from answering to encouraging, from giving to wondering. Our job is now to encourage our students to use the Web to find things out, to learn how to solve a problem, to search for conceptual understanding, to explore possibilities, and perhaps most of important of all, to choose problems of interest to them to practice and build their skills. While students likely know Khan Academy and YouTube videos, most still need to be invited and yes encouraged to use all the tools available on the Internet to solve problems (in our case to learn to use spreadsheets to solve problems). In the digital age, they and their collaborators need to learn to aggressively find and use the digital opportunities to work on and solve problems. They need to learn to separate good from bad, valuable from worthless, helpful from wasteful. They need to be encouraged to find things out for themselves, to try again, to try harder, to keep trying. And they need to be told to get help from their peers and from experts if they need it. They may, of course, at times need some direction, need us to bend their path a bit, but we will have to remember it is their path and not ours!

*I borrow this term, as it applies to education, from my dear friend Jim Kaput.