Dennis Baron is Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Illinois. His book, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, looks at the evolution of communication technology, from pencils to pixels. In this post, also posted on Baron’s personal blog The Web of Language, he discusses the increasingly popular trend of using robots in classrooms. Read his previous posts here.
They’re coming, and they’ll be here by September! Robot teachers, programmed with a single mission: to save our failing schools.
Funded by the Frankenstein Foundation, computer engineers in secret mountain laboratories and workshops hidden deep below the desert floor are feverishly soldering chips and circuit boards onto bits of aluminum to create mechanical life forms whose sole purpose is to teach English.
We need this invasion of English-teaching robots because, according to researchers at the University of California, San Diego, “an unprecedented number of children in the US start public school with major deficits in basic academic skills, including vocabulary skills.” So computer scientists at UCSD’s Machine Perception Laboratory designed RUBI, a “sociable robot” who successfully taught a group of toddlers ten vocabulary words in only twelve days. RUBI improved the children’s word-mastery by a full 25% compared to a control set of words not taught by the mechanical wonder.
In another experiment, another RUBI the Robot successfully taught English-speaking preschoolers nine words in Finnish (Finnish is notoriously difficult to learn because it is unrelated to any other language). And Korean educators report similar success with ENGKEY, yet another robot English teacher. English is mandatory in all Korean schools, and the government hopes to replace expensive and hard-to-recruit native speakers of American or Canadian English with expensive and hard-to-maintain machines like ENGKEY, a robot programmed to recognize and respond to human speech.
Like computers, robots appeal to school administrators who think the machines are smarter, cheaper, more efficient, and less likely to talk back or take sick days, than human teachers. And they appeal as well to legislators, government officials, and employers who are concerned with low test scores, high drop-out rates, and global economic competition.
To put the robot teacher invasion into context, we should remember that using technology to teach is hardly a new idea. Books are a teaching technology, though anyone who has studied a foreign language only from a textbook and then tried watching a foreign-language film knows that even tried-and-true book-learning has its limitations.
As for the newer communication technologies, when they came on the scene, telephones, radio, film, and television were all going to deliver information to students faster and more efficiently than any teacher could. What I learned from educational radio in the fourth grade was how to sleep in class with my eyes open, and what I learned from filmstrips in school was how long it took for the heat of