Two Methodological Articles

Innovation and Reality
Life is changing, and change is gradually penetrating even the school — one of the most conservative institutions of society. How does the Russian state guide this process? Some clarity emerged from a seminar recently held by the National Training Foundation (NTF). The discussion concerned the next phase of the project "Informatization of the Education System."
Go There, I Know Not Where
The project's client is the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, and it is funded by a World Bank loan granted on fairly soft terms (no more than 2% per annum, issued for seventeen years). This is already the fourth NTF project. It encompasses not only work with authors and publishers aimed at producing new educational products, but also the selection of "pilot" regions for the project and even the training of a new generation of teachers in pedagogical universities — teachers capable of implementing innovations in school life.
Seven regions were selected for implementation, one from each Federal District. Schools were chosen there — some prestigious and good, others ones on which it seemed less regrettable to experiment. They received decent equipment: not merely PCs and projectors, but also measuring instruments and handheld computers. The content that will put this wealth to work will be provided by the Unified Collection of Digital Educational Resources¹, which is intended to be accessible to all schools in Russia. This repository, maintained by a dedicated organization, is to be replenished through a network of competitions for the development and procurement of electronic materials. The critical mass of content that would transform the repository into an indispensable resource for innovative educators has not yet been reached, but some material has already been placed in the collection. It contains more than 22,000 objects, with nearly 9,000 open for access. However, in the author's view, the most interesting item among the currently open material is a collection of Russian classical music².
The results of previous efforts to informatize education are already in operation. In December 2004, the overwhelming majority of Russian schools received media libraries consisting of instructional CDs produced on government commission. One does not wish to disparage a well-intentioned initiative, but one circumstance deserves attention. It seemed to the author that the number of conceptual and factual errors in these materials is considerably higher than in traditional printed educational aids. Why might this be? Perhaps because the IT and subject-matter qualifications of the developers do not always correlate well. Perhaps because quality control in this new industry has not yet been established. Or perhaps because bugs are more noticeable in multimedia products than in printed ones.
In any case, very diverse resources are being converted to digital form. Let me give just one "live" example. A presenter introduces a digital resource for teaching zoology in school. The projector displays a computer desktop with two images and captions. Under one is written "blue whale," under the other — "paramecium." The innovation consists in the fact that clicking on these images yields information about "Subkingdom Metazoa" and "Subkingdom Protozoa."³ There may well have been other revolutionary ideas there, but the author of this text could not discern them. The fact is that alongside the caption "blue whale" was a photograph of a sperm whale (it had been photographed through a column of water and had thereby acquired a bluish tint), while the "paramecium" was something resembling a Euglena (whose flagellum had been photographed out of focus and was therefore invisible). The zoologist's brain simply shuts down when confronted with such substitutions. Incidentally, the project in question successfully passed both Russian and international peer review...
The conversation that has already begun about errors in approved and even procured digital resources will become ever more interesting over time. The loan funds do not provide for their correction, and one must take comfort in the fact that each person is responsible for their own work. At the seminar, however, a noteworthy analogy was discussed. The first horseless carriages were worse than the familiar horse-drawn vehicles: more expensive, more temperamental, less comfortable. But people who had a sense for the new strove to introduce them anyway, regardless of broken limbs and other unpleasantness. The development of the automobile industry proved them right.
So, the most important thing is the replenishment of the state collection. For this purpose, competitions are held for the development of new instructional tools bearing the unwieldy acronyms DER, CISS, and IEME.
DERs (digital educational resources) are intended to be integrated into existing school practice. CISSs (complex-structure information sources) presuppose certain changes in the established order of things. The fact is that technological changes are highly likely to entail changes in the nature of students' and teachers' activities. An example discussed at the seminar: an essay can be written with pen and paper, or it can be written on a computer. But as soon as essays begin to be created in electronic form, the possibility arises of extended work on an evolving text (including one modified in response to the teacher's comments). That is already a pedagogical innovation. Incidentally, it must be understood that the education system will not embrace innovations with open arms. The more significant the change, the greater the resistance from the conservative school environment. This, by the way, is not altogether a bad thing...
Finally, the third group of informational resources — IEMEs (innovative educational-methodological complexes) — constitutes a complete set of instructional tools encompassing print, digital, and network components. By the organizers' design, they are to be characterized by an orientation toward preparing students for life in the information society (rather than toward the traditional goals of school instruction). The letter "I" in IEME signifies that no one knows what is actually planned to be achieved. One will have to navigate by landmarks, directly during testing (or even during implementation). "Go there, I know not where..."
The seminar in which the author participated assembled the winners of the IEME competition. Through a selection process (carried out by more than 150 experts, 15 of whom were international), 37 entries were chosen from 229 applications. Of these, 26 came from Moscow and St. Petersburg, and 2 came from abroad — from the United States and Ukraine. The remainder came from all of Russia.
Civilization in the School
At this stage of writing the report, the author wished to describe several of the winning projects. Alas, the situation is not straightforward. Some of what was liked is connected with things one would not wish to publicly criticize. Some elicited from the NTF experts themselves the reaction: "Well, since you turned out to be the winner of our competition, let us try to figure out what is innovative about your work." It will be possible to describe only two projects — one that was wholeheartedly admired, and the author's own.
Students at Moscow Gymnasium No. 1567 have been taught for many years running, beginning in the fifth grade, to conduct scientific research: formulating a problem, constructing measuring instruments, recording and interpreting observational results, and presenting research findings. The student work produced in the course of this instruction combines childlike naivety with flashes of genius. Did you know that when making a hydrometer at home, one can use a plastic syringe weighted with a pair of nuts fitted over its nozzle — it already has markings that need only be calibrated? And can you determine how the height to which a ping-pong ball submerged in water leaps is related to the depth of its submersion? Do not rush to answer; the relationship is non-trivial.⁴ A team of seven teachers, scientists, and methodologists — the first named being Elena Ilyinichna Afrina — presented an IEME intended to help transfer an already established practice to new ground, by preparing the study of natural sciences in the upper grades.
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And the author of these lines, together with Alexander Kozlenko from the Kyiv software firm "Quasar-Micro" and Marina Kravchenko from Kharkiv National University, presented the project "Ecology. Constructing the Biosphere" (the very one that came from Ukraine). We want future citizens to preserve their habitat in a livable condition. That means we must give them experience in applying knowledge about interrelationships in living (and not only living) nature. Such experience cannot be gained on Earth's biosphere; therefore a computer simulator of another planet is needed. And from where should students obtain the knowledge required to operate this simulator — from a textbook? No, from investigative digital models representing real, terrestrial reality. And how can children's interest in this strange task be engaged? By organizing team project work and competition among them. So, dear students: form groups, submit proposals for transforming uninhabited planets, populate them with prokaryotic biospheres, adapt plants and animals to conditions on those planets, engineer ecosystems, build cities and ensure their sustenance. The textbook explains what questions you must find answers to, and indicates which models may help you do so. And hurry — the competition does not sleep!.. All that remains now is to embody these ideas in textbook and curriculum texts. Dear me!
Also shown at the seminar was an object-oriented environment for solving standard physics problems. By dragging with the mouse, one assembles a model, enters the formulas, and away one goes. And in the study of economic geography, a student will be able to post a description of some ancient city, whose history he has studied, to the IEME support website. There are, in fact, no shortage of ideas; the question is how well they will be realized.
No Way Around the Lawyers
The presentation by a specially invited lawyer generated extraordinary interest. Readers of Computerra do not need to be told that copyright, first and foremost, blocks the creation of new content; second, serves the interests of large holders of others' works; and only third, protects the author who has ventured to create something new. For the majority of IEME authors, this understanding came as a surprise. If an author or a publisher wishes to produce an integral product without enormous headaches, the simplest solution is to do everything from scratch, from beginning to end. Although the state has created a library of digital resources, it is practically impossible to make use of it.
Suppose an author takes another person's work from the public domain and inserts it into his own context. He then transfers this result to the state and receives payment for his work under a contract. By that act alone he has created the most complex legal entanglement, in the unraveling of which he will end up the guilty party. And if another person's product has been modified or reinterpreted in any way — that is a complete nightmare.⁵ The "copyright" solution is: insert into one's products links to others' resources, which the end user in the school will retrieve from the centralized library at the moment of access. Do you think that is technologically workable? Rights can, of course, be requested or purchased, but how complex that procedure turns out to be!
The author was gratified that he is making a product on ecology — in the end, he will simply write (and the publisher will implement in software) for the tenth time what already exists in analogous products. Indeed, that is even good — if we are able, we will do it better than the others. But what about those creating an IEME on the history of painting? Let them simply paint everything again from scratch.⁶
And finally — one actual story that lodged in memory after the seminar ended. In one region of vast Russia, flash-drive technology became widespread in working with teachers. A curious visitor learned that this consisted of teachers copying methodological materials and administrative directives onto their flash drives.
Let us believe that Russian education will successfully assimilate the current innovations as well.
On the Study of Chemistry and Beyond...
I was asked to offer my opinion on a matter in which I am not particularly expert — the problems of teaching chemistry in school. Well, so be it; I will take the risk. Let me begin by declaring that I, as a biologist, respect and even love chemistry (as well as geology, physics, astronomy, cosmology, and other natural sciences). Although these sciences afford less opportunity for empathy than biology, they are nonetheless bound together in one knot by the natural-scientific worldview. You are no doubt aware that sciences are divided into natural, non-natural,⁷ and anti-natural?⁸ A person who has grasped the foundations of the natural sciences undergoes a qualitative transformation. He perceives the interrelationships by which the properties of the surrounding world are linked together, and understands how the "fabric of being"⁹ is woven. Do you recall the ancient meaning of the word "cosmos"? It encompassed the concept of orderliness and regularity in the universe, contrasting cosmos with chaos. Today it is probably impossible to hold knowledge of all the natural sciences in a single mind at their present level; hardly any attempt of this kind was made after Alexander von Humboldt, the universal genius of the early nineteenth — now the early previous — century. But even the rudiments of these sciences offer the chance for a coherent picture of this world, for a different level of dialogue with it. So how, then, is a natural-scientific worldview to be formed at school?
At school, children study the foundations of the sciences. Why this privilege is accorded to science — only one of the modes of engaging with reality — is a separate question. Be that as it may, the future trolleybus driver must know that roundworms have a primary body cavity, annelids a secondary one, and arthropods a mixed one (forgive me; I am drawing examples from my own field).
Why? I do not know. Do you think school curricula reflect any understanding of why something needs to be learned? For my own work, for instance, I have formulated the following purpose for the school course in zoology: to cultivate in children an interested and caring attitude toward animals, our remarkable relatives. And let the study of specific curricular topics develop children's capacity for reasoning and for establishing interrelationships... Would the relevant authorities share my approach? Unlikely. It is simpler for them to test knowledge of facts. The clumsy transition to standardized testing¹⁰ only worsens the reduction of instruction to the mere accumulation of a mass of specific knowledge. What could the study of chemistry offer? It could develop the capacity for reasoning. What else? It could render the world around us comprehensible, orderly, interesting! Plus, it could provide a wealth of practically useful information. When I began studying chemistry in seventh grade more than a quarter century ago, I collected a string of mediocre grades. One was required to memorize a heap of reactions and properties that were for me a jumbled mass of facts. My parents asked an acquaintance of theirs — a good school chemistry teacher — to speak with me. He talked with me as we sat on a bench in his garden, then continued the conversation in a peripatetic manner during a walk to the grocery store and back. In the course of that audience, he did not explain to me a multitude of factual consequences, but laid out for me their causes — the fundamental principles. In a certain respect these principles sound mythological, but this does not prevent one from using them as the foundation upon which to organize facts. So: there are atoms consisting of nuclei with electron shells. These atoms strive to bring their electron shells to perfection, to completeness. Those for whom perfection requires little more, and for whom the interaction of the nucleus with the outer electrons is strong, find it easier to supplement what they already have. Those that have little and hold it poorly find it easier to give it away. One can supplement by sharing or by taking... Comparing the "strength" of a nucleus's tendency to hold electrons explains which reactions proceed and which do not. And the number of electrons that atoms accept or donate determines the ratios of the reagents and the formulas of the resulting substances.
Did my school chemistry teacher not know this? Of course she did. But she had no occasion to have a candid conversation with a struggling student: she was occupied with working through the aims and objectives of specific lessons. Today one must learn that this reaction proceeds under such-and-such conditions, and that one under such-and-such others — is it really so hard to remember? And then the situation changed: a biologist came to teach chemistry in our class, and everything became easy and clear.
Do you suppose I was simply unlucky with my first chemistry teacher? But similar things happened with mathematics. The mathematics teacher, who considered me dull, required me to memorize rules for operations with various functions, finding nothing in need of elaboration. I would then go to the physics teacher, who assessed me — perhaps undeservedly — quite highly. The physics teacher explained to me that a derivative is a rate, and an integral is the area under a curve, and showed me in the solution of which natural problems these functions are useful. Having received explanations that the mathematics teacher would have considered superfluous, I often solved the problems set for us in ways that did not conform to the prescribed methodology. I do not know precisely whether the situation with the teaching of chemistry, mathematics, and other sciences in school has improved or worsened compared to the period of late stagnation; by analogy with biology and by reference to the declining level of preparation of university students, I suspect it has worsened.¹¹
Mastery of a subject consists of two complementary but independent components — knowledge of facts and understanding of interrelationships. Knowledge without understanding is dead. Understanding cannot but rest on knowledge, but once it has arisen, it rapidly extends knowledge's horizons...
Alas, here a painful problem arises. Not everyone is capable of understanding. Why, in the mass school, is knowledge perfected rather than understanding? Because virtually everyone can manage such instruction (some better, some worse — depending on diligence and the development of memory). Instruction grounded in understanding is undemocratic, because it is not universally accessible. It is something that can be permitted only in some "elite" school.¹²
How would I teach chemistry? In a "mass" school — I have no idea. But in a real one, where children are taught in earnest, I would try to apply the idea that I am now developing with my colleagues in the ecology course — one of the integrating natural sciences.¹³ The logic there is as follows: how does one understand the principles governing the functioning of our biosphere? By constructing (in a computer model) an artificial biosphere on some uninhabited planet!
So, perhaps, if I were to venture into innovations in the teaching of chemistry, I would propose to students that they develop an alternative chemistry. For my own part, I would find it genuinely interesting to construct chemistry for a two-dimensional space, with a different stable number of "2D electrons" in the shells of "2D atoms," and consequently different "2D elements," a different "2D Mendeleev table,"¹⁴ different valences, and different formulas for "2D substances." What is most interesting is that even in this chemistry, oxidation and reduction will be possible, there will be its own metals and non-metals, acids and bases... To develop such "2D chemistry," a student would probably need to work through "3D chemistry" to the point of genuinely understanding it. And the authors of such a course would face the non-trivial task of devising and programming an environment that would make this possible. As for "4D chemistry," we can save that for an elective for the especially gifted.
With these methods we will explain a substantial portion of general and inorganic chemistry. And what of organic chemistry? One would identify which "2D element" will perform the function of carbon. Determine how many covalent bonds it will form (actually, there is not much choice here: four would offer no novelty; two would not yield sufficient diversity of compounds; therefore, three). Such "2D organic chemistry" will be poorer than the ordinary kind, but will allow one to quickly work through all classes of compounds (and will later prompt the question of which groups of substances from "3D organic chemistry" are impossible in "2D"). And on which "2D compounds" shall we initiate matrix synthesis?
How long should such a course take? No more than a year, perhaps only half a year. Shall we wager that, if properly conducted, it would reduce the time required to study standard, "normal" chemistry? Alas, the curriculum would need to be changed. What would the regulatory authorities say? One shudders to think...
Could the average schoolchild handle such a course? Probably not. But that does not mean such a course is unnecessary — some will manage it. Could the average teacher deliver such a course? No. But some proportion of teachers — especially younger, computer-literate ones — would be interested and would cope. And what is to be offered to the "broad masses"? I do not know. Perhaps entertaining and instructive accounts of the properties of substances and materials. That, at least, is more honest — there is hope that the instructional material will be assimilated. Perhaps then "understanding-based" chemistry will become prestigious, and the new Russians will strive to have their children learn precisely it. Alas, here a problem in the domain of social engineering arises. How can one ensure that instruction based on understanding is not appropriated by our "elite," who select students by the status or wealth of their parents? This is probably a subject for a separate conversation. I believe the solution lies in making this instruction genuinely require good mental development, and in financially incentivizing educational institutions to increase the number of students who successfully master such an "understanding-based" curriculum.
What is next in line? Physics? What a pity that cosmology is not taught in school!

1 school-collection.edu.ru Back to text

2 Unfortunately, an attempt to download anything from it ended in failure. Apparently a licence is required, issued to Russian schools. Back to text

3 This "subkingdom" survives only in school biology courses. The hypothesis that protozoans are one of the groups of animals has collapsed. In fact, animals (as well as fungi and plants) are small branches on the evolutionary tree of organisms that are traditionally called "protozoans." Back to text

4 Better yet, go and look at the students' work at schools.techno.ru/sch1567/dost/uchrab.htm Back to text

5 Although why take it if one is not going to reinterpret it? Back to text

6 Do you think reproducing classical paintings does not infringe their rights? It does, however, infringe the rights of museums and photographer-printer-reproducers, which is far more serious. Back to text

7 The philologists and mathematicians and other scholars of symbolic systems whom I sincerely respect, as well as the diverse technical sciences. Back to text

8 Shall I name them, or will you guess? Well, those ones that have become so popular these days... Back to text

9 © Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Back to text

10 And do you know what ingenious tests of understanding — and more broadly, of cognitive abilities — exist in, say, America? Magnificent ones! It is just unclear who among us can compose them and where they could be used... Back to text

11 And one more factor. Of the three good teachers mentioned here, one has passed away, and two — like Jews — are far from the post-Soviet space. Back to text

12 The word "elite" is placed in quotation marks because in our context two categories of people consider themselves to be the elite — "stars" (showmen and showwomen) and nouveaux riches. Back to text

13 I wrote about this in the essay "Innovation and Reality" in Computerra No. 664. Back to text

14 With period lengths dependent on the number of electrons in each layer of the electron shell. Back to text
D. Shabanov. Innovation and Reality // Computerra, Moscow, 2006. – No. 44 (664). — pp. 20–21
D. Shabanov. On the Study of Chemistry and Beyond... // Computerra, Moscow, 2007. – No. 30 (698). — pp. 42–43