OK, for the most part this reads like a press release converted into a newspaper article (the sort of article I complain about on various media discussion lists), complete with the required introductory story about little Deyci Sierra from Mexico. Buried two thirds of the way down is a nugget: "When students launch the Fast ForWord software, they feel like they're playing a computer game. But what they're really doing is causing permanent physical changes to their brains through repetition of certain exercises." Now of course it's not quite that simple, but there is an important insight here into why computers (could or should) teach differently than, say, teachers and textbooks: learning is an emergent property of the activity, rather than the sole focus of the activity. It's the difference between learning the principles of ballistics by playing baseball and learning the principles by reading about them in a physics text.
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