technically
learning
The Forgotten Black Innovators of Ed Tech
Part II
Part II
In honor of Black History Month, this post is part of a series on the Black educational technology innovators who are likely all but forgotten by educational technology researchers and practitioners today. These individuals did cutting-edge work and worked with well-known researchers, but for various reasons (including, at least in some cases, the discrimination and challenges that Black researchers have faced in academia), their stories are rarely told. My inspiration for looking into these stories was a realization that my class on educational technology almost exclusively focuses on White men who played a pivotal role in the history of educational technology, but as the stories in this series make clear, even when academia was dominated by White men, other voices were still present. These stories are not just about technology innovations, but also about civil rights and the desire to advance the opportunities of others.
Part I - Dr. Weusi-Puryear and Dr. Weusijana
Part II - Dr. Roulette William Smith
Part III - Dr. Shaw and His Mentors
Part II - Dr. Roulette William Smith
I thank Dr. Smith for his help in constructing this narrative.
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The field of educational technology is replete with polymaths—individuals who have studied and achieved some level of competence in a number of disparate fields, often making cutting-edge contributions in those fields. This list includes Seymour Papert, Gordon Pask, Herbert Simon, and Patrick Suppes. These individuals made wide-reaching contributions to a variety of fields for which they are still remembered today, including mathematics, philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence, economics, cybernetics, architecture, and education.
Dr. Roulette William Smith was also an early educational technology researcher and a polymath, but unlike the others, his story is less likely to be remembered. As a Black man, Dr. Smith joins a long list of polymaths from diverse backgrounds who tend to get ignored especially in Western historical narratives. (For a broad survey of the many polymaths across time, space, and cultural background, see Waqas Ahmed’s The Polymath: Unlocking the Power of Human Versatility.) In 1961, at the young age of 19, Smith began completing a Master’s degree in Mathematics at Stanford University, being the youngest math graduate student at the time [1]. He completed his Master’s degrees in Mathematics in 1964 at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, and he completed a Master’s in Computer Science in 1965, the year that Stanford’s Computer Science Department first formed. He then went on to obtain a PhD in Education at Stanford in 1973, under the supervision of Patrick Suppes, who had become the president of both the American Educational Research Association and the National Academy of Education that same year. Dr. Smith’s dissertation was titled “Modeling Instruction Using Computer Generated Dialogue.” It was one of the earliest applications of AI to education, predating the first conference on AI and education by over a decade and being practically contemporaneous with what is often said to be the first intelligent tutoring system—SCHOLAR, developed by Jaime R. Carbonell in 1970.
In 1970, prior to finishing his dissertation, Dr. Smith began teaching at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he became an assistant professor in Education and Psychology in 1973. He was one of only three Black faculty at UCSB at the time (R. W. Smith, personal communication, February, 22, 2022). In 1972, he became one of the inaugural Executive Editors (and the leading editor for US-based submissions) of the Elsevier-published journal Instructional Science, and he remained an editor until 1983. With this journal, Dr. Smith and his co-editors looked towards a broadening what is typically considered as educational; as mentioned in the journal’s opening editors’ address, “the word ‘instruction’ will be construed in a very liberal fashion to consider the whole gamut of processes by which people self-consciously seek to make themselves understood to others” (Brieske, Lewis, Macdonald-Ross, & Smith, 1972). To this day, the journal remains a premier journal in what is now the learning sciences; its more recently added subtitle is “An International Journal of the Learning Sciences.” From the beginning, its editorial advisory board included many notable education researchers including Suppes, Pask, Robert Gagné, and Robert Glaser. Over the decades, its editors have included many other established learning scientists. Yet I suspect few recognize the names of the inaugural editors, including Roulette William Smith.
In 1973, he published a paper called “The Ombudsman: A Computer Model of Dialogue in Instruction and Conflict Mediation,” which was one of the earliest investigations of computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL)—before the CSCL field formally emerged. A year later, he pursued the idea of completing a sabbatical in one of two groups: Newell and Simon's group at Carnegie Mellon University or Seymour Papert's group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Smith, 1974)—these were two of the most prominent AI labs in the world at the time. Ultimately he decided to go to Carnegie Mellon to continue his work on group computer-assisted instruction. Not only were Newell and Simon leading AI researchers and psychologists, it is little known that they were also beginning to explore educational applications of their work at the time. The image below shows Dr. Smith's innovative description of Group CAI in a letter to Allen Newell to discuss the possibility of a sabbatical and potential research topics; the next image is Newell's response, showing a positive reception of the sabbatical [2].
Interestingly, a chance encounter in Pittsburgh led Dr. Smith to decide he wanted to pivot to a career in medical education, and upon his return to California, he left his academic position to go to medical school in University of California, San Francisco. More broadly, at this time, he decided to try “to formulate the most difficult problem that [he] could imagine,” which was to find out people who need help but don’t know it, and to then help these “unknowingly needy” (Rolle & Smith, 1993). Given the multifaceted nature of this broad problem, his plan was to study medicine for 10 years, followed by law for 10 years, followed by theology—all in addition to his background on psychology and education. (He never ended up pursuing law and theology formally, but his career was seemingly dedicated to this broad problem.)
Although he was at medical school from 1976-1980, he left and began conducting his own medical research on viruses. In 1979, he became the inaugural Associate Editor of another Elsevier journal that reflected his interdisciplinary interests: Health Policy and Education (which is now called Health Policy). Just as Instructional Science broadened traditional conceptions of education, this journal, broadened conceptions of healthcare to include educational and policy aspects. Throughout the 1980s he held various visiting scholar positions at Stanford in various departments: Institute for Mathematical Studies in the Social Sciences, School of Medicine, School of Education, and Department of Anthropology. In these various positions, he conducted leading research on the Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV), formed mathematical models for the molecular basis of aging and memory as well as the evolution of AIDS, and taught classes on “technological futures and anticipatory anthropology.” His work on viruses has continued to the present day where he has investigated links between COVID-19 and stress-related viruses like the EBV.
From the 1980s to the 2000s, Dr. Smith also conducted innovative transdisciplinary research on common sense and why it’s not so common. He also had professorial positions at interdisciplinary psychology institutions (the Rosebridge Graduate School of Integrative Psychology and Institute of Transpersonal Psychology). During this time he also formed his own interdisciplinary institute to pursue his innovative research, aptly called the Institute for Postgraduate Interdisciplinary Studies.
Interestingly, throughout his early career in education and AI, Dr. Smith crossed paths with each of the other four (likely more well-known) polymaths mentioned above. This is probably more than mere coincidence. As someone interested in tackling big questions from multidisciplinary perspectives, he likely sought out opportunities to work with others with similar mindsets. The journal Instructional Science itself took a very interdisciplinary approach to the study of learning and instruction that was likely the result of Smith’s polymathic approach (along with that of other editors who came from an interdisciplinary cybernetic background).
Had Dr. Smith continued his career at the intersection of education and computer science, he would have likely continued to be at the cutting edge of educational technology and the burgeoning field of AI in education. Yet he sought broader approaches to tackling the question of how to help people; education was one dimension of helping the unknowingly needy and technology was merely a powerful tool. Unfortunately such work is not the kind that is typically valued, understood, or incentivized by the Academy, and as such Dr. Smith had to forge his own path at various institutions, including his own, leaving behind a tenure-track position at an R1 institution. His career may appear multifaceted and scattered, but I believe there was a consistent theme of understanding human psychology from a holistic perspective to improve the human condition—including the biological basis of our condition and the role that technology can play in improving it. In this sense, Dr. Smith himself considers his work to have continued to be under the auspices of educational technology, if we are willing to broaden our definitions of those terms—just as the journals Instructional Science and Health Policy and Education broadened traditional notions of instruction and healthcare (R. W. Smith, personal communication, February, 28, 2022). Common to many polymaths, Dr. Smith used analogies to drive his work, such as analogies between the transmission of biological viruses and the transmission of psychological disorders and between common sense in computer reasoning and human reasoning. I think the field of educational technology can benefit from this transdisciplinary, polymathic approach, and as mentioned above, many early innovators in the field were polymaths. A more holistic understanding of how to improve teaching and learning can benefit from bridging across psychological theories, technological innovations, mathematical models, policy, and the myriad other fields that can inform how, why, and what people learn—Dr. Smith’s career is a good case study for such an approach.
His career may appear multifaceted and scattered, but I believe there was a consistent theme of understanding human psychology from a holistic perspective to improve the human condition—including the biological basis of our condition and the role that technology can play in improving it.
Notes
Much of the biographical information in this post was obtained from Dr. Roulette William Smith's CV as well as his 2021 Marquis Who's Who biography and, in some cases, clarified through personal communication with Dr. Smith.
Images obtained from the Allen Newell Collection of the Carnegie Mellon University Libraries Digital Collections.
References
Brieske, G. F., Lewis, B. N., Macdonald-Ross, M., & Smith, R. W. (1972). An opening statement from the editors. Instructional Science, 1-7.
Rolle, S. K. & Smith, R. W. (1993, December 6). Roulette William Smith, PhD. Sojourner Kincaid Rolle Papers. (V/1512), Department of Special Research Collections, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA. https://californiarevealed.org/islandora/object/cavpp%3A13859.
Smith, R. W. (1974, February 13). [Letter to Allen Newell]. Allen Newell Collection (Box 106, Folder 8191), University Libraries Digital Collections, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA.