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From The Age: Honest parents named as emotional abusers.

PARENTS who have not harmed their children are being wrongly recorded as having ”emotionally abused” them because authorities generally cannot legally intervene unless a parent is found to be at fault.

This is a glaring example of the way in which documentation in the service of bureaucracy records information known to be false in order to achieve a result in the spirit of the principle the documentation is designed to uphold. If it isn’t on the form, it can’t be recorded. If nothing is recorded, we can’t receive the service. So we’ll lie now to get what we need, but the lies might come back to bite us in serious ways later.

This particular situation is also a glaring example of the Pollyanna world of popular feel-good psychology – if we love and praise and nurture our children, it will all be good: they will have happy, healthy lives, do wonderfully well at school, get great jobs and be whatever they want to be. If it doesn’t happen that way, someone must be to blame. Always, someone must be to blame.

Maybe those applying economic “theory” to areas that are not primarily about making money such as education and training (or those applying “psychological theory” to non-sentient entities such as markets …) should take heed of misapplied analogies:

Soviet biology was set back a generation when the authorities decided to apply the rules of communist ideology to growing corn, instead of following experimental evidence. Lysenko’s ideas about how grains planted in a cold climate would grow more hardy, and produce even hardier progeny, sounded good to the lay person, especially within the context of Leninist dogma. Unfortunately the ways of politics and the ways of corn are not always the same, and Lysenko’ efforts culminated in decades of hunger. (from Csikszentmihalyi, 1990, p140-141, emphasis added (because it’s the line I found particularly apropos))

I’ve been reading Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi’s work on creativity and flow (I can do this now that Wikipedia has helpfully allowed me to pronounce his name so I can actually talk about his work!  (“cheek-sent-me-high-ee” [note by me: presumably this is the American pronunciation, which is probably the best I can aspire to but nothing like the orginal]. Originally Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, Hungarian pronunciation: [ˈmihaːj ˈtʃiːksɛntmihaːji]).

He has many interesting things to say, and his concepts of positive psychology / optimum experience resonate strongly with how I view the world. As with Vygotsky’s work, the way his ideas are represented in educational and psychology literature (actually, more likely I’ve read text books or review articles) does not do them justice. In particular, his description of attentional processes and their relationship with flow deserves much closer examination on my part as it is at the heart of expert skilled performance. But probably most pertinent to my current area of study are his comments on formal study (extrinsically driven “inquiry”) versus informal study (intrinsically motivated “hobby”) and their influence in organising “psychic energy” (flow). (And as an aside re psychic energy: I love the idea of  negentropy or “the specific entropy deficit of the ordered sub-system relative to its surrounding chaos” which can be used “as a measure of distance to normality” – in fact, it is probably an extremely important concept to get my head around. I suspect that Csikszentmihalyi’s notion of psychic energy, far from being New Age mumbo-jumbo, provides an opportunity to understand the “Chi energy” of martial arts in terms of cognitive science … this aside should probably be a new post …)

So back to the comment on formal study (“real scientists”) versus informal study (“amateur scientists”) from Csikzsentmihalyi, M. (1009) “Flow: The psychology of optimal experience”, New York: HarperPerennial, p137-138). It is pertinent to my current way of thinking particularly as a comment on the push for output / performance metrics to determine whether or not academics are “active researchers” and quality assurance of academia by ensuring all academics have Ph.D.s. to prove their research credentials …

Is it really true that a person without a Ph.D., who is not working a one of the major research centers, no longer has any chance of contributing to the advancement of science? Or is this just one of those largely unconscious efforts at mystification to which all successful institutions inevitably succumb? It is difficult to answer these questions, partly because what constitutes “science” is of course defined by those very institutions that are in line to benefit from their monopoly.

There is no doubt that a layman cannot contribute, as a hobby to the kind of research that depends on multibillion-dollar supercolliders, or on nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. But then, such fields to not represent the only science there is. The mental framework that makes science enjoyable is accessible to every one. It involves curiosity, careful observation, a disciplined way of recording events, and finding ways to tease out the underlying regularities in what one learns. It also requires the humility to be willing to learn from the results of past investigators, coupled with enough skepticism and openness of mind to reject beliefs that are not supported by facts.

Defined in this broad sense, there are more practicing amateur scientists that one would think. Some focus their interest on health, and try to find out everything they can about a disease that threatens them or their families. Following in Mendel’s footsteps, some learn whatever they can about breeding domestic animals, or creating new hypbrid flowers. Others diligently replicate the observations of early astrononmers with their back yard telescopes. There are closet geolgistists who roam the wilderness in search of minerals, cactus collectores who scour the desert mesas for new specimens, and probably hunderds of thousands of individuals who have pushed their mechanical skills to the point that they are vergin g on true scientific understanding.

What keeps many of these people from developing their skills further is the belief that they will never be able to become genuine “professional” scientists. and therefore that their hobby should not be taken seriously. But there is no better reason for doing science than that sense of order it brings to the mind of the seeker. If flow, rather than success and recognition, is the measure by which to judge its value, science can contribute immensely to the quality of life.

Csikszentmihalyi has many more quotable quotes and pertinent comments, and it is an interesting study in motivation to note that I only blog things when the book I’m reading and the computer (rather than note pad) are in close proximity (I also have hundreds of photos taken at each single event that I photograph, but very few occasions where I take out the camera …)

While specialisation is necessary to develop the complexity of any pattern of thought, the goals-ends relationship must always be kept clear: specialisation is for the sake of thinking better, and not an end in itself. Unfortunately many serious thinkers devote all their mental effort to becoming well-known scholars, but in the meantime they forget their initial purpose in scholarship.

There are two words whose meanings reflect our somewhat warped attitudes toward levels of commitment to physical or mental activities. These are the terms amateur and dilettante. Nowadays these labels are slightly derogatory. An amateur or dilettante is someone not quite up to par, a person not to be taken very seriously, one whose performance falls short of professional standards. But originally amateur from the latin verb amare, “to love,” referred to a person who loved what he was doing. Similarly, a dilettante , from the latin delectare, “to find delight in,” was someone who enjoyed a given activity. The earliest meanings of these words therefore drew attention to experiences rather than accomplishments; they described the subjective rewards individuals gained from doing things, instead of focusing on how well they were achieving. Nothing illustrates as clearly our changing attitudes towards the value of experience as the fate of these two words. There was a time when it was admirable to be an amateur poet or a dilettante scientist, because it meant that the quality of life could be improved by engaging in such activities. But increasingly the emphasis has been to value behaviour over subjective states; what is admired is success, achievement, the quality of performance rather than the quality of experience. Consequently it has become embarrassing to be called a dilettante, even though to be a dilettante is to achieve what counts most – the enjoyment one’s actions provide.

An addendum … and possibly why I don’t blog often. It’s the unfinished nature of blogging that concerns me – by the time I’ve “finished”, what there is to write is a full-blown paper, not a quick comment. But when I do actually blog something while I’m still developing an idea, the logical continuation of the thought keeps popping up after I’ve published the post and I add addendums like this:

The bad connotations that the terms amateur and dilettante have earned for themselves over the years are due largely to the blurring of the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic goals. An amateur who pretends to know as much as a professional is probably wrong, and up to some mischief. The point of becoming an amateur scientist is not to compete with professionals on their own turf, but to use a symbolic discipline to extend mental skills, and to create order in consciousness. On that level, amateur scholarship can hold its own, and can be even more effective that its professional counterpart. But the moment that amateurs lose sight of this goal, and use knowledge mainly to bolster their egos or to achieve a material advantage, then they become caricatures of  the scholar. Without training in the discipline of skepticism and reciprocal criticism that underlies the scientific method, laypersons who venture into the fields of knowledge with prejudiced goals can become more ruthless, more egregiously unconcerned with truth, than even the most corrupt scholar.

Here is a (yet another) cautionary tale about productivity indicators in academia – how many of the greatest discoveries in science or the greatest academic thinkers would have been nurtured (let alone employed) in academia of today? And what of the relative value of one paper that solves a puzzle that baffled mathematicians for more than a century versus 20 papers on somewhat more mundane issues that anyone could address?

via Cleverest man in the world ponders whether to accept $1 million.

American colleagues remember his fingernails being unusually long as well as his eccentricity, and the frugality of his lifestyle. In 1995, he shocked his peers by returning to the poorly funded research institute in St Petersburg, turning down lucrative offers in America in favour of a salary worth the equivalent of pounds 120 a month.

He had been uninterested in churning out routine academic papers and was determined to focus on solving a complex maths puzzle known as the Poincare conjecture that had baffled mathematicians for more than a century. But it seems his new colleagues lost patience with him.

“Grigory did not want to waste his time [on academic papers] and colleagues voted him out. They voted out the most brilliant mathematician in the world,” recalled Tamara Yefimova, one of his former maths teachers. Embittered, Mr Perelman left in December 2005 and appears not to have worked since. In 2002 and 2003 he had quietly published the answer to the Poincare conjecture, which involved proving a hypothesis about three dimensional space and which academics believe could further our understanding of how the universe is structured.

It took four years for teams of academics around the world to check Mr Perelmans solution, but eventually they confirmed that he had cracked something that many had thought was unsolvable.

This article on Foreign Airline Safety versus U.S. Major Airlines comes from Philip Greenspun via Michael’s Beebo blog (yeah, yeah – it’s from a while ago, but I don’t really keep up with blogging).

Greenspun takes issue with Malcolm Gladwell’s cultural explanation of poorer safety records of foreign airlines which he paraphrases thus:

Gladwell comes to the conclusion that foreigners are unsafe because they are … foreign. They have a strange and defective culture that prevents the first officer (copilot) from speaking up and pointing out problems to the captain. If only everyone were American, the world would be a better and safer place.

This article explores an alternative explanation: foreign airlines do comparatively poorly because their first officers have almost no pilot-in-command experience.

Game guru Sid Meier explains gamer psychology | VentureBeat. (via Stephen Downes)

Sid Meier is the maker of Civilization, Railroad Tycoon, Pirates! and other such games. He notes that people don’t want to play games that are too hard, and for many things, if you make them more realistic, they become harder …

… you have to always tilt the odds in favor of the player winning, regardless of the true mathematical odds for things such as battles. If you don’t do this, players will perceive your game as too difficult and will drop it … I thought the more realistic you made a game, the more historically accurate, [the more] the player would appreciate it. In reality, I was wrong …

One example he gives of the “realism problem” is flight simulators. At first, they were simple and fun. But as they became more realistic, the controls became more complex. Fewer and fewer people could master them. And ultimately, the games became so inaccessible that the genre died out.

So although people will learn about history (or railroad tycoonery or pirating), they will get a distorted view of the level of difficulty involved in ruling the world (or the railroads or the high seas).

This article from the ABC website documents the declining standard of maths from high school through to uni. Talk to students at schools trying to maximize their ENTER scores and start to understand that the way scores are calculated drives subject choices, rather than the actual relevance of the content …

(written on the iPhone … Not sure whether this is a good idea from an editing point of view …)

Building a Better Teacher ~ Stephens Web ~ by Stephen Downes.

Stephen comments on an article in the NY Times that claims great teaching can be taught, an issue of great interest to me and Stephen alike. In his comment (from which I declined to actually read the original article), Stephen suggests that the article is effectively a marketing blurb for a book by Doug Lemov, which in turn is promotion for his consultancy. When The NY Times implements its “subscription paywall”, this sort of book promotion will not be effective because the articles will no longer be widely distributed (many of the people who read the NY Times for free will not pay for the privilege). Stephen also notes that Lemov uses “unsurprising techniques” (ie nothing new or innovative) and there are no scholarly references to the “Lemov Taxonomy”.

I am interested in Stephen’s comments because there is subtext that jumps out at me:

1) Paywalls will discourage advertising masquerading as journalism. (Possibly a good thing about paywalls? Of course I won’t find out because I won’t pay …)

2) Where will newspapers get their pay-for content? (Implication that much of the content of newspapers is actual marketing / promotion. Can real journalism only be resurrected by making people pay to read?)

3) Lemov has no “scholarly references to it” – by which I presume Stephen means that Lemov is not cited by any papers in academic journals and that this reduces Lemoy’s credibility. I find this an interesting observation given the subtext in a lot of Web 2.0 discussion that the gate-keeping process of peer-reviewed academic journals creates an unnecessary monopolisitic constraint on the dissemination of new ideas.

Couple Elizabeth Blackburn’s comments with the Climate Change Wars, and you start to see why “science” is getting a bad name. Add in the funding models over recent times (who pays for research) and it all starts getting even murkier.

NOBEL prizewinner Elizabeth Blackburn’s discoveries in molecular biology led her into cross-disciplinary research in cancer and chronic stress, but she warns that researchers first need deep specialist knowledge.As institutions are focusing on breaking down barriers to cross-disciplinary research, the University of California-based professor cautions there is a risk of researchers being shallow if they seek to generalise early.”My feeling is not to get too cross-disciplinary and shallow and spread all over the place too quick,” Blackburn tells the HES while visiting Monash University, where she is a distinguished visiting professor.”One needs to be able to bring something very substantive to the table because I can see the temptation would be to try to be overly generalised and shallowness would be the consequence.”

via Deep specialisation key to collaboration | The Australian.

It is more than two years since I wrote anything in my taekwondo blog – but not because there is nothing interesting to say. In the past two years I have learned so much more about technique and application and moral culture, and it has been an exciting and challenging time to be part of USMA. Apart from my own thoughts on taekwondo, I’ve been delighted to watch my daughter’s skills develop and was very proud that she represented Australia in Argentina in the World Championships. She just missed the medal round in patterns, and performed to the best of her ability in sparring – a great effort for her first international event.

The reason that my taekwondo blog has died is a sad reflection on taekwondo in Australia – too much politics, not enough technique / application, and a seeming abyss of moral culture. To write anything about taekwondo, to question any technique, to reflect on good and bad aspects of the art form, to consider the relationship between a Korean martial art developed in a military context and modern Australian cultural context – all these are political minefields with people searching for disrespect or subversion or technical error in every utterance, rather than looking for a way forward and an open exchange of ideas to build on the wonderful foundation created by General Choi and bring it to people of all walks of life, including women and children.

When the administration of taekwondo is more about building individual business interests than serving the students of taekwondo (giving back to taekwondo in the form of leadership and instruction), the moral culture at the core of the martial art is destroyed. There will always be a very difficult path to tread through the democratic legal framework for Not-for-profit Associations versus the Dan hierarchy of a martial art, and the only way to negotiate a path through this is through plenty of discussion around common goals. Of course this is almost impossible if there are no common goals, and most parties have the goal of exerting maximum power with minimum input.

So rather than writing a whole lot of stuff about the exciting things that I’ve learned through training taekwondo with Sabum Cariotis and sharing my passion for a martial art with other people who might have thought of starting but did not know whether it would be okay for them (e.g., too old, too unfit, too inflexible, wrong demographic etc), I don’t write anything at all. It is a real shame, because so much of the way I think in my own professional area of cognitive science and spatial coding has been heavily influenced by my martial arts training. My discussions with Sabum Cariotis on space, time, temporal sequencing of movements, trigger points, options and decision-making have triggered all sorts of ways of understanding spatial coding, and I have also learned so much about cognitive aspects of training for expert skilled performance through watching Sabum Cariotis instruct and learning how to instruct martial arts under his guidance.

I have to say also that my eLearning blog has also died somewhat because of similar issues – universities are also becoming more focused on their business interests than on their core mission of community service through generating and sharing knowledge and understanding. I work for a specific institution and my academic output belongs to this institution as part of their “intellectual property” … such a strange concept, that “intellectual property” has a life of its own outside of any individual’s own intellect. It would be an interesting exercise to force university managers (and taekwondo practitioners) to study enough philosophy of mind to have a view of what constitutes knowledge (or skilled performance) and whether or not it can exist independently of the mind (or body) which is using it …

Doctor and Patient – Looking Beyond MCATs to Pick Future Doctors – NYTimes.com.

The investigators found that the results of the personality test had a striking correlation with the students’ performance. Neuroticism, or an individual’s likelihood of becoming emotionally upset, was a constant predictor of a student’s poor academic performance and even attrition. Being conscientious, on the other hand, was a particularly important predictor of success throughout medical school. And the importance of openness and agreeableness increased over time, though neither did as significantly as extraversion. Extraverts invariably struggled early on but ended up excelling as their training entailed less time in the classroom and more time with patients.

It is interesting to see that the personality factors leading to long term future success are different from those leading to short-term “success”. Failure to consider progress over the whole training continuum is becoming a serious “quality” issue in education. The need to  enforce more rigorous standards early in training to prepare students for later training is difficult to do when evaluation is at the wrong granualarity. (Note to self: look up the Belgian study from which the data were reported)

Essays and Op Eds.

I have a few Bruce Schneier books on computer security, but I have only just found his website – looks like a lot of thought-provoking reading for me (Thanks Pat for the link!)

I have recently re-focused my thinking on issues arising from Ilana Snyder’s “Being Digital” project that I worked on last year. I prepared a report on some of the data from that project, available online at http://preview.tinyurl.com/ca8o45. The interesting part for me was reading some of the literature on cultural form (particularly Raymond Williams) and digital literacy practices, and trying to get my head around the academic discourse and legitimate research methodology in non-scientific research disciplines.

Having just returned to considering these ideas, I stumbled across the work of Karl Maton and, in particular, this paper on the place of theory in educational research. I wish I had written this particular piece myself, although perhaps it is a good thing to have somewhere else to point people to when expressing similar views. Of course, this would touch on whether a published opinion can add weight to my own professional opinion without an additional ingredient of “data”, and what constitutes the legitimisation of a personal opinion into a professional opinion, and then into domain expertise. I am hoping that further reading of Karl Maton’s work will enlighten me on this in a way that triggers a whole new way of expressing the core ideas in my recent research activity.

From Paul Christensen “in praise of bluffing” published in “The Antioch Review” of Spring 1999

http://review.antioch.edu/bidetail.php?id=41

So how was I not to bluff, if all my heroes did it, and did it well? You know the measure of your spiritual depth by how well you bluff. Cowards tell little lies and fudge a lot; poets expand the radius of the lie into illusion and allusion, and dream more. Politicians grasp the pulse of an imaginary nation and pronounce in simple boring language things that everyone should know, and the bluff is therefore stale and usually unimaginative, underreaching. Most of them have given up the bluff and gone to the pollsters to learn the trite and cliched truth. Priests bluff according to formula and repeat the doctrinal gestures and elements so often it is no longer bluff but rote habit.

No, the bluff pure and ethereal is reserved for geniuses and mad people. No modern poem ever reaches the condition of pure bluffness. The poem is a sad little grocery list with a bit of ego linking up the potatoes and carrots. Everyone wants a practical lesson in life and living, and the poor little lyric bag of syllables serves us a dim copy of that desire, as tasty as a box of Stove Top Stuffing or Hamburger Dinner. Predictability is a passion of our times, and preordained answers are far more welcome than the unexpected twist. People ask stupid and unbluffable questions and begin nodding and coaxing out the expected language before you can answer. “What’s the best car to buy, huh?” The Chevrolet Metro has the best mileage, according to the news we all watched last night, and remember partly. “Uh huh, that’s right. That’s right, uh huh.”

We cannot bluff now because we all have a uniform, slightly squared-off consciousness shaped for us by the same media exposure. We all watch the same shows, listen to NPR, The Jim Lehrer News Hour, Morning Edition, and All Things Considered, and then proceed to have, not conversations exactly, but trading sessions. I say part of a fact and you supply the rest; I was picking my nose at some critical moment of Bob Edwards’s comments and missed something, and you were sitting idly and retained it. So we talk as if we put together a rehab unit’s jigsaw puzzle: a portrait of Art Linkletter’s house at nightfall, just as Lawrence Welk begins playing an old rerun on the tube.

We all see the same movies, eat the same food, hear the same music, and read the same books and magazines, so we live in a lit circle of shared cultural noodles and broth. And the diet is so cloying and indigestible that we hardly ever want to regurgitate our nightly consumption.

By disposition the majority would prefer to remain behind the fence of such shared common shallowness, such boiled news and pre-owned food. We go along inside used and tired minds, trading tokens of consciousness that we already own in duplicate and triplicate. Maybe that’s why conversation is dead in America; what’s there to say that’s new? Nothing much. I’m okay, are you fine, too? Yeah, sure. Bye now. Bye.

In my current research, I am looking at the pattern recognition and the ability to deal with uncertain information that characterises expertise, so the notion of bluffing as a manifestation of implicit pattern recognition is appealing. It resonates with the concept of confabulation as part of a normal epistemic process as described by Hirstein (2005) in Brain Fiction, and of using simple heuristics described by Gigerenzer (2007) in Gut Feelings, among others.

The quote below is from Clay Shirky’s piece on “Gin, TV and Social Surplus” in which he describes how our American cousins spend 200 billion hours a year watching TV, which he equates to 100 million hours each weekend just watching the ads!!! I have no idea how he comes up with these astonishing numbers, but they sound impressive … as does the 100 million hours of human thought spent he calculates has been spent so far on Wikipedia …

I was being interviewed by a TV producer to see whether I should be on their show, and she asked me, “What are you seeing out there that’s interesting?”

I started telling her about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus–”How should we characterize this change in Pluto’s status?” And a little bit at a time they move the article–fighting offstage all the while–from, “Pluto is the ninth planet,” to “Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system.”

• Read the whole article

So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, “Okay, we’re going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever.” That wasn’t her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, “Where do people find the time?” That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, “No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.”

A letter from LS Michaelis published in The Lancet, 1946, and just as true today:

Sir, — At a time when the resources of medical education are being replanned and expanded, it would I think be useful to define these three complementary activities.

Coaching is the assembling of knowledge in preparation for a test of mental assimilation — i.e., the examination. Coaching may follow teaching, but should never precede or coincide with it.

Training is the acquisition of techniques by practical experience: It may coincide with teaching, but should never precede it.

Teaching provides a fundamental introduction, a crtical survey, and a challenge to original thought; it promotes judgement and insight, enthusiasm, and inquiry. It should precede and accompany training, but never degenerate into coaching.

Clever young graduates, with a fund of systematic knowledge, make good coaches; able technicians may make good trainers. But teaching calls for a balanced view of the part and the whole; it demands a broad outlook and a deep insight, with scepticism for the established and an open mind for the new.

When coaching is allowed to predominate in education, the body medical presents itself as a cleanly dissected corpse. When training is given more than its due, the result is a robot. Only when teaching is given its proper scope and precedence does this body medical emerge as a growing living organism.

In the past week or so, I have been immersed in my first sensory neuroscience conferences for 10 years (and ironically, they managed to overlap by half a day which was a bit unfortunate). The lead-up to these conferences has been somewhat frantic due to the fact that our year-long project on Simulations in Early Pilot Training required an extra month’s work to address a few extra issues.

I hope to find time to write a few more substantive posts about the various strands of ideas generated by these conferences, but the upshot was that although much has changed in sensory neuroscience, much has not. The ideas that have been percolating away in my mind while I have been occupied by elearning and simulation mirror some of the major developments in the mainstream of cognitive neuroscience, and the time is ripe for the application to training of learning principles firmly grounded in cognitive neuroscience.

It’s all very exciting. Watch this space for updates of ideas (although this always takes longer than I think it will …)

“Spring and Fall Fashions in Cognitive Science” is the text of the first presidential address given to the Cognitive Science Society in 1986 (twenty years ago). It was the 8th year of the Society and the address was given by Zenon Pylyshyn whose book on “Seeing and Visualizing” is my latest fave. This paper is reasonably short and, unlike most of Pylyshyn’s writing, reasonably accessible due to the fact that:

“It was an after-dinner talk and should be read in that spirit, even though there is a serious message hidden in there somewhere”.

The serious message is a very important one. (Pylyshyn’s work is only “inaccessible” due to the information density of each sentence – he writes clearly, concisely and pleasingly, but each paragraph has rich and deep concepts to be considered making it difficult to read quickly – and this is not a criticism by any stretch of the imagination !!!)

Fashions come around again, and just as clothes are moving through the 80’s cycle, so it appears, are issues in cognitive science. Although perhaps it would be fairer to say that it has taken twenty years for people to understand the nature of these issues sufficiently to begin to consider them.

Interestingly, I am also only just beginning to appreciate the real quality of the Monash Psychology Department in which I spent my formative academic years: it was a purely experimental department (ie had no clinical programs) and had the reputation of being focussed on “rats and stats”, but in reality, it was a true cognitive science department with strength across all the fields which would currently constitute cognitive science of the sort alluded to below.

Finally, my conclusion. What do I think of Cognitive Science, I heard you ask (didn’t you?). I have always found psychology depressing because I came into it from physics and engineering thinking that, since it experimentally studied the human mind it was a science. I soon realized that it was not a science but a catalog, and a methodology for adding to the catalog. I don’t doubt that it is a useful catalog: it’s certainly important to know such things as how to help people who are depressed or to understand how people’s memory or opinions can be changed in emotional contexts or by clever questioning (say in eyewitness testimony). But many of us had hoped that there was a theoretical science like physics or chemistry there somewhere and we were disappointed. I now believe that the problem is simply that there is no unitary subject matter for psychology — it is not a natural scientific domain. But I find renewed hope now that within psychology lies one or more natural scientific domains, and that cognition, suitably circumscribed to include those aspects that are explainable in terms of symbol processing operations (together with the nonsymbolic mechanisms required to support symbol processing) may be one of those natural scientific domains.

I think that Professor Ross Day, founding chair of the Monash Psych Department, did an excellent job in circumscribing a natural scientific domain as the focus of his experimental psychology department.

I gave a talk last week on simulations in aviation and medicine as part of the MUVES seminar series at the University of Melbourne. It covers a wide range of ideas that I hope to capture better over the next few weeks and months.

- Link to powerpoint slides and notes

As an aside, I have recently installed Office 2004 for Mac and this is the first time I’ve used this version of Powerpoint – against all odds, I’m pretty impressed with the Presenter Tools which allow a timer, the notes and upcoming slides to show to the presenter while mirroring only the slideshow itself to the audience. I am also reasonably happy with the web output as per this link. It is now pretty straightforward to prepare a presentation, present it and post it on the web. And with the “save as picture” option for slides, Powerpoint becomes a fairly useful tool for preparing diagrams.

When the tool actually does the job I want it to, I am much less inclined to bag it – though I reserve the right to be deeply offended when people use the wrong tool for their job.

I haven’t written in my taekwon-do blog since our new dojang opened in January – but I have been thinking a lot about the way in which my study of taekwon-do has informed my thinking about cognitive science.

Let me be clear about this: there are three elements to my study of taekwon-do which have been pivotal in influencing the way I think.

1) my Instructor, who introduced me to the martial art in an accessible way, showing the theory and practice, the moral culture and application, and most of all, demonstrating through everything he does the ongoing level of passion and commitment required to become a martial artist.

2) the 15 volume encyclopedia of taekwon-do (and its condensed version), written by General Choi, which documents the martial art itself and the structure of the taekwon-do syllabus through which a martial artist can learn his or her art form.

3) the conceptual mapping across perceptual learning, motor learning and meta-cognitive awareness of learning principles through which my Instructor is able to relate theory and practice and through which he gave me sufficient insight and desire to understand the depth and richness of the curriculum developed by General Choi.

As I have remarked elsewhere in my taekwon-do blog, the structure of the taekwon-do curriculum, bringing together the martial arts of east with the educational system of the western military (US Military Academy), is a masterpiece of curriculum design and exposition. However, based as it is on curriculum design principles for a military curriculum, there is no specific curriculum framework for children. I have also discussed elsewhere in my blog the special facility my Instructor has in working with young children and older people, two groups who are not the traditional focus for martial arts instruction.

The focus I have had in previous posts on martial arts and instructing children have been based around motivational factors in terms of learning most likely because I was involved in educational design of “learning materials”. However now that I am reading Eleanor Gibson (Principles of Perceptual Learning and Development), Williams and Hodges(Skill Acquisition in Sport), Johnson-Frey (Taking Action: Cognitive Neuroscience Perspectives on Intentional Acts) and such things, focusing on perceptual learning and cross-modal sensory-motor integration, I am seeing other aspects of the taekwon-do syllabus that are masterful in terms of design.

I am currently working with concepts of dynamic coordination and constraints in skill acquisition, which fit pretty nicely with the taekwon-do concept of sinewave, and how these fit in with instructional models. This approach contrasts sharply with traditional instructional approaches emphasising verbal instruction, active cognitive processing of knowledge, and dependency on feedback from instructors. The role of the instructor or coach in the dynamic approach is

“to ensure the correct ‘discovery environment’ through the manipulation of task and environmental constraints in an attempt to guide exploration of the dynamics of the perceptuo-motor workspace … if one uses the metaphor of a ‘story’ to conceptualise the skill acquisition process in sport, then the end-state form (the skill) to be acquired by each individual is not prescribed at the outset, but is painstakingly and creatively written ongoingly. In such a ‘self-reading and self-writing’ dynamical system (Kugler, 1986), practitioners have a major say in the development of the individual’s unique storyline by creating localised pressures (as constraints) so that functional global systems behaviour emerges from practice time. The implication is that there is a need for significant research programmes in the sport and exercise sciences to gain a broad understanding of how constraints shape the individual ‘stories’ of skill acquisition in different sports contexts.”

The constraints-led model asserts that the set of possible movement solutions for a skill to be acquired can be limited by the dimensions of the perceptuo-motor workspace imposed by the coach or training environment. Directed coaching or training environments with limited dimensionality will only support a very narrow search process, whereas unbounded workspaces allow unconstrained search which can be unrewarding, inefficient and potentially unsafe. An important role of the coach or instructor from this perspective is to support the perceptuo-motor search process by manipulating constraints so that exploration occurs within the optimal area of the perceptuo-motor workspace.

Interactions between the coach and student are minimised during early stages of learning so that the important dynamics of the movement task are revealed through discovery.

“In a soundbite, the key point is: Let the learner begin to write her own story. Direct coach intervention at this stage may well assist in the short-term assembly of coordinative structures as temporary solutions, but the ongoing process of establishing control may be delayed as a result of inappropriate (i.e. textbook and non-individualised) coordinations early on. In fact, the adoption of generalised ‘textbook’ approaches can be likened to the short-term solution of ‘plagiarism in our analogy of writing a story. In other words, the learner may come to rely on these ‘neatly packaged’ temporary solutions for immediate performance effects in specific environments. But the unique relationships between movement subsystems, which influence long-term performance transfer to novel situations, will not be established early in learning” Williams et al 1999, p322.

This all starts sounding very like the ideas I was trying express early in my blog in the article on Teaching Kids.