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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 Blackburns 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.

I have learnt a huge amount over my lifetime, but I have rarely been a classic “good student”. I didn’t do my homework and I didn’t attend lectures regularly (unless the lecturer was particularly good or I had friends who were “conscientious” and were taking the same classes) although I always went to tutorials and prac classes because they were “hurdle requirements”. To make up for my slackness, I read the textbooks and recommended reading and constructed my own study notes around the headings in the course outline. I came from an academic family and a background where books abounded and reading was a favorite leisuretime activity – reading the texts was a “lazy way out” for me in terms of study. I paid the penalty for my slack study habits of rarely getting top marks although I usually did pretty well. Of course, in hindsight, I realise that my poor study habits were actually pretty good lifelong learning habits – finding out from the “community of experts” (my lecturers) what they thought I should know, reading up on it, and only asking them questions when I knew enough of their domain to be taken seriously (the point at which their expertise became meaningful to me). I tended to be accepting of their right to dismiss me not because they were superior or smarter, but because I knew that I had rarely paid them the courtesy of listening to their lectures so I was probably asking about things that I should already know.

This is not “confessions of a slack student” but more an understanding that the things define being a good student may not necessarily promote the best long-term learning. The things that result in the highest grades may not necessarily reflect the best long-term learning either. But it doesn’t mean the structure shouldn’t be there. We may put structures in place with a particular purpose in mind, but although the type of scaffold will determine what we are capable of supporting, we may not know ahead of time whether we will be planting climbing roses or passionfruit or ivy. Even if we take care to plant one thing, it may well be that something else ends up growing in its place.

And from the other side of the fence, I take great care in preparing lectures or presentations or articles – the time and effort that goes into preparing content is not at all commensurate with the importance of that content to the audience or to the size of audience. And more often that not the prepared content is only loosely related to what I end up saying. However the process of content preparation is critical to my role as an academic and critical to my ability to share knowledge and be part of a community. In fact it is critical to my identity as a person – for me, I am what I know about.

I have finally received my copy of the following book, and spent an entirely enjoyable afternoon reading it from cover to cover. It is just as relevant now as it was in 1741, and the language use is sufficiently quaint to add an enticing quality to the text possibly above and beyond its original intent. I recommend the book highly.

Dr Isaac Watts, 1741, Improvement of the Mind
edited and abridged by Stephen B Helfant and J. David Coccoli, 1987,
Helfant Publishing House, Groton, Massachusetts
ISBN 0-942969-00-6

According to Dr Isaac Watts, there are five methods for “improving the mind”, each of which has its individual merits, but all of which should be integrated for best results. I have taken the liberty of transcribing a few paragraphs of the text to give a sense of the writing style, and to provide the basis for some further discussion and to provide the context for my further writings, since the book itself was hard to get hold of.

In this post, I’ve reproduced some basic content, and in future posts, I will comment further on what has been written.

1. Observation

“Observation is the notice we take of all occurrences … whether they are sensible or intellectual, whether relating to persons or things, to ourselves or others … All those things which we see, which we hear or feel, which we perceive by sense or consciousness, or which we know in a direct manner, with scarce any exercise of our reflecting faculties, or our reasoning powers, may be included under the general name of observation … When this observation relates to any thing that immediately concerns ourselves, and of which we are conscious, it may be called experience … When we are searching out the nature or properties of any being by various methods of trial … this sort of observation is called experiment … All these belong to the first method of knowledge: which I shall call observation”

2. Reading

“Reading is where we acquaint ourselves with what other men have written, or published to the world in their writings. These arts of reading and writing are of infinite advantage; for by them we are made partakers of the sentiments, observations, reasonings and improvements of all the learned world, in the most remote nations, and in former ages almost from the beginning of mankind.”

3. Lectures

“Public or private lectures are such verbal instructions as are given by a teacher while the learners attend in silence. This is the way of learning … philosophy … from the professor’s chair; or of mathematics, by a teacher shewing us various theorems or problems, i.e., speculations or practices by demonstration and operation, with all the instruments of that art necessary to those operations.”

4. Conversation

“Conversation is another method of improving our minds, wherein, by mutual discourse and inquiry, we learn the sentiments of others, as well as communicate our sentiments to others in the same manner … under this head of conversation we may also rank disputes of various kinds.”

5. Meditation

“Meditation or study includes all those exercises of the mind, whereby we render all the former methods useful for our increase in true knowledge and wisdom. It is by meditation we come to confirm our memory of things that pass through our thoughts in the occurrences of life, in our own experiences, and in the observations we make. It is by meditation that we draw various inferences, and establish in our minds general principles of knowledge. It is by meditation that we compare the various ideas which we derive from our senses, or from the operations of our souls, and join them in propositions. It is by meditation that we fix in our memory what we learn, and form our own judgement of the truth or falsehood, the strength or weakness, of what others speak and write. It is meditation … that draws out long chains of argument, and searches or finds deep and difficult truths which before lay concealed in darkness.”

Dr Watts goes on to compare and contrast the various methods of improving the mind, and some of his observations deserve re-examination in the modern context. His analysis is still very insightful today and I reproduce some snippets below.

“It would be a needless thing to prove, that our own solitary meditations, together with a few observations that the most part of mankind are capable of making, are not sufficient, of themselves, to lead us into the attainment of any considerable proportion of knowledge, at least in an age so much improved as ours is, without the assistance of conversation and reading, and other proper instructions that are to be attained in our days. Yet each of these methods have their peculiar advantages, whereby they assist each other, and their peculiar defects which have need to be supplied by the other’s assistance.”

Observation:

“(An) advantage of observation is, that we may gain knowledge all the day long … and every moment of our existences we may be adding something to our intellectual treasures. “

Reading:

“By reading, we acquaint ourselves, in a very extensive manner, with the affairs, actions, and thoughts of the living and the dead, in the most remote nations, and most distant ages, and that with as much ease as though they lived in our own age and nation. By reading books, we may learn something from all parts of mankind; whereas by observation we learn all from ourselves, and only what comes within our own direct cognizance. By conversation we can only enjoy the assistance of a few persons, viz., those who are near us, and live at the same time as we do, that is, our neighbours and contemporaries; but our knowledge is much more narrowed still, if we confine ourselves merely to our own solitary reasonings, without much observation or reading: for then all our improvement must arise only from our own inward powers and meditations … When we read good authors, we learn the best, the most laboured, the most refined sentiments, even of those wise and learned men; for they have studied hard, and have committed to writing their maturest thoughts, and the result of their long study and experience: whereas by conversation, and in some lectures, we obtain many times only the present thoughts of our tutors and friends, which (though they might be bright and useful) yet, at first perhaps, may be sudden and undigested, and are mere hints which have risen to no maturity … It is another advantage of reading, that we may review what we have read; we may consult the page again and again, and meditate on it, at successive seasons, in our serenest and retired hours, having the book always at hand: but what we obtain by conversation and in lectures, is oftentimes lost again as soon as the company breaks up, or at least when the day vanishes, unless we happen to have the talent of a good memory, or quickly retire and note down what remarkables we have found in those discourses. And for the same reason, for the want of retiring and writing, many a learned man has lost several useful meditations of his own, and could never recall them again.”

Lectures:

“There is something more sprightly, more delightful and entertaining in the living discourse of a wise, learned, and well-qualified teacher than there is in the silent and sedentary practice of reading … A tutor or instructor, when he paraphrases and explains other authors, can mark out the precise point of difficulty or controversy, and unfold it. He can shew you which paragraphs are of greatest importance, and which are of less moment … He can inform you what new doctrines or sentiments are arising in the world before they come to be public; as well as acquaint you with his own private thoughts, and his own experiments and observations, which never were, and perhaps never will be, published to the world, and yet may be very valuable and useful … A living instructor can convey to our senses those notions … which cannot so well be done by mere reading … He can describe figures and diagrams, point to lines and angles, and make out the demonstration in a more intelligible manner … even though we should have the same figures lying in a book before our eyes. A living teacher, therefore, is a most necessary help in these studies … When an instructor in his lectures delivers any matter of difficulty, or expresses himself in such a manner as seems obscure, so that you do not take up his ideas clearly or fully, you have opportunity at least when the lecture is finished, or at other proper seasons, to inquire how such a sentence should be understood, or how such a difficulty may be explained and removed. If there be permission given to free converse with the tutor, either in the midst of the lecture, or rather at the end of it, concerning any doubts or difficulties that occur to the hearer, this brings it nearer to conversation or discourse.”

Conversation:

“When we converse familiarly with a learned friend, we have his own help at hand to explain to us every word and sentiment that seems obscure in his discourse … we may propose our doubts and objections against his sentiments and have them solved and answered at once … difficulties we meet with in books, and in our private studies, may find relief by friendly conference … if we note down this difficulty when we read it, we may propose it to an ingenious correspondent when we see him; we may be relieved in a moment, and find the difficulty vanish: he beholds the object perhaps in a different view, sets it before us in quite another light, leads us at once to evidence and truth, and that with a delightful surprise …”

“Conversation calls out into light what has been lodged in all the recesses and secret chambers of the soul: by occasional hints and incidents it brings old useful notions into remembrance; it unfolds and displays the hidden treasures of knowledge with which reading, observation, and study had before furnished the mind. By mutual discourse, the soul is awakened and allured to bring forth its hoards of knowledge, and it learns how to render them most useful to mankind. A man of vast reading without conversation, is like a miser, who lives only to himself. In free and friendly conversation, our intellectual powers are more animated, and our spirits act with superior vigour in the quest and pursuit of unknown truths. There is a sharpness and sagacity of thought that attends conversation, beyond what we find when we are shut up reading and musing in our retirements. Our souls may be serene in solitude, but not sparkling, though perhaps we are employed in reading the works of the brightest writers. Often has it happened in free discourse, that new thoughts are strangely struck out, and the seeds of truth sparkle and blaze through the company, which in calm and silent reading would never have been excited. By conversation you will both give and receive this benefit; as flints when put into motion, and striking against each other, produce living fire on both sides which would never have arisen from the same hard materials in a state of rest.”

“A man who dwells all his days among books, may have amassed together a vast heap of notions; but he may be a mere scholar, which is a contemptible sort of character in the world. A hermit who has been shut up in his cell in a college, has contracted a sort of mould and rust upon his soul, and all his airs of behaviour have a certain awkwardness in them; but these awkward airs are worn away by degrees in company … The scholar now becomes a citizen or a gentlemen, a neighbour and a friend; he learns how to dress his sentiments in the fairest colours, as well as to set them in the strongest light. Thus he brings out his notions with honour; he makes some use of them in the world, and improves the theory by practice.”

“Mere observation, lectures, reading and conversation, without thinking, are not sufficient to make a man of knowledge and wisdom. It is our thought and reflection, study and meditation, that must attend all the other methods of improvement, and perfect them.“

Balance

“By a survey of these things we may justly conclude,

• that he who spends all his time in hearing lectures, or poring upon books, without observation, meditation or … conversation, will have but a mere historical knowledge of learning, and be able only to tell what others have known or said on the subject
• he that lets all his time flow away in conversation, without due observation, reading or study, will gain but a slight and superficial knowledge, which will be in danger of vanishing with the voice of the speaker
• and he that confines himself merely to his closet, and his own narrow observation of things, and is taught only by his own solitary thoughts, without instruction by lectures, reading, or free conversation, will be in danger of a narrow spirit, a vain conceit of himself, and an unreasonable contempt of others

and after all, he will obtain but a limited and imperfect view and knowledge of things, and he will seldom learn how to make that knowledge useful.”

Conclusion

“These five methods of improvement should be pursued jointly, and go hand in hand, where our circumstances are so happy as to find opportunity and conveniency to enjoy them all: though I must give my opinion that two of them, viz., reading and meditation, should employ much more of our time than public lectures, or conversation and discourse. As for observation, we may always be acquiring knowledge that way, whether we are alone or be in company.”

In order to understand appropriate use of technology in teaching, we need to understand which aspects of our curriculum are critical for which aspects of our future learning. For example, if general hand / eye coordination is transferable across tasks, do we need to agonise over detailed task-specific simulations for each task we want to learn? And if hand / eye coordination is transferable, do we need a few authentic, high fidelity simulations, or a broader range of generic simulations.

Let’s take a specific example of a visuo-motor task simulation using stereoscopic 3D vision and haptic (active touch) feedback from a hand-held probe. If haptic feedback is only helpful with the level of fidelity provided by a stereoscopic visual display, this implies that it is critical for the visuo-haptic feedback to be ecologically valid and temporally faithful, and for the task model to be authentic. If ecological validity and authenticity are not critical, the question must be asked as to which specific aspects of the simulation are important (rather than just “cool”)?

If active exploration of visuo-haptic-motor space versus passive presentation of sensory information is critical, then would it be enough to provide a 2D visual display and allow active exploration through joystick control? Does it depend on whether you are learning how to perform the specific task (where differential haptic feedback might be important) versus learning how to conceptualise the specific task (where joystick-controlled exploration might be enough)? Does the “analogue” continuous control provided by the joystick teach something different from the digital discrete-step control provided by keyboard controls? Would haptic feedback through specific sequences of pre-determined tasks (selected for cue salience) provide better learning outcomes than free exploration of the model space (which may not result in the student exposing themselves to relevant comparisons from which they can extract salient task cues)?

Research into haptic feedback is a perfectly reasonable undertaking, but is there enough evidence to suggest that one should invest in 3D VR models and haptic probes for real training and education situations? Not only does the haptic feedback need to have a demonstratable impact on learning outcomes, but the learning outcomes must be critical to the goals of teaching and financially supportable compared with other teaching strategies. For high fidelity visuo-haptic simulations to be financially viable, new task models would need to be able to be developed more cheaply and quickly than the active life of the simulation hardware, the haptic feedback itself would need to have made a significant contribution to the specific task learning outcomes, and the learning outcomes would have to be achieved more cheaply than by other available methods.

How do you test the learning outcomes? Is it in terms of specific skill acquisition? Should task-specific training also be generalisable to other similar tasks? In order to address these questions, there needs to be some theoretical understanding of the nature of the task and a clear articulation of task-critical features. Some differential learning situations (in presumed order of ecological validity) to think about for example in a surgical scenario are:

1) training on cadavers / animal models

2) training on 3D models with haptic feedback

3) training on 2D models with interactive exploration (joystick / keyboard control)

4) “yoked control” observation of surgery (real and simulated)

In considering differential learning outcomes, what framework of learning do we assume? Do we have measures which can provide critical data to distinguish between hypotheses? What would we consider to be evidence for improved outcomes between, for example, task 2 and task 3? Is task 1 the appropriate control condition, is it a test condition, and / or is actual surgical performance the only valid “test” of learning? Without a strong model for how haptic feedback enhances skill acquisition, it is difficult to provide a strong justification for the significant financial outlay in introducing VR + haptic feedback training solutions.

How do the issues raised for this specific simulation example pan out for other teaching paradigms? I contend that we need to be able to identify specific teaching and / or learning objectives and to take a position about how our practice brings about the achievement of those objectives. This necessarily entails a conceptualisation of what occurs during teaching and learning. It also requires some position on short-term versus long-term learning, specific skills versus task-specific knowledge versus discipline-area knowledge, and the metacognitive processing around these things.

Do we take a position that declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge are acquired differently? If so, what primary learning outcomes are desired – skill based or discipline based? How do we conceptualise the relationship between theoretical knowledge and practical skills deriving from that technical knowledge? I contend that without taking a position on these questions, we cannot make informed decisions about educational design. Furthermore, for practical skills, we can break down requirements with respect to domain knowledge about a domain versus metaknowledge and insight around aquiring domain-specific practical skills. Does evidence from the perceptual-motor learning area suggest different approaches to teaching dependent on the requirement for repetitive accuracy of well-defined motor skills in a well-defined environment, versus creative perceptuomotor response and adaptability for a defined outcome in a changeable environment? Do we need to incorporate redundancy in simulations to ensure exposure to multiple cues to increase the potential for adaptability in changeable environments or are we aiming to extract the essential, minimal cue set to perform a task to become extremely efficient? What are the implications for robustness, pattern recognition (synthesis / generalisation …) and rule extraction (analysis / abstraction …) of different forms of simulations?

(now also posted on my OLU blog)

I have become increasingly frustrated with the literature on educational technology and online learning, in part because so often the connection between theory and practice in applied / action research seems to be entirely absent. I am not quite satisfied with research which claims to be situated within a “framework” rather than to be testing any specific hypothesis deriving from a theory or theoretical perspective. In research on how we use technology to enhance learning, I believe we need to have a plausible model of learning, a plausible model of teaching, and a clear articulation of the desired outcomes from our teaching practice. I would actually go further, and question whether we should be focussing more on teaching than learning, since it is the teaching side of the equation that we engage in, and over which we have some level of control. It does not seem appropriate especially in a university, to answer basic questions about the nature of teaching and learning with motherhood statements about “student-centered learning” and terminology which seems to derive more from political correctness than scholarly investigation.

The choice of whether we focus on teaching or learning alone seems to me to have theoretical implications which should follow through into our practice. For example, with a focus on (social constructivist / student-centred) learning, we are implicitly favouring inductive models through which students build on what they already know and follow their interests and strengths. With a focus on teaching, we are externalising domains of knowledge, setting learning objectives, and defining the things to be learned at the end of a course of study irrespective of the student’s individual knowledge base or interests. We need to be clear about our purpose and intent, because there are strong implications for practice, depending on which position we adopt.

So here are some questions that I believe deserve due consideration. When we engage in educational / instructional design, is it appropriate to consider teaching and learning without having a position on the nature of knowledge representation and epistemology? Is it appropriate to consider the effect of “learning styles” or interface design on learning without a good understanding of cognitive processing, perceptual processing, memory and attention? In taking account of learning styles, are we aiming to build all modes of learning for each individual (work on areas of weakness as well as, or in preference to areas of strength) or are we focussed on relative fairness in terms of assessment (allowing everyone to focus on their areas of strength and hide their weaknesses)?

In designing simulations or replacing practical classes with virtual projects, can you really consider or measure learning outcomes without a fairly comprehensive understanding of the whole process of learning? Which learning outcomes are relevant indicators of good teaching? Which learning outcomes are indicators of inherent student ability / skill? Are short-term learning outcomes or long-term learning outcomes the ones to focus on? Do our educational theories speak to which outcomes are relevant? Does our rhetoric on desired graduate attributes speak to what indicators should be important?

Convenience measures do not make for good science if they do not measure things relevant to a theoretical position. The fact that something has been measured does not substitute for a theory. Quantitative analyses and statistical differences between groups do not by themselves constitute good research if they are not theoretically grounded and do not form critical tests of specific hypotheses. The fact that a data set is compatible with a theoretical position is no great contribution to science if the same data set is compatible with a range of other theoretical positions, and a different data set from the same study would not have allowed rejection of any competing theories.

In thinking about theory in this area, I am repeatedly drawn to the position that educational technology research is not a discipline area by itself, but provides a potential context for data which speak to theoretical questions from core discipline areas such as cognitive science, social psychology and computer science. It is important for us to ensure that any research questions relate back to core discipline areas rather than building an entirely self-referential data set around a single piece of technology or learning design.

Rotating Snake
This is one of a whole raft of pretty cool visual illusions delivered via flash – seems like it’s time to update my own (very old) illusion applets !!

NOTES & IDEAS: Using Blogs to Teach Philosophy | Academic Commons
via Stephen Downes

Students taking their first philosophy course often express surprise when encouraged to use “I” in their papers. Unlike academic writing in most other disciplines, philosophical writing frequently and strongly states the “I” because philosophers have to develop and defend their own positions. They cannot weasel out of taking responsibility for their views, and thus the assertion of the “I” means that they are willing to stand or fall with their expressed position.

This is an interesting perspective – I always understood that the third person / passive voice of scientific writing was to indicate that the concept being expressed could stand alone by itself without the need for a personal appeal by me as its proponent. But the mood has drifted such that it has become more like parliamentary privilege – I am sufficiently removed from the concept that I don’t need to identify with it or suffer any discomfort or gulit-by-association if it is flawed.