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Eric Calvert

The Extended Mind - 0 views

consc.net/extended.html

mind brain cognition extended externalism

shared by Eric Calvert on 09 Feb 11 - Cached
  • Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? The question invites two standard replies. Some accept the demarcations of skin and skull, and say that what is outside the body is outside the mind. Others are impressed by arguments suggesting that the meaning of our words "just ain't in the head", and hold that this externalism about meaning carries over into an externalism about mind. We propose to pursue a third position. We advocate a very different sort of externalism: an active externalism, based on the active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes.
  • It is not just the presence of advanced external computing resources which raises the issue, but rather the general tendency of human reasoners to lean heavily on environmental supports. Thus consider the use of pen and paper to perform long multiplication (McClelland et al 1986, Clark 1989), the use of physical re-arrangements of letter tiles to prompt word recall in Scrabble (Kirsh 1995), the use of instruments such as the nautical slide rule (Hutchins 1995), and the general paraphernalia of language, books, diagrams, and culture. In all these cases the individual brain performs some operations, while others are delegated to manipulations of external media.
  • In these cases, the human organism is linked with an external entity in a two-way interaction, creating a coupled system that can be seen as a cognitive system in its own right. All the components in the system play an active causal role, and they jointly govern behavior in the same sort of way that cognition usually does. If we remove the external component the system's behavioral competence will drop, just as it would if we removed part of its brain. Our thesis is that this sort of coupled process counts equally well as a cognitive process, whether or not it is wholly in the head.
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  • By embracing an active externalism, we allow a more natural explanation of all sorts of actions. One can explain my choice of words in Scrabble, for example, as the outcome of an extended cognitive process involving the rearrangement of tiles on my tray. Of course, one could always try to explain my action in terms of internal processes and a long series of "inputs" and "actions", but this explanation would be needlessly complex. If an isomorphic process were going on in the head, we would feel no urge to characterize it in this cumbersome way.[*] In a very real sense, the re-arrangement of tiles on the tray is not part of action; it is part of thought.
Eric Calvert

EBSCOhost: Of mind and media - 0 views

0-web.ebscohost.com.maurice.bgsu.edu/...detail

shared by Eric Calvert on 12 Aug 10 - No Cached
  • When children are told to watch a television program not for fun but to learn something from it, their expenditure of mental effort rises dramatically, and with it, the quality of learning outcomes. [14] Quite clearly, children's differential perceptions of the media and of symbolic forms of representation ("pictures are realistic and hence require less mental effort than print") reflect the views of the social world around them. Where or when television is perceived as a serious medium (as was the case in Israel in the early days of television), processing capacities become mobilized, and much learning takes place. Not so when the medium is taken to be "just pictures." The socially held and communicated views of the media appear to affect the way children handle them, the depth with which they process their offerings, and thus what they actually learn from them.
    • Eric Calvert
      Eric Calvert on 12 Aug 10
       
      This raises a question for me related to learning games.  If the "learning" part is too carefully disguised (and some learning games are sold with statements like, "it makes learning easy!" or "students don't even know they're learning!") is there a risk that it's educational value will be compromised?   Do you think it's better to disguise learning as a video game, or create learning games that are EXPLICITLY designed to be used to promote learning/thinking?
  • Significantly, I and others have found that children often tend to handle a medium more on the basis of the general image they hold of it than on the basis of its particular offering or intrinsic attributes. Symbolic forms of representation that are perceived to duplicate reality closely (e.g., pictures) are taken to require no knowledge of authorship and no skill for processing.[12] Television, as a general rule, is perceived to be fun, simple, easy to understand, and generally useless. Comprehending televised content is perceived to require no brains, while failing to comprehend it is a sign of stupidity. On the other hand, print is generally perceived to be highly demanding, and success in comprehending a story in print is regarded as a matter of ability. Failing to comprehend print is expected because it is "tough." Do these differential perceptions make a difference in learning? Indeed, they do! In line with such perceptions, children do not expend much mental effort on a televised story, even when it is quite poetic and requires effort. Thus they learn far less from it than from an equivalent story in print. The largest and most impressive difference in responses is found in the more intelligent children, who mobilize their capacities to learn from the print story but forgo doing so when it comes to TV.[13]
    • Eric Calvert
      Eric Calvert on 12 Aug 10
       
      Do you think it's possible that part of the reason why the Web has been resisted as a learning tool by some educators is that they associate it primarily with entertainment, whereas books/paper are seen as "serious" media?
  • Forms of Representation As Tools of the Mind Last, and perhaps most important, we need to ask whether the different symbolic forms of representation not only offer different meanings, require different mental capacities, and are differentially perceived, but also whether they leave some differential cognitive residue. That is, do they somehow affect the way we come to perceive or represent the world to ourselves? Do they affect our cognitive apparatus in some lasting way, thus coming to serve as tools of the mind?
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  • Children exposed to novel symbolic forms of representation typical of film and television (e.g., zooming in and out, long shots and close-ups, animated breakup of space) have shown evidence of coming to use these forms in their thinking. As one student commented, "I have learned to think of my life as a series of frames partly overlapping each other and dissolving into each other." My findings came from both controlled experiments and natural field and cross-cultural studies. The latter, being of greater ecological validity, are of particular relevance here. I found that children's prolonged exposure to TV, provided that they expend effort in processing its messages, results in measurable changes in their mastery of relevant capacities.
  • One way to describe comprehension is as a network of relations among "nodes" of knowledge. It can be argued that a single bit of information cannot be comprehended except as part of a network of relations with other such nodes. For example, the difficulty of trying to memorize historical dates is that they often remain unconnected, free-floating in one's cognitive space, and thus quite incomprehensible and meaningless. It is only when the study of history is turned into a narrativelike web of connected themes (a story) that the single event or date becomes meaningful. The denser the web of connections, the richer the meaningfulness of the single item. Coming to comprehend something means networking -- creating a network or web.[19]
    • Eric Calvert
      Eric Calvert on 12 Aug 10
       
      Does this sound a bit like "connectivism?"
  • The Internet and other computer products and possibilities (particularly multimedia programs) are similarly based on the idea of a web, this one connecting sites, information packages, and participants. All these technologies afford quick and efficient connectivity and easy access to the different "nodes." This, of course, is their strength, allowing serf-guided exploration and targeted information searches, in the best of the constructivist spirit. They also seem to be gradually changing the meaning of "knowledge," from something that is possessed to something to which we have access .[20]
  • But this could as easily be their weakness, even their cognitive downside. For what these developments allow is an undisciplined, free-associational, yet tempting wandering among the various nodes ("web surfing"). Students have been observed to start exploring the life cycles of elephants in Central Africa but to very quickly find themselves following a lead that takes them to the biography of Napoleon or to the political situation in Turkey.
  • Mind and technological media are not two unrelated entities. They affect each other in a variety of ways. Technological media are, of course, the creation of the human mind, but they in turn affect their creator. Media's symbolic forms of representation are clearly not neutral or indifferent packages that have no effect on the represented information. Being part and parcel of the information itself, they influence the meanings one arrives at, the mental capacities that are called for, and the ways one comes to view the world. Perhaps most important, the culture that creates the media and develops their symbolic forms of representation also opens the door for those forms to act on the minds of the young in both more and less desirable ways.
Eric Calvert

Chunking (psychology) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/...Chunking_(psychology)

memory chunking mnemonics Miller

shared by Eric Calvert on 25 Aug 10 - Cached
  • In cognitive psychology and mnemonics, chunking refers to a strategy for making more efficient use of short-term memory by recoding information. More generally, Herbert Simon has used the term chunk to indicate long-term memory structures that can be used as units of perception and meaning, and chunking as the learning mechanisms leading to the acquisition of these chunks. Chunking means to organize items into familiar manageable units.
  • The word chunking comes from a famous 1956 paper by George A. Miller, The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information. At a time when information theory was beginning to be applied in psychology, Miller observed that whereas some human cognitive tasks fit the model of a "channel capacity" characterized by a roughly constant capacity in bits, short-term memory did not. A variety of studies could be summarized by saying that short-term memory had a capacity of about "seven plus-or-minus two" chunks.
  • Miller noted that according to this theory, it should be possible to effectively increase short-term memory for low-information-content items by mentally recoding them into a smaller number of high-information-content items. "A man just beginning to learn radio-telegraphic code hears each dit and dah as a separate chunk. Soon he is able to organize these sounds into letters and then he can deal with the letters as chunks. Then the letters organize themselves as words, which are still larger chunks, and he begins to hear whole phrases." Thus, a telegrapher can effectively "remember" several dozen dits and dahs as a single phras
Eric Calvert

Toward a Theory of Online Learning - 0 views

cde.athabascau.ca/...ch2.html

Anderson online learning theory Athabasca

shared by Eric Calvert on 09 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Toward a Theory of Online Learning
  • Terry Anderson Athabasca University
  • There is nothing more practical than a good theory. ~ James C. Maxwell (1831-1879)
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  • Theory has both been celebrated and condemned in educational practice and research. Many proponents have argued that theory allows—even forces—us to see the “big picture” and makes it possible for us to view our practice and our research from a broader perspective than that envisioned from the murky trenches of our practice. This broader perspective helps us to make connections with the work of others, facilitates coherent frameworks and deeper understanding of our actions, and perhaps most importantly allows us to transfer the experience gained in one context to new experiences and contexts. Critics of theory (Wilson, 1999) have argued that too strict an adherence to any particular theoretical viewpoint often filters our perceptions and blinds us to important lessons of reality.
  • Wilson (1997) has described three functions of a good educational theory. First, it helps us to envision new worlds.
  • Second, a good theory helps us to make things. We need theories of online learning that help us to invest our time and limited resources most effectively.
  • Third, Wilson argues that a good theory keeps us honest. Good theory builds upon what is already known, and helps us to interpret and plan for the unknown. It also forces us to look beyond day-to-day contingencies and to ensure that our knowledge and practice of online learning is robust, considered, and ever expanding.
  • online learning is a subset of learning in general; thus, we can expect issues relevant to how adults learn generally to be relevant to how they learn in an online context.
  • effective learning is learner centered, knowledge centered, assessment centered, and community centered
  • Learner Centered
  • Learner-centered learning, according to Bransford et al., includes awareness of the unique cognitive structures and understandings that the learners bring to the learning context. Thus, a teacher makes efforts to gain an understanding of students' pre-existing knowledge, including any misconceptions that the learner starts with in their construction of new knowledge. Further, the learning environment respects and accommodates the particular cultural attributes, especially the language and particular forms of expression, that the learner uses to interpret and build knowledge.
  • Knowledge Centered
  • Effective learning does not happen in a content vacuum. McPeck (1990) and other theorists of critical thinking have argued that teaching generalized thinking skills and techniques is useless outside of a particular knowledge domain in which they can be grounded. Similarly, Bransford et al. argue that effective learning is both defined and bounded by the epistemology, language, and context of disciplinary thought.
  • Each discipline or field of study contains a world view that provides often unique ways of understanding and talking about knowledge. Students need opportunities to experience this discourse, as well as the knowledge structures that undergraduate teaching affords. They also need opportunities to reflect upon their own thinking: automacy is a useful and necessary skill for expert thinking, but without reflective capacity, it greatly limits one's ability to transfer knowledge to an unfamiliar context or to develop new knowledge structures.
  • Assessment Centered
  • The third perspective on learning environments presented by Bransford et al. is the necessity for effective learning environments to be assessment centered. In making this assertion, they do not give unqualified support for summative assessments (especially those supposedly used for national or provincial accountability), but rather look to formative evaluation that serves to motivate, inform, and provide feedback to both learners and teachers
  • Understanding what is most usefully rather than what is most easily assessed is a challenge for the designers of online learning.
  • Baxter, Elder, and Glaser (1996) found that competent students should be able to provide coherent explanations, generate plans for problem solution, implement solution strategies, and monitor and adjust their activities.
    • Eric Calvert
      Eric Calvert on 10 Aug 10
       
      BTW LRND 6820 students... this is the standard we're working toward in the LRND program.
  • the enhanced communications capacity of online learning and the focus of most adult online learning in the real world of work provide opportunities to create assessment activities that are project and workplace based, that are constructed collaboratively, that benefit from peer review, and that are infused with both the opportunity and the requirement for self-assessment.
  • A danger of assessment-centered learning systems is the potential increase in the workload demanded of busy online learning teachers.
    • Eric Calvert
      Eric Calvert on 10 Aug 10
       
      Limited time and financial resources, in addition to perceived objectivity, are probably the main reasons why our education system and policy frameworks rely so heavily on standardized tests, despite the fact that hardly anyone believes they're the best way to assess individual learners.
  • Thus, the challenge of online learning is to provide high quantity and quality of assessment while maintaining student interest and commitment.
  • Community Centered
  • The community-centered lens allows us to include the critical social component of learning in our online learning designs. Here we find Vygotsky's (1978) popular concepts of social cognition to be relevant as we consider how students can work together in an online learning context to create new knowledge collaboratively. These ideas have been expanded in Lipman's (1991) community of inquiry and Wenger's (2001) ideas of community of practice to show how members of a learning community both support and challenge each other, leading to effective and relevant knowledge construction. Wilson (2001) has described participants in online communities as having a shared sense of belonging, trust, expectation of learning, and commitment to participate and to contribute to the community.
  • In short, it may be more challenging than we think to create and sustain these communities, and the differences—linked to a lack of placedness and synchronicity, that is, mutual presence in time and place—may be more fundamental than the mere absence of body language and social presence.
    • Eric Calvert
      Eric Calvert on 10 Aug 10
       
      One of the topics we'll talk about in the second half of the semester is how to overcome some of these obstacles.  
  • These potential barriers argue for a theory of online learning that accommodates, but does not prescribe, any particular boundaries of time and place, and that allows for appropriate substitution of independent and community-centered learning. To this requirement, we add the need for a theory of e-learning that is learning centered, provides a wide variety of authentic assessment opportunities, and is grounded in existing knowledge contexts.
  • Affordances of the Net
  • Online learning, as a subset of all distance education, has always been concerned with providing access to educational experience that is at least more flexible in time and in space than campus-based education.
  • Much of the early work on the instructional use of the Internet (Harasim, 1989; Feenberg, 1989) assumed that asynchronous text-based interaction defined the medium.
    • Eric Calvert
      Eric Calvert on 10 Aug 10
       
      Bear this in mind as you read older research.  Because our field is changing so rapidly, we always have to be mindful of the definition of "online learning" the author was working from in order to make sense of the author's findings.
  • The Web's in-built capacity for hyperlinking has been compared to the way in which human knowledge is stored in mental schema and to the subsequent development of mental structures (Jonassen, 1992). Further, the capacity for students to create their own learning paths through content that is formatted with hypertext links is congruent with constructivist instructional design theory that stresses individual discovery and construction of knowledge (Jonassen, 1991).
  • Education is not only about access to content, however. The greatest affordance of the Web for educational use is the profound and multifaceted increase in communication and interaction capability that it provides.
    • Eric Calvert
      Eric Calvert on 10 Aug 10
       
      We will spend a good deal of time "playing" with different tools for facilitating communication for learning this semester and reflecting on their usefulness.
  • Defining and Valuing Interaction in Online Learning
  • I will here simply accept Wagner's (1994) definition of interaction as “reciprocal events that require at least two objects and two actions. Interactions occur when these objects and events mutually influence one another” (p. 8).
  • Interaction (or interactivity) serves a variety of functions in the educational transaction. Sims (1999) has listed these functions as allowing for learner control, facilitating program adaptation based on learner input, allowing various forms of participation and communication, and acting as an aid to meaningful learning. In addition, interactivity is fundamental to creation of the learning communities espoused by Lipman (1991), Wenger (2001), and other influential educational theorists who focus on the critical role of community in learning. Finally, the value of another person's perspective, usually gained through interaction, is a key learning component in constructivist learning theories (Jonassen, 1991), and in inducing mindfulness in learners (Langer, 1989).
  • As long ago as 1916, John Dewey referred to interaction as the defining component of the educational process that occurs when the student transforms the inert information passed to them from another, and constructs it into knowledge with personal application and value (Dewey, 1916).
    • Eric Calvert
      Eric Calvert on 10 Aug 10
       
      "Make and take" vs. "sit and get."
  • It can be seen that, generally, the higher and richer the form of communication, the more restrictions it places on independence.
    • Eric Calvert
      Eric Calvert on 10 Aug 10
       
      This is a real issue even in the LRND program. We're grappling with finding the right balance in using "rich" tools like Elluminate that allow exploring and discussing multiple media in real time (but require students to do the same thing at the same time) and asynchronous tools that offer more flexibility and choice but perhaps less richness.   Any early opinions?
  • Student-student Interaction
  • Modern constructivist theorists stress the value of peer-to-peer interaction in investigating and developing multiple perspectives.
  • Student-teacher Interaction
  • Student-content Interaction
  • Eklund (1995) lists some potential advantages of such approaches, noting that they allow instructors to •   provide an on line or intelligent help facility, if a user is modeled and their path is traced through the information space; •   use an adaptive interface based on several stereotypical user classes to modify the environment to suit individual users; and •   provide adaptive advice, and model the learner's use of the environment (including navigational use, answers to questions, and help requested) to make intelligent suggestions about a preferred individualized path through the knowledge base. To these advantages must be added the capacity for immediate feedback, not only for formal learning guidance, but also for just-in-time learning assistance through job aids and other performance support tools.
  • Teacher-teacher Interaction
  • Teacher-content Interaction
  • Content-content Interaction
  • Content-content interaction is a newly developing mode of educational interaction in which content is programmed to interact with other automated information sources, so as to refresh itself constantly, and to acquire new capabilities. For example, a weather tutorial might take its data from current meteorological servers, creating a learning context that is up-to-date and relevant to the learner's context.
  • A Model of E-learning
  • The model illustrates the two major human actors, learners and teachers, and their interactions with each other and with content. Learners can of course interact directly with content that they find in multiple formats, and especially on the Web; however, many choose to have their learning sequenced, directed, and evaluated with the assistance of a teacher. This interaction can take place within a community of inquiry, using a variety of Net-based synchronous and asynchronous activities (video, audio, computer conferencing, chats, or virtual world interaction). These environments are particularly rich, and allow for the learning of social skills, the collaborative learning of content, and the development of personal relationships among participants. However, the community binds learners in time, forcing regular sessions or at least group-paced learning. Community models are also, generally, more expensive, as they suffer from an inability to scale to large numbers of learners. The second model of learning (on the right) illustrates the structured learning tools associated with independent learning. Common tools used in this mode include computer-assisted tutorials, drills, and simulations.
  • A key decision factor is based on the nature of the learning that is prescribed. Marc Prensky (2000) argues that different learning outcomes are best learned through particular types of learning activities. Prensky asks not, “How do students learn?” but more specifically, “How do they learn what?
  • Prensky (2000, p. 56) postulates that, in general, we all learn: •   behaviors through imitation, feedback, and practice; •   creativity through playing; •   facts through association, drill, memory, and questions; •   judgment through reviewing cases, asking questions, making choices, and receiving feedback and coaching; •   language through imitation, practice, and immersion; •   observation through viewing examples and receiving feedback; •   procedures through imitation and practice; •   processes through system analysis, deconstruction, and practice; •   systems through discovering principles and undertaking graduated tasks; •   reasoning through puzzles, problems, and examples; •   skills (physical or mental) through imitation, feedback, continuous practice, and increasing challenge; •   speeches or performance roles through memorization, practice, and coaching; •   theories through logic, explanation, and questioning.
  • Online Learning and the Semantic Web
  • Campus-based education systems are constructed around physical buildings that afford meeting and lecture spaces for teachers and groups of students. The Web provides nearly ubiquitous access to quantities of content that are many orders of magnitude larger than those provided in any other medium.
  • The Web offers a host of very powerful affordances to educators.
  • Thus, I conclude this chapter with an overview of a theory of online learning interaction that suggests that the various forms of student interaction can be substituted for each other, depending on costs, content, learning objectives, convenience, technology, and available time. The substitutions do not result in decreases in the quality of the learning that results. More formally: Sufficient levels of deep and meaningful learning can be developed, as long as one of the three forms of interaction (student-teacher; student-student; student-content) is at very high levels. The other two may be offered at minimal levels or even eliminated without degrading the educational experience. (Anderson, 2002)
  • The challenge for teachers and course developers working in an online learning context is to construct a learning environment that is simultaneously learning centered, content centered, community centered, and assessment centered.
  • Table 2-1 illustrates how the affordances of these emerging technologies can be directed so as to create the environment that is most supportive of “how people learn.”
  • However, we can expect that online learning, like all forms of quality learning, will be knowledge, community, assessment, and learner centered.
  • The task of the online course designer and teacher is to choose, adapt, and perfect (through feedback, assessment, and reflection) educational activities that maximize the affordances of the Web. In doing so, they create learning-, knowledge-, assessment-, and community-centered educational experiences that result in high levels of learning by all participants.
  • Toward a Theory of Online Learning
  • Eric Calvert on 09 Aug 10
     
    Chapter by Terry Anderson from "Theory and Practice of Online Learning"
Eric Calvert

LRND Weekly #9 "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" - Ian Poor - 0 views

ianpoor.com/...y-9-is-google-making-us-stupid

LRND6820 VoiceThread debate carr google ianpoor

shared by Eric Calvert on 25 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • First off I would like to point out that I am extremely torn about this subject, and am actually more confused after going through this process (haha).
    • Eric Calvert
      Eric Calvert on 25 Oct 10
       
      That's okay, Ian.  Some educational psychologists argue that "cognitive dissonance" is a necessary precondition for new learning.  (Put another way, when we're "sure" about our opinions, we tend to stop listening and thinking.)
  • e need to use new and upcoming technologies (like the ones we are researching for our PLE’s) to help students gain the techniques and work patterns that can help them “dive deeper” into the “right” content.
    • Eric Calvert
      Eric Calvert on 25 Oct 10
       
      Amen!
Eric Calvert

LRND 6820-ON INTELLIGENCE | mmieure's blog - 1 views

blogs.bgsu.edu/...lrnd-6820-on-intelligence

shared by Eric Calvert on 08 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • If you examine this backwards, it would appear that the only way to change behaviors in an individual is to first alter the perceptions/predictions which are coming from the brain.
    • Eric Calvert
      Eric Calvert on 08 Oct 10
       
      Yes! (Although, to a certain extent, exerting control/influence on the behavior of others can change mental patterns as well.  The drawbacks of this approach are that it can be coercive and it takes some consistency and repetition.)  For example, think of people who pay personal trainers or diet counselors to essentially manipulate their behavior until they develop the habits they want.
  • Thus, if we couple expectations with predictions and perceptions, I believe that we can go a long way in changing behavior over time.  If a person is going to behave based on what the brain see’s as most logical, then behavior can be changed by changing the logic.  I am a true believer in congnitive therapy, for instance.  I believe that cognitive therapy is rather strong proof that the patterns of ones behaviors can be changed by retraining the brain to set up the resultant behaviors to the desired outcome.
    • Eric Calvert
      Eric Calvert on 08 Oct 10
       
      Good insight and example, Matt.
  • There needs to be more emphasis on “what” behaviors are resulting from technology.  If we can tangilby measure the behaviors resulting from technological innovation, would that not help us to understand what parts of technology are effective and what parts are ineffective?
    • Eric Calvert
      Eric Calvert on 08 Oct 10
       
      Another interesting point.  Remember, too, that Hawkins really views behavior as part of the thinking/learning process.  In his view, behavior is often driven by desire to collect data about the world to help us determine which mental patterns are applicable and to verify that our mental models of the world are correct.  There's no hard line between thought and behavior.
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