Introduction: Technique, Interpretation and "Major Projects"
"All serious art, music and literature is a critical act." George Steiner, Real Presences (11)
We spend the first three weeks of CS92 sampling from three rather large areas of research: the history of American education; the philosophy of education; and cognitive psychology. Why?
In the weeks to come we'll be reading from the literature(s) concerned with Human-Computer Interaction, and the point of all the reading is that the programs you're going to build will not just be programming tasks but exercises in design, interpretation and criticism as well. In this sense, CS92 projects are often appreciated as art projects as well as programming projects. Every project will "comment" on at least some of the issues we're reading about, sometimes explicitly and sometimes subtly, because inevitably the technical challenges you will face will be necessary, but not sufficient, to make the design of the program a success. In this sense, I would add "software" to Steiner's list above.
From (Analytic) Philosophy to (Cognitive) Psychology
As we turn to thinking about (cognitive) theories of teaching and learning, we might wonder from what perspective (or using what framework) we can compare the texts by Cuban, Dewey, Scheffler and Svinicki. Do we need to compare them? Do they represent compatible or conflicting accounts of what we should consider "good design" in educational software?
One source of possible conflict seems related to a point made by Scheffler in the section of his paper titled "The Notion of Information." Noting that an "information processing" model of learning is suggestive (and perhaps seductive), he writes
But see how much is left out of the picture. Learning takes place not just by computing solutions to problems, not even just exchanging words, but by emulation, observation, identification, wonder, supposition, dream, imitation, doubt, action, conflict, ambition, participation, and regret. It is a matter of insight and perception, invention and self-knowledge, intimation and feeling, as much as of question and answer." (523)
Scheffler's comment would seem to pose such enormous challenges to psychology that we might begin by discussing what questions (for the purposes of instructional design) you think a theory of learning should be able to answer and what sorts of explanations of educational phenomena we might reasonably expect from cognitive and brain science in the (near) future. We'll then turn to the 1999 issue of New Directions For Teaching and Learning edited by Marilla Svinicki.
"New Directions in Learning and Motivation" (1999)
One way to read Svinicki's article is to think about how it reflects some of the distinctions made by Dewey in Experience and Education. The author clearly considers the transition from a behaviorist model of learning to a meta-cognitivist model a kind of progress, and as the latter is much more challenging than the former as a teaching/instructional design paradigm, we might also begin by debating this notion of educational program (if there is a debate to be had).
We'll look through several of the articles in the Svinicki volume, and see if there are any issues which seem especially relevant to this semester's projects and/or especially controversial given our analysis of the Svinicki article.
Rob Curtis of LiveMath.com
We're fortunate to have Rob as a guest today, and in addition to telling us about his experiences in the educational software business we might just get his reaction to some of the learning theory issues we're discussing.
Engines for Education by Roger Schank and Chip Cleary (1995)
We'll begin the Schank & Cleary discussion with Jason's comments, and follow this with a look at the authors' "Top 10 Mistakes" alongside a description of Schank's "Script Theory".
For next week: We're off on Tuesday, and may meet in the Multimedia Lab or the MSLab on Thursday. A note to the list will be sent no later than Tuesday afternoon, so be sure to look for CS92-l mail before class on Thursday.