Engines for Education by Schank and Cleary
The Unschooled Mind by Howard Gardner
For next week
"..instead of listing questions to think about (which many of us, I suspect, only glance at) I want to try something new for tomorrow's class. I'd like everyone to come up with at least one question or response (just a few sentences) to the reading. This won't be collected or anything (well, I'm certainly not planning to collect it) but we will be using these in class tomorrow. So I would like everyone to put their question or response in writing, even if it's in the five minutes before class begins."
My own brief response to the readings for today would be that, while I share the authors' sense of what sorts of learning activities and scenarios are most desirable (esp. in chapter 7), I think they often confuse the value of learning by yourself with the value of learning for yourself. In the opening chapter they clearly discount the value of social interactions in education that depend on shared knowledge and experience, and give enormous weight to operational (even behavioristic) notions of learning. Finally, most of the claims they make about the mistakes of contemporary education (e.g. "there isn't all that much that is important to know") are unsupported by any evidence, and far from obviously true. Some questions I hope we get to consider are:
Finally, for an insight into where the assigned chapters from Schank and Cleary lead, see Andrea's comments on chapters 10 and 11 from last year's Seminar.
Gardner is most famous for his "Theory of Multiple Intelligences," first described in his 1983 book, Frames of Mind. In order to appreciate his view(s), it's worth remembering what they are arguments against: a fundamentally unified notion of intelligence measurable by something like an IQ test (or its modern psychometric equivalent).
Gardner's views have had enormous influence in the world of education and his books have been translated into at least 20 languages; indeed, there are now even MI Schools (e.g. http://www.NewCitySchool.org/) and MI Teachers (e.g. at Vartan Gregorian Elementary in Providence). Gardner's theory is controversial, however, largely because it seems difficult or impossible to evaluate the "data" that supports multiple intelligences. There is also the practical problem of how Gardner's theory is or ought to be implemented in schools, and Gardner has recently spoken out against using the theory to label children in ways that deprive them from certain experiences and opportunities (see e.g. a 1997 interview at http://www.zephyrpress.com/gardner.htm). For our purposes, we can regard Gardner's theory and his book either as cognitive science or a kind of Enlightenment cognitive philosophy; the point is that his work should draw our attention to the range of aptitudes (Jerome Bruner once urged Gardner to use the term "aptitude" rather than "intelligence") a theory of education and/or educational software design needs to take into account.
Chris Creed's questions for today raise a number of interesting issues, including that of "learning for understanding," the focus of the entire collection Software Goes to School (that we'll read later in the semester). You might also be interested in the 1996 article by Veenema and Gardner called "Multimedia and Multiple Intelligences" (http://www.epn.org/prospect/29/29veen.html).