ZenPundit
Monday, April 02, 2007
FEEDBACK ON WISE AND STUPID CROWDS
Dr.Von took the time from his busy schedule to send me a comment on my post on WISE AND STUPID CROWDS, CREATIVITY AND THE IC:
"I tend to believe that many are falling into the usual trappings we humans are prone to do. The concept of 'Groupthink' has its positive features, but I fear it does hamper creativity. It often takes revolutionary thinkers, who are largely isolated from the establisment, to go against mainstream beliefs to get at deeper truth and innovation in thought. It was to Einstein's advantage that he was isolated from the bias of academia at the turn of the last century, so he could reach the conclusion that Newtonian physics had limits and the world worked in very different ways than what the 'Group' thought. We will always need that individual freedom working in parallel with the Group. Creativity and innovation can come from either branch, so we cannot fall into a phase of 'all group, all the time,' as some might be suggesting. It reminds me a lot of how we need both pure and applied science, and both horizonta l/vertical thinking. This relates to some thoughts about intellectual absolutism that have always bothered me...it won't help us figure out the complex systems and problems we are dealing with."
I agree both specifically to the point regarding revolutionary thinkers coming from outside the mainstream as well as for the general philosophy of accepting the paradox of opposing ends of spectrums in order to gain comprehension.
My qualification to Von's comment is that the isolation he cites here is of an intermediate variety; Newton was a social misfit but was still connected to the formal academic world. Freud and Einstein, contemporaries, were initially marginalized in their fields prior to their respective breakthroughs due to their dissatisfaction with prevailing orthodoxies ( Newtonian physics and physiologically based psychology) as well as their status as Jews in conservative, Catholic, Imperial Austria-Hungary. Brilliant outlier figures who well understood the premises of their fields and found them inadequate, rather than hermits or dilettantes.
ADDENDUM:
If you live North of Chicago or have an interest in education, Dr. Von is being the good citizen and is running for his local school board. Aside from his past scientific work at Fermilab, Von's experience in innovative educational programs, such as Project Excite, which is supported in part by Northwestern University, is both extensive and impressive. He could use your support and feedback, if you are so inclined, here is his site.
Dr.Von took the time from his busy schedule to send me a comment on my post on WISE AND STUPID CROWDS, CREATIVITY AND THE IC:
"I tend to believe that many are falling into the usual trappings we humans are prone to do. The concept of 'Groupthink' has its positive features, but I fear it does hamper creativity. It often takes revolutionary thinkers, who are largely isolated from the establisment, to go against mainstream beliefs to get at deeper truth and innovation in thought. It was to Einstein's advantage that he was isolated from the bias of academia at the turn of the last century, so he could reach the conclusion that Newtonian physics had limits and the world worked in very different ways than what the 'Group' thought. We will always need that individual freedom working in parallel with the Group. Creativity and innovation can come from either branch, so we cannot fall into a phase of 'all group, all the time,' as some might be suggesting. It reminds me a lot of how we need both pure and applied science, and both horizonta l/vertical thinking. This relates to some thoughts about intellectual absolutism that have always bothered me...it won't help us figure out the complex systems and problems we are dealing with."
I agree both specifically to the point regarding revolutionary thinkers coming from outside the mainstream as well as for the general philosophy of accepting the paradox of opposing ends of spectrums in order to gain comprehension.
My qualification to Von's comment is that the isolation he cites here is of an intermediate variety; Newton was a social misfit but was still connected to the formal academic world. Freud and Einstein, contemporaries, were initially marginalized in their fields prior to their respective breakthroughs due to their dissatisfaction with prevailing orthodoxies ( Newtonian physics and physiologically based psychology) as well as their status as Jews in conservative, Catholic, Imperial Austria-Hungary. Brilliant outlier figures who well understood the premises of their fields and found them inadequate, rather than hermits or dilettantes.
ADDENDUM:
If you live North of Chicago or have an interest in education, Dr. Von is being the good citizen and is running for his local school board. Aside from his past scientific work at Fermilab, Von's experience in innovative educational programs, such as Project Excite, which is supported in part by Northwestern University, is both extensive and impressive. He could use your support and feedback, if you are so inclined, here is his site.
Labels: cognition, creativity, public school, reader response, von
¶ 6:51 PM 1 comments
Monday, March 05, 2007
WHY SCHOOLS KILL CREATIVITY - BUT THEY DON'T HAVE TO
I watched this highly enjoyable TED presentation by Sir Ken Robinson at Dr. Florida's Creative Class blog. Robinson has a solid critique that he delivers with gentle humor
Reproducing my comments at Creative Class, Creativity, in my humble opinion comes in several variants - generative insight, synthesis, tweaking/tinkering and the collective, stochastic/stigmergic, version of tweaking you see in open-source and/or market based "accumulated wisdom" forms of cultural evolution. They are not all the same thing nor do they, in my very limited experience of reviewing studies, look the same in MRI brain studies of cognitive tasks
Public education is not currently designed to promote any of these forms of creativity, though some instructors do. Instead the cognitive emphasis is on recall and at best, application and analysis. Certainly useful thinking skills but not the only ones students should have in their kit.
The good news is that these forms of creativity are not that hard to teach students to practice but the incentives to do so aren't there for teachers or professors. With the former group, NCLB pressure mitigates against doing so; with the latter, the publish or perish ethic makes teaching itself an irrelevance at worst and a minor positive at best.
I watched this highly enjoyable TED presentation by Sir Ken Robinson at Dr. Florida's Creative Class blog. Robinson has a solid critique that he delivers with gentle humor
Reproducing my comments at Creative Class, Creativity, in my humble opinion comes in several variants - generative insight, synthesis, tweaking/tinkering and the collective, stochastic/stigmergic, version of tweaking you see in open-source and/or market based "accumulated wisdom" forms of cultural evolution. They are not all the same thing nor do they, in my very limited experience of reviewing studies, look the same in MRI brain studies of cognitive tasks
Public education is not currently designed to promote any of these forms of creativity, though some instructors do. Instead the cognitive emphasis is on recall and at best, application and analysis. Certainly useful thinking skills but not the only ones students should have in their kit.
The good news is that these forms of creativity are not that hard to teach students to practice but the incentives to do so aren't there for teachers or professors. With the former group, NCLB pressure mitigates against doing so; with the latter, the publish or perish ethic makes teaching itself an irrelevance at worst and a minor positive at best.
Labels: cognition, creativity, education, ken robinson, public school, richard florida
¶ 6:42 PM 0 comments
Thursday, February 22, 2007
IMPENDING REVOLUTIONS
While I had heard of the Negroponte project for $ 100 laptops previously, it was not until today that a post at Dave Davison's Thoughts Illustrated made me appreciate the true scale of the endeavor. Dave's post led me to this article about Alan Kay, one of the fathers of the PC and of the very internet itself. Some key points from the Kay article:
"The Viewpoints Research Institute is actually involved in three new projects. One is the $100 laptop project that Nicholas Negroponte is doing. That is coming along very well. The first 1,000 factory-built machines were built in the last few weeks. The plan is to build 5 million to 8 million laptops this summer, and perhaps as many as 50 million in 2008. We're very involved in that. The other thing is a recently funded NSF project that will take a couple of giant steps, we hope, toward reinventing programming. The plan is to take the entire personal-computing experience from the end user down to the silicon and make a system from scratch that recapitulates everything people are used to—desktop publishing, Internet experiences, etc.—in less than 20,000 lines of code. It would be kind of like a Moore's Law step in software. It's going to be quite difficult to do this work in five years, but it will be exciting.
The third project we're just getting started on and don't have completely funded yet, is to make a new kind of user interface that can actually help people learn things, from very mundane things about how their computer system works to more interesting things like math, science, reading and writing. This project came about because of the $100 laptop. In order for the $100 laptop to be successful in the educational realm, it has to take on some mentoring processes itself. This is an old idea that goes all the way back to the sixties. Many people have worked on it. It just has never gotten above threshold."
Kay makes very clear that the $100 laptop effort is aimed at the Gap where children are relatively uncorrupted by the pop culture techno expectations of America. A tabula rasa to re-start the information revolution. However the economic spillover effects of such an accomplishment cannot be contained. The entire computer market will be affected to broaden societal and global access to information.
At a stroke, in American public schools, the rationale for spending billions on textbooks ( which run about $ 70 per copy on average and are exceedingly mediocre in quality) would be eliminated, as would their use as a crutch by gen-ed majors and basketball coaches posing as teachers of core academic subjects. The poorest American school districts can afford $ 100 laptops even when new textbooks are beyond their budgetary reach. Kids in East St. Louis and Watts and the moonscape of inner city Detroit can enter the information age along with Bangladeshis and Burundians.
Factor in the pirates who will produce copycat versions in places like China and we are talking about an increase in the online population of the world by several orders of magnitude with all that such connectivity entails.
Cross-posted at Chicago Boyz
While I had heard of the Negroponte project for $ 100 laptops previously, it was not until today that a post at Dave Davison's Thoughts Illustrated made me appreciate the true scale of the endeavor. Dave's post led me to this article about Alan Kay, one of the fathers of the PC and of the very internet itself. Some key points from the Kay article:
"The Viewpoints Research Institute is actually involved in three new projects. One is the $100 laptop project that Nicholas Negroponte is doing. That is coming along very well. The first 1,000 factory-built machines were built in the last few weeks. The plan is to build 5 million to 8 million laptops this summer, and perhaps as many as 50 million in 2008. We're very involved in that. The other thing is a recently funded NSF project that will take a couple of giant steps, we hope, toward reinventing programming. The plan is to take the entire personal-computing experience from the end user down to the silicon and make a system from scratch that recapitulates everything people are used to—desktop publishing, Internet experiences, etc.—in less than 20,000 lines of code. It would be kind of like a Moore's Law step in software. It's going to be quite difficult to do this work in five years, but it will be exciting.
The third project we're just getting started on and don't have completely funded yet, is to make a new kind of user interface that can actually help people learn things, from very mundane things about how their computer system works to more interesting things like math, science, reading and writing. This project came about because of the $100 laptop. In order for the $100 laptop to be successful in the educational realm, it has to take on some mentoring processes itself. This is an old idea that goes all the way back to the sixties. Many people have worked on it. It just has never gotten above threshold."
Kay makes very clear that the $100 laptop effort is aimed at the Gap where children are relatively uncorrupted by the pop culture techno expectations of America. A tabula rasa to re-start the information revolution. However the economic spillover effects of such an accomplishment cannot be contained. The entire computer market will be affected to broaden societal and global access to information.
At a stroke, in American public schools, the rationale for spending billions on textbooks ( which run about $ 70 per copy on average and are exceedingly mediocre in quality) would be eliminated, as would their use as a crutch by gen-ed majors and basketball coaches posing as teachers of core academic subjects. The poorest American school districts can afford $ 100 laptops even when new textbooks are beyond their budgetary reach. Kids in East St. Louis and Watts and the moonscape of inner city Detroit can enter the information age along with Bangladeshis and Burundians.
Factor in the pirates who will produce copycat versions in places like China and we are talking about an increase in the online population of the world by several orders of magnitude with all that such connectivity entails.
Cross-posted at Chicago Boyz
Labels: computers, davison, education, futurism, negroponte, public school
¶ 7:30 PM 11 comments
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
ALVIN TOFFLER'S THIRD WAVE PUBLIC EDUCATION
Alvin Toffler, the acclaimed futurist and author was interviewed by Edutopia, the Lucas Foundation's education magazine, where he expounded on the need to radically redesign the public education system, starting with a blank slate. It's an excellent summary article ( full version is on the pdf page) An excerpt:
"Future School"
"We should be thinking from the ground up. That's different from changing everything. However, we first have to understand how we got the education system that we now have. Teachers are wonderful, and there are hundreds of thousands of them who are creative and terrific, but they are operating in a system that is completely out of time. It is a system designed to produce industrial workers.
Let's look back at the history of public education in the United States. You have to go back a little over a century. For many years, there was a debate about whether we should even have public education. Some parents wanted kids to go to school and get an education; others said, "We can't afford that. We need them to work. They have to work in the field, because otherwise we starve." There was a big debate. Late in the 1800s, during the Industrial Revolution, business leaders began complaining about all these rural kids who were pouring into the cities and going to work in our factories. Business leaders said that these kids were no good, and that what they needed was an educational system that would produce "industrial discipline."
....It's open twenty-four hours a day. Different kids arrive at different times. They don't all come at the same time, like an army. They don't just ring the bells at the same time. They're different kids. They have different potentials. Now, in practice, we're not going to be able to get down to the micro level with all of this, I grant you, but in fact, I would be running a twentyfour- hour school, I would have nonteachers working with teachers in that school, I would have the kids coming and going at different times that make sense for them.
The schools of today are essentially custodial: They're taking care of kids in work hours that are essentially nine to five -- when the whole society was assumed to work. Clearly, that's changing in our society. So should the timing. We're individualizing time; we're personalizing time. We're not having everyone arrive at the same time, leave at the same time. Why should kids arrive at the same time and leave at the same time? "
I have written posts along these lines previously and agree with Toffler that the public school system needs a paradigm shift if it is to be relevant and useful to children who will be working in the last decades of the 21st century. It may be that in shifting to Philip Bobbitt's " market state", public education authorities will become a dispenser of funds and an accreditor of quality, certifying that children are being well-educated but that the particulars of education decisions will be left to parents, students and a diverse array of providers.
Alvin Toffler, the acclaimed futurist and author was interviewed by Edutopia, the Lucas Foundation's education magazine, where he expounded on the need to radically redesign the public education system, starting with a blank slate. It's an excellent summary article ( full version is on the pdf page) An excerpt:
"Future School"
"We should be thinking from the ground up. That's different from changing everything. However, we first have to understand how we got the education system that we now have. Teachers are wonderful, and there are hundreds of thousands of them who are creative and terrific, but they are operating in a system that is completely out of time. It is a system designed to produce industrial workers.
Let's look back at the history of public education in the United States. You have to go back a little over a century. For many years, there was a debate about whether we should even have public education. Some parents wanted kids to go to school and get an education; others said, "We can't afford that. We need them to work. They have to work in the field, because otherwise we starve." There was a big debate. Late in the 1800s, during the Industrial Revolution, business leaders began complaining about all these rural kids who were pouring into the cities and going to work in our factories. Business leaders said that these kids were no good, and that what they needed was an educational system that would produce "industrial discipline."
....It's open twenty-four hours a day. Different kids arrive at different times. They don't all come at the same time, like an army. They don't just ring the bells at the same time. They're different kids. They have different potentials. Now, in practice, we're not going to be able to get down to the micro level with all of this, I grant you, but in fact, I would be running a twentyfour- hour school, I would have nonteachers working with teachers in that school, I would have the kids coming and going at different times that make sense for them.
The schools of today are essentially custodial: They're taking care of kids in work hours that are essentially nine to five -- when the whole society was assumed to work. Clearly, that's changing in our society. So should the timing. We're individualizing time; we're personalizing time. We're not having everyone arrive at the same time, leave at the same time. Why should kids arrive at the same time and leave at the same time? "
I have written posts along these lines previously and agree with Toffler that the public school system needs a paradigm shift if it is to be relevant and useful to children who will be working in the last decades of the 21st century. It may be that in shifting to Philip Bobbitt's " market state", public education authorities will become a dispenser of funds and an accreditor of quality, certifying that children are being well-educated but that the particulars of education decisions will be left to parents, students and a diverse array of providers.
Labels: education, edutopia, futurism, public school, toffler
¶ 6:55 PM 3 comments
