Last updated: December 21, 2004

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BOOK OF PROBLEMS

Presidential Workshops and Interactive Discussion Sessions
at the
International Conferences
of the
Association for Educational Communications and Technology
Dallas, Texas, November 12-16, 2002, and
Anaheim, California, October 22-25, 2003

 

 

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INTRODUCTION

 

In re mathematica ars proponendi quaestionem pluris facienda est quam solvendi.

The above motto, on the front page of Georg Cantor's thesis, is cited in Stanislav Ulam's (1991) autobiography "Adventures of a Mathematician." Cantor's affirmation that "in mathematics the art of asking questions is more commonly applied than that of solving problems" is more than a statement of fact. For someone who, like Cantor, the creator of Set Theory and discoverer of transfinite numbers, can look at mathematics as a tremendous accomplishment of the human mind, the same statement also becomes an article of faith. To advance in any science, the most important thing is to be able to ask questions: to ask the right questions and to ask them the right way. In other words, knowing to formulate what one does not know is a fundamental step in the advancement of knowledge.

Despite appearances to the contrary, we still know very little about human learning. Many respected educational researchers may not agree with this statement and claim that, thanks to their work and that of their colleagues, we have a good handle on the issue of learning, particularly, that we are pretty well able to create in a deliberate fashion the conditions necessary for desired learning outcomes. They are right only to an extent, namely as long as one defines learning as the consequence of instruction; they are wrong if one is willing to look at learning as something more broadly defined.

The description below aims at providing further insight into the problem and makes suggestions for addressing it through the creation of a Web-based "Book of Problems." It is the text of a proposal to the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) to launch the creation of the Book of Problems initiative at the International Conference of the AECT to be held in Dallas, Texas, November 12-16, 2002, through a closed workshop for invited researchers, thinkers and practitioners followed by a public interactive discussion session. The AECT leadership has accepted the proposal and granted Presidential Status to both the workshop and the discussion session.

 

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ABSTRACT

THE BOOK OF PROBLEMS (or what we don't know about learning)

Proposal for a Workshop with Interactive Discussion Session
for the International Conference of the
Association for Educational Communications and Technology
Dallas, TX, November 12-16, 2002

Rationale

The problem addressed in the proposed workshop cum interactive discussion session is the state of knowledge about human learning. The underlying rationale is that we know very little about human learning and that, by clarifying what we do not know, carefully recording and annotating unsolved problems, it should be possible to inspire entirely new areas and new kinds of research into human learning.

The above assertion concerning the state of knowledge about human learning must be qualified with reference to how learning is defined. Most people don't define learning explicitly. However, even if they don't define it explicitly, it can easily be derived from their writings that their implicit definitions of learning are limited to what happens in a purposefully structured learning environment in which desired attitudinal or competence goals are to be achieved along the lines of well-designed processes. Such settings are the ones in which most of the existing research practice is rooted. Basically, therefore, what we learn from educational research is that "well-designed instruction works," each specific study adding to our knowledge of what "well-designed" means and the term "instruction" referring to processes ranging from highly directive ones that make people learn in prescribed ways to the more imaginatively designed environments that allow people to find their own ways to specifically defined learning goals. There is little research about learning that takes place beyond the instructional context, such as incidental learning, or about how attention to the conditions of learning in multiple settings (instructional as well as non-instructional ones) may mutually reinforce the depth of our learning. We often shy away from messy situations.

The past decade has seen an emerging interest in broadening the way we look at learning to beyond the instructional context per se. According to De Vaney and Butler (1996), past definitions of learning have long remained under the spell of Hilgard's (1948) definition, which states that "learning is the process by which activity originates or is changed through training procedures…as distinguished from changes by factors not attributable to training" (p. 4). Only quite recently, this close linkage between instruction and learning has started to disappear. Driscoll (2000), for instance, analyzes the definitional assumptions shared by current learning theories. She notes that, in order "to be considered learning, a change in performance or performance potential must come about as a result of the learner's experience and interaction with the world" (p. 11; emphasis added). Tessmer and Richey (1997) argue for broadening the instructional design concerns to beyond the instructional context as such and to recognize "context" as an important factor in the design of instruction. Shotter (e.g. 1997) emphasizes the dialogic nature of learning, as do Savery and Duffy (1995) with particular reference to constructivist learning environments. John-Steiner (2000) elevates the idea of dialogue to the level of creative collaboration. Building on these different definitional developments, J. Visser (2001) proposes, while attempting to bring the various pieces together, a definition that looks at learning as a disposition to dialogue rather than as the collection of mental processes that result from such a disposition. Visser's definition furthermore recognizes the ecological integration of diverse levels of organizational complexity at which the dialogue takes place, involving, in addition to individuals, social entities of varying dimension. It also sees as the ultimate purpose of the dialogue the ability to interact constructively with change, rather than the mere acquisition of particular behaviors necessary for such interaction. Recently, Educational Technology magazine dedicated an entire special issue (Y. L. Visser, Rowland & J. Visser, 2002) to the issue of broadening the definition of learning and the implications this would have for educators and educational technologists.

Looking at human learning from the perspective of the above mentioned emerging shift in definitional assumptions provides a clear sense of the growing awareness of how much more complex the world of learning is than we ever thought. Consequently, it also heightens our consciousness of how little we actually know about that complex phenomenon. Confronted by this enhanced awareness of the limitations of our knowledge, it is worth looking at the history of science and ask ourselves if anything can be learned from what we know about the ways in which human knowledge developed, going from crisis to crisis.

Progress in several fields of intellectual endeavor has greatly benefited from open dialogue among scientists who were concerned with what they did not know, rather than with what they already knew. A clear example can be found in the history of how our understanding of the fundamental structure of matter and energy advanced throughout the twentieth century, particularly during the first half of it, thanks to the willingness and audacity of the scientists involved to keep challenging each other at the frontier of what was known, i.e. looking out over the vast unknown (e.g. Pais, 1991).

Another interesting example, which inspires the current proposal, can be drawn from the history of mathematics in the first half of the 20th century. The Polish school of mathematicians, who used to gather in the cafés and tearooms in such places as Lwów, developed a book in which they inscribed - and annotated - the great unsolved problems of their discipline. The book was kept in the Scottish Café in Lwów (whence its name: The Scottish Book) and handed by a waiter to the mathematicians in attendance when they so wanted. Miraculously, this fascinating notebook, the collaborative conscience of the mathematicians of the time regarding what they did not know, escaped the devastation of World War II and its aftermath and eventually got published. While it was kept, it used to help challenge those who wanted to be challenged to try and solve these problems. (The story of the Scottish Book can be found in Ulam [1991]. The print edition of the Book is hard to come by. A version of it, which was edited and translated by Ulam, was published in 1957 in Los Alamos, NM, by the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. An excerpt of the Book can be found at http://www.icm.edu.pl/home/delta/delta2/dlt0209.html.)

It is contended that in the sciences of learning we have reached a breakthrough stage that calls for a similar honest reflection among scientists on what they do not know as a means to move forward. Consequently, it is appropriate for those scientists who have an interest in broadening and deepening the meaning of learning to do what the earlier referred Polish mathematicians did: keep a book of what they don't yet know - not the nitty-gritty of it, but the really important problems - and use it as a source of inspiration for them and others to advance. While it would be attractive to use coffee and tea houses as gathering places for the discussion of such matters, it is now more appropriate to make this a Web-enabled effort as far as recording and annotating of the problems is concerned. The actual gatherings that contribute to filling the book progressively may well be linked to events such as the annual meetings of AECT and other professional organizations where scientists pertaining to the multiple disciplines relating to the transdisciplinary fied of the sciences of learning come together anyway in a more or less frequent fashion. Such gatherings can be complemented by various modes of electronic interaction in between of face-to-face events. The current proposal thus aims at starting the effort off on the occasion of the International Conference of the AECT in November 2002 in Dallas, Texas.

Nature of the proposed activity

The proposed activity will bring together selectively invited prominent researchers and thinkers to discuss ways of broadening research agendas in the area of research on human learning. It is proposed that the group of invitees first meet in a workshop-style conducted private session in the framework of the AECT International Conference. This proposed private workshop-type session will be followed by a two-hour session open to the conference attendees consisting of two parts: (1) presentation by the invitees of the results of their private meeting and (2) a discussion, involving invitees and attendees together, of the problems under consideration. This latter interactive session will particularly aim at critically appraising the work of the invitees and providing an opportunity for others to start contributing to the process envisioned by the Book of Problems. There will be no paper presentations in the traditional sense of the word. Rather, in the running up to the session, a concept paper will be prepared by the chair and circulated among the group of invited scientists with the aim of enhancing the document. While the process will start off with a particular number of invited scientists, it is expected and will be encouraged that the initial group will identify others who should be expected to make useful contributions to the Book of Problems. The enhanced version of the concept paper, which will increasingly reflect the views of a growing number of scientists, will guide the discussions during both the private session and the interactive discussion session. In addition to being made available to the invitees and attendees of the proposed sessions, the concept paper will also be available via the World Wide Web.

Purpose of the session

The workshop cum interactive discussion session, both through the process of its preparation and implementation, has the following objectives:

Panelists

Chair/organizer of the activity is Jan Visser, President, Learning Development Institute (LDI) and Principal Investigator of LDI's Meaning of Learning (MOL) project. For the purpose of organizing the session and its follow-up, he will be assisted by Yusra Laila Visser, Researcher at Florida State University and co-investigator of LDI's MOL project and David L. Solomon, Research Fellow with LDI as well as Vice President, Creative Director at BBDO Detroit. They will also themselves contribute to the process envisioned by the Book of Problems.

The following scholars, listed alphabetically, have at an earlier stage, independently of the idea to start this off at the 2002 AECT International Conference, been appoached and expressed interest in and commitment to being part of the effort to write the Book of Problems:
Carl Bereiter (University of Toronto)
Ron Burnett (Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design)
Marcy Driscoll (Florida State University)
Vera John-Steiner (University of New Mexico)
David Jonassen (University of Missouri)
Basarab Nicolescu (International Center for Transdisciplinary Studies and Research & Université Paris VI)
Divid Perkins (Harvard University)
Rita Richey (Wayne State University)
Gavriel Salomon (University of Haifa)
Marlene Scardamalia (University of Toronto)

Other researchers will be contacted after AECT will have agreed to run the activity in the framework of the 2002 International Conference in Dallas and will have granted Presidential status to it.

Procedures for the interactive discussion session

While procedures for the private workshop session, including the determination of how much time should be allocated to it, will be worked out in consultation with the prospective participants, it seems fair at this stage to describe how the interactive discussion session, which involves the participation of regular conference attendees, is foreseen to be conducted.

As mentioned, there will be no paper presentations during the proposed session. An expectedly large proportion of the participants will come well prepared for the debate. They include researchers alerted to the opportunity by the organizers and the team of invited scientists who have already joined the initiative. In addition, other interested researchers will themselves take the initiative to contact the organizers on the basis of information available in the program and on the Web pages of the AECT 2002 International Conference or on the Web site of the Learning Development Institute. Participants who "discover" the session only while in Dallas will be somewhat less prepared, but everything possible will be done to make their participation as effective as possible for the stated purposes of the session and as beneficial as possible for themselves. This may require a very brief summary of issues at the outset of the interactive session.

The value of the session lies in the energetic participation of all its participants in the debate. The chair will apply his considerable experience in conducting such sessions in ways that create maximum involvement of the participants. Depending on the size of the audience, part of the debate during the proposed two-hour session may be conducted in small groups so as to raise the level of creative engagement. In line with the set purpose for panel discussions, emphasis will be on the ad hoc interchange, recognizing the value of both divergence and convergence of positions in clarifying the issues concerned. To allow this ad hoc interchange to develop effectively, a fair level of improvisation will characterize the procedures of this session.

Long-term issue

It is expected that the community of scientists, whose initial establishment is aimed at through the proposed activity, while begun in the AECT context, will grow beyond that same context. The sciences of learning constitute a truly transdisciplinary field. The Learning Development Institute (http://www.learndev.org) and its partner, the International Center for Transdisciplinary Studies and Research (CIRET; http://perso.club-internet.fr/nicol/ciret/) will work together to achieve that aim. In doing so, opportunities will be sought to involve scientists active in different fields pertaining to the sciences of learning by proposing follow-up sessions to different other organized bodies of scientists, such as those active in the areas of mass communication, neuroscience, linguistics, and the development of scientific competence.

References

De Vaney, A. & Butler, R. P. (1996). Voices of the founders: Early discourses in educational technology. In D. H. Jonassen (Ed.), Handbook of research for educational communications and technology. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster Macmillan (p. 3-45).

Driscoll, M. P. (2000). Psychology of learning for instruction. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

Hilgard, E. R. (1948). Unconscious processes and man's rationality. Urbana, IL (as quoted in De Vaney & Butler, 1996).

John-Steiner, V. (2000). Creative collaboration. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Pais, A. (1991). Niels Bohr's times: in physics, philosophy, and polity. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Savery, J. R., and Duffy, T. M. (1995). Problem based learning: An instructional model and its constructivist framework. Educational Technology, 35(5), 31-38.

Shotter, J. (1997). The social construction of our 'inner' lives. Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 10, 7-24.

Tessmer, M. & Richey, R. C. (1997). The role of context in learning and instructional design. Educational Technology Research and Development 45(2), 85-115.

Ulam, S. M. (1991). Adventures of a mathematician. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Visser, J. (2001). Integrity, completeness and comprehensiveness of the learning environment: Meeting the basic learning needs of all throughout life. In D. N. Aspin, J. D. Chapman, M. J. Hatton and Y. Sawano (Eds), International Handbook of Lifelong Learning. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Visser, Y. L., Rowland, G, & Visser, J. (Eds.) (2002). Special issue on broadening the definition of learning. Educational Technology, 42(2) - entire issue.

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THE "BOOK OF PROBLEMS" COMMUNITY OF SCHOLARS

Overview of members of the Book of Problems (BOP) community of scholars alphabetically listed by last name as of September 24, 2002. Members whose names are preceded by a red bar will be present in Dallas; those whose names are preceded by a green bar will interact with the participants of the Dallas workshop by teleconferencing. All other members, whose names are preceded by a yellow bar, contribute to the initiative in writing and possibly through alternative mechanisms of scientific exchange that may, in time, be decided upon. As the initiative progresses, the above list is expected to grow as more individuals are being approached.The column with biographical notes is continually under construction.

New names are being added as the community grows. Those whose names are preceded by a blue bar joined the community on the occasion of the Anaheim, CA, workshop and Special Panel Session (see below) at AECT 2003.

   Name  Affiliation  Biographical notes
 
John Bransford
Vanderbilt University John D. Bransford is Centennial Professor of Psychology and Education and Co-Director of the Learning Technology Center at Vanderbilt University. He is an internationally renowned scholar in the areas of cognition and technology. His collaborative involvement over several decades in research on human learning, memory and problem solving has helped shape the "cognitive revolution" in psychology. While developing the Learning Technology Center at Vanderbilt, John, who is an award winning author and developer, and his colleagues have contributed decisively to the thoughtful use of technology for the development and improvement of school-based learning through such programs as the Jasper Woodbury Problem Solving Series in Mathematics, The Scientists in Action Series, and the Little Planet Literacy Series, which are being used around the world. Closer to home they are involved, among other efforts, in a "Great Beginnings" project in Nashville that links homes, schools and members of the broader community through innovative uses of technology. John plays a prominent role in synthesizing findings from multiple areas of research to create a "user friendly" theory of human learning.
 
Ron Burnett
Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design Ron Burnett is a Canadian communications scholar and social/cultural critic. He has a particular interest in popular culture, hypermedia, and postmodern media communities. He is the author of Cultures of Vision: Images, Media and the Imaginary, and the forthcoming How images think, as well as founder and editor of Ciné-Tracts Magazine (1976-1983). He is President of the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Prior to that he was Director and Associate Professor of Communications and Cultural Studies in the Graduate Program in Communications at McGill University in Montreal, Québec, Canada.
 
David Cavallo
MIT Media Lab David Cavallo is Principal Investigator of the Future of Learning Group at the Media Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. David's work is particularly motivated by the concern that the latent learning potential of the world population has been grossly underestimated as a result of prevailing mindsets that limit the design of interventions to improve the evolution of the global learning environment.
 
Marcy Driscoll
Florida State University Marcy Driscoll is Program Leader and Professor of Instructional Systems and Learning Psychology in the Instructional Systems Program of the Department of Educational Research at Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida. She is the author of multiple textbooks, among which the award winning Psychology of learning for instruction and, together with Robert Gagné, Essentials of learning for instruction, as well as numerous other publications. Marcy has a wide array of editorial responsibilities. She held and holds important leadership positions in the professional communities pertaining to her areas of interest and research.
 
Alison Gopnik
University of California at Berkeley Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley. Her research focuses on early human development. She is specifically interested in questions regarding how children come to understand the world around them and what their "theories of mind" are, particularly in terms of children's early understanding of visual perception and desire as well as their understanding of causality and their explanations of events. She is also interested in the interactions between children's language and their cognitive development. Alison is widely known for such books as Words, Thoughts, and Theories, which she wrote with Andrew Meltzoff, and The Scientist in the Crib: Minds, Brains, and How Children Learn, which she coauthored with Patricia Kuhl and Andrew Meltzoff. The investigations reflected on in these books are informed by "the theory theory", the idea that children understand the world by using strategies that are similar to and perhaps even identical with processes of theory change in science.
 
Susan Greenfield
University of Oxford Baroness Susan A Greenfield, CBE, is a neuroscientist whose multidisciplinary research focuses on neuronal mechanisms in the brain that are common to regions affected in both Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. She is particularly interested in strategies to arrest neuronal death in these disorders. A Professor of Pharmacology at Oxford University and Professor of Physics at Gresham College, as well as Fellow of Lincoln College, Susan is widely known, both in the UK and beyond, for her public lecturing, including via the BBC. She is the first female director of the Royal Institution, established in 1799 to "diffuse science for common purposes of life." Among her many publications are the best-selling The human brain: A guided tour as well as Journey to the centers of the mind: Toward a science of consciousness and The private life of the brain: Emotions, consciousness and the secret of the self.
 
Vera John-Steiner
University of New Mexico Vera John-Steiner is a social and developmental psychologist with a particular interest in the role of language in learning, collaborative cognition and complex collaboration. She wrote, among other books Notebooks of the mind, which won several awards, and Creative collaboration. Vera is Presidential Professor in Linguistics & Educational Psychology, & Language, Literacy, & Sociocultural Studies at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM.
 
David Jonassen
University of Missouri David Jonassen has taught and pursued his research goals around the world at different universities in the USA as well as in the Netherlands, France, Norway, Australia, Austria, Germany, Malaysia, Poland, Scotland, Singapore, Taiwan, and soon Korea. His background is in educational media and experimental educational psychology. David, who is considered among the top scholars in the world in the field of instructional design and technology, is the author or coordinating editor of a great many books and has written numerous articles, chapters, and reports on text design, task analysis, instructional design, computer-based learning, hypermedia, individual differences and learning, and technology in learning. His current research focuses on cognitive tools for learning, knowledge representation, computer-supported collaborative argumentation, cognitive task analysis, and especially problem solving. He has received numerous honors for excellence in both research and writing.
 
Steve Lansing
University of Arizona J. Stephen Lansing is an ecological anthropologist, well known for his research on the emergence of cooperation within and among groups of humans who collaboratively interact with the same key environmental conditions, such as the rice farmers in Balinese watersheds. Within the context of the above research interest, Steve has been actively and successfully involved in the development of adaptive agent simulation models that can predict the emergence of cooperation at multiple hierarchical levels as a function of human-environmental interactions. He is the author of a variety of books. Priests and Programmers: Technologies of Power in the Engineered Landscape of Bali is probably the best known among those books.
 
Leon Lederman
Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy Leon M. Lederman is an experimental physicist who received the 1988 Nobel Prize for his part in developing the neutrino beam method and the demonstration of the doublet structure of the leptons through the discovery of the muon neutrino. Since retiring from his function as Director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, he has dedicated his efforts to helping others to discover the beauty of the world through science. Thus he helped organize a Teachers' Academy for Mathematics and Science, designed to retrain 20 000 primary school teachers in the Chicago Public Schools in the art of teaching science and mathematics. In addition, he has been involved with science education for gifted children and with public understanding of science. He helped to found the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, a three year residential public school for gifted children in the State of Illinois. He also founded ARISE, a program to modernize the teaching of science in high schools.
 
Federico Mayor
Culture of Peace Foundation & Universidad Autónoma de Madrid Federico Mayor Zaragosa is a biochemist of renown, whose publications focus, among other areas, on the metabolism of the brain and the biochemical processes and pathology of the newly born. He founded and directed the Centro de Biología Molecular Severo Ochoa at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Federico is also a poet, a thinker and one of the great humanists of our time. He served as Director-General of UNESCO from 1987 to 1999. Much of his attention during that period was directed at leading the Organization back to its original roots, namely its role in fomenting a culture of peace, promoting tolerance and understanding among the peoples. As part of this objective he took great care to advance human learning in its rich variety of appearances among all members of planetary society. Following an effective two mandates at the helm of UNESCO, he subsequently founded and presides over the Fundación Cultura de Paz, headquartered in Madrid, Spain.
 
Basarab Nicolescu
Centre International de Recherches et d'Études Transdisciplinaires & Université de Paris VI Basarab Nicolescu is a widely published theoretical physicist who works with the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique at the University of Paris VI, France. He is also Founding President of the International Centre for Transdisciplinary Research and Studies in Paris and Member of the Romanian Academy. He is winner of the Silver Medal of the French Academy for one of his many books and of the Benjamin Franklin Award for Best History Book for another book. His authoring activities range from poetry, via philosophy, ethics, consciousness and spirituality, to such down-to-earth things as Hadron scattering or the Odderon intercept in perturbative QCD.
 
Seymour Papert
MIT Media Lab Seymour Papert is a South Africa born mathemetician and an early artificial intelligence pioneer with a history of active participation in the movement to abolish apartheid in his native country. He engaged in mathematical research during the 1950s at the University of Cambridge before joining Jean Piaget at the University of Geneva with whom he worked for five years until 1963. The latter collaboration prompted his interest in using mathematics as a way to understand how children learn and think. Seymour is probably best known around the world - through projects he carried out in all continents and via his work, which has been widely translated - for his pioneering ideas about children's use of computers as a means to foster learning, thinking and creativity. Among his best known works are Mindstorms: Children, computers and powerful ideas (1980) and The children's machine: Rethinking school in the age of the computer (1992). In the early 1960's he founded, together with Marvin Minsky, the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT. He is also a founding faculty member of the MIT Media Lab and inventor of the Logo programming language, putting children in control of computater technology. Living in Maine, he spends part of his time working in the Maine Youth Center in Portland, the state's facility for teenagers convicted of serious offenses.
 
David Perkins
Harvard University David Perkins originates from the fields of mathematics and artificial intelligence, in which he obtained his Ph.D. at MIT. He is a founding member of the well-known Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, a project which he co-directed for more than 25 years. Project Zero initially focused on the psychology and philosophy of education in the arts, but later broadened its perspective to encompass cognitive development and cognitive skills in both humanistic and scientific domains. Singling out any of the multiple books David has written would probably do a disservice to seeing the broadness of his interest in the human mind.
 
Nick Rawlins
University of Oxford Nicholas Rawlins is a psychologist at the Experimental Psychology Department of the University of Oxford, UK, where he is a Fellow of University College and Professor of Behavioral Neuroscience. His research focuses on animal learning and memory, brain mechanisms of memory storage, animal models of psychosis, attentional deficits in schizophrenia, and FMRI studies of pain in humans.
 
Rita Richey
Wayne State University Rita C. Richey is Professor and Program Coordinator in Instructional Technology for the College of Education at Wayne State University. She has a background in English, psychology and instructional technology and has won many awards, both for her outstanding performance as a teacher at Wayne State, such as the 1997 Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award and the 1985 President's Award for Excellence in Teaching, and for the quality of the books she produces, including the 1995 Outstanding Book in Instructional Development award of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology. Rita's research focuses on Instructional Design Effectiveness and Instructional Design Processes; Transfer of Training and Organizational Performance Improvement; and Competency Modelling.
 
Gavriel Salomon
University of Haifa Gavriel Salomon is professor of educational psychology and past dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Haifa, Israel, where he is also co-director of the Center for Research on Peace Education. Gabi is well known for his work on a broad range of topics at the interface of educational psychology and communication, including the cognitive effects of media's symbol systems; the expenditure of mental effort; mindfulness and mindlessness; organizational change; the design of intelligent computer tools; the design and systemic study of technology-afforded learning environments; and - more recently - research on peace education. He has an extensive publication record in all of the above areas, his most recent book being Peace education: The concept, principles, and practices around the world. Gabi is the recipient of various awards, including the Israel National Award for life long achievements in educational research (2001).
 
David Scott
University of Massachusetts at Amherst David K. Scott owes his motivation to having been born and grown up on the northernmost of the Orkney Islands in Scotland. The setting exposed him at an early age to the forces of nature which led to his interest in physics. The commitment of his family and community to helping him attend boarding school from the age of ten and to further pursue his academic interests has been a shaping force in his concern for the "democractization of privilege." David has a distinguished career both as a nuclear scientist and as an administrator, having served most recently as Chancellor of the Amherst campus of the University of Massachusetts from 1993 to 2001. He advocates and has developed policies for an integrative university in which transdisciplinary research and holistic learning communities overcome the fragmentation of knowledge and incite the development of wise human beings motivated to create a better world.
 
Jan Servaes
Katholieke Universiteit Brussel Jan Servaes is Dean of the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences as well as Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication at the Katholieke Universiteit Brussel in Belgium. He is director of the Research and Documentation Centre 'Communication for Social Change' (CSC), and Coordinator of the European Consortium for Communications Research (ECCR). In addition to Belgium (Antwerp and Brussels), he has taught International Communication and Development Communication in the USA (Cornell), The Netherlands (Nijmegen), and Thailand (Thammasat, Bangkok). He is also President of the International Association of Media and Communication Research (IAMCR), in charge of academic publications and research. He has undertaken research, development, and advisory work around the world and is widely known as the author of journal articles and books on such topics as international and development communication; media policies; social change; and human rights and conflict management.
 
John Shotter
University of New Hampshire John Shotter is a professor of interpersonal relations in the Department of Communication, University of New Hampshire. Author of such early (1975) works as Images of Man in Psychological Research and more recent (1993) ones such as Cultural Politics of Everyday Life: Social Constructionism, Rhetoric, and Knowing of the Third Kind and Conversational Realities: the Construction of Life through Language, he has a long standing interest in the social conditions conducive to people having a voice in the development of participatory democracies and civil societies. In recent times, John has begun to look beyond current versions of Social Constructionism, toward the surrounding circumstances that make such a movement possible. In this context, the move first to a focus on joint action, then to dialogically-structured or 'chiasmically organized' (Merleau-Ponty, 1968) activities, is a central part of his interest in participatory modes of life and inquiry.
 
David Solomon
BBDO Detroit &
Learning Development Institute
David L. Solomon is Vice President, Creative Director in Training Operations at BBDO Detroit, the agency of record for DaimlerChrysler Corporation. He has more than 14 years experience designing, developing and implementing learning and performance improvement solutions for multinational and privately held businesses. David has held faculty/adjunct faculty positions in the Instructional Technology program at Wayne State University; the Human Resource Development department at Oakland University; and the communications department at Walsh College. David's research has explored the various ways in which philosophy shapes instructional design practice, including an investigation of perspectives, foundations, and elements of post-modernism in theory and practice. He joined the Learning Development Institute in 2000 as a Research Fellow on the Meaning of Learning (MOL) project.
 
Michael Spector
Syracuse University Michael Spector is a philosopher by original background and is currently Professor and Chair, Instructional Design, Development and Evaluation at Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York, USA. He is also a visiting Professor of Information Science at the University of Bergen, Norway and a member of the International Board of Standards for Training, Performance and Instruction. In addition, he is active in the context of numerous professional organizations in the area of education, computing and artificial intelligence. Mike's research and development interests cover such fields as intelligent performance support for instructional design; acquisition of complex cognitive skills; and the design of system dynamics based learning environments. He also teaches graduate seminars on topics related to the planning and implementation of learning environments and instructional computing systems.
 
 James C. Spohrer
IBM Almaden Research Center Jim Spohrer is a senior manager at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California. He is also a core team member of the Educational Object Economy (EOE) foundation, which he helped start while a Distinguished Scientist in Apple's Learning Communities Group. At IBM Jim focuses on next generation user experience. In the EOE context his long-term goal is to create virtual learning community that goes critical as it grows in members and member generated open source assets, operating under an intellectual capital appreciation license (like a software bank,. borrow code, and repay in interest that is code enhancements or other useful meta-content). Jim's research interests revolve around understanding learning platforms and learning communities. He is especially interested in pedagogy, production and proliferation aspects of engaging, effective, and economically viable learning environments. Jim received his Computer Science Ph.D.from Yale in 1989 and his Physics B.S. from MIT in 1978. In 1989, Jim was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Rome La Sapienza in Italy.
 
John Stein
University of Oxford John Stein is a physiologist at the University Laboratory of Physiology of the University of Oxford, UK, where he is a Fellow of Magdalen College and Professor of Physiology. His research focuses on auditory and visual perceptual impairments suffered by dyslexic children as well as on the role of the posterior parietal cortex, basal ganglia and cerebellum in the control of movement. As an outgrowth of his interest in the physiology of learning to read and dyslexia, John is setting up a study of the strengths of dyslexics that may predispose them to be artists,elite IT and other entrepreneurs. He is also involved in an attempt to design tests of deep learning styles for detecting unusual talent in the inadequately taught.
 
Robert Sternberg
Yale University Robert Sternberg owes his childhood interest in psychology to his very poor performance on IQ tests. He credits his extraordinary academic and professional career in later years to the exceptional role of mentors in his life. Bob is now the IBM Professor of Psychology and Education at the Department of Psychology, Yale University. He is well-known for his work in the fields of intelligence, wisdom, and creativity, and has published some 900 books and articles in these fields. He graduated Summa Cum Laude Phi Beta Kappa from Yale and subsequently received his Ph.D. from Stanford. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Association (of which he is currently President-Elect and will become President on January 1, 2003), and the American Psychological Society. He has won four awards from the American Educational Research Association, as well as numerous awards from other organizations. Bob's research focuses on higher mental functions; thinking styles; cognitive modifiability; leadership; and love and hate.
 
Jan Visser
Learning Development Institute Jan Visser is a theoretical physicist, turned educator, turned documentary filmmaker, turned instructional designer and researcher of human learning. He has a profound interest in the arts and is a practicing musician. As a physicist he dedicated himself to exploring the quantum mechanical aspects of molecular biological structures; as a documentary filmmaker his interest was drawn to the role of imagination in children's (and adults') coming to grips with the seemingly unalterable facts of life; as a science educator he explored developing the scientific mind through the understanding of the historical and epistemological development of science as well as the experiential involvement with natural phenomena; as an instructional designer he dedicated himself to the exploration and management within the learning environment of affective conditions, whereas as a learning scientist his attention goes to human learning as a complex adaptive phenomenon. Jan is president of the Learning Development Institute and former UNESCO Director for Learning Without Frontiers. He has lived and worked around the world, including a residence of some 20 years in Africa.
 
Muriel Visser
Learning Development Institute & Florida State University Muriel Visser has an academic background in rural sociology (Wageningen University, Netherlands), distance education (University of London and Educational Extension College, Cambridge, UK), and mass communication (Florida State University). Her professional experience has focused on the design and management of international development projects, particularly in Africa. Muriel's current research interests focus on human learning and behavioral change as it relates to living with and in the presence of HIV and AIDS. In the context of her research she is also asking herself questions regarding research methodological issues (particularly how we best get to know what we want to know in non-traditional research settings).
 
Yusra Laila Visser
Learning Development Institute & Florida State University Yusra Visser spent the first 18 years of her life in southeast Africa, learning much from growing up amidst the wonders and the difficulties of postcolonial states, witnessing both the splendor of the diversity of lifestyles and cultures in those regions and the ravaging effects of war, poverty, and disease. While as a teenager at the Waterford-Kamhlaba United World College in Mbabane, Swaziland, she learned about the values of a solid education as well as the importance of political action and consciousness, about social service, and about the use of systematic inquiry for interpreting the attributes of the surrounding world. Those early experiences set the stage for some of her later choices, such as her specialization in Africa Studies and Political Economy while doing her undergraduate work at American University in Washington, DC, and her later focus on problem based learning for her graduate work at Florida State University. Yusra in Principal Investigator for the development of the Problem-Oriented Learning focus area at the Learning Development Institute as well as a researcher active in LDI's the Meaning of Learning (MOL) and The Scientific Mind (TSM) focus areas.
 
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INPUTS INTO A COLLABORATIVE DIALOGUE

In preparation of the Dallas workshop mentioned above, members of the BOP community have been requested to elucidate what, from their point of view, are the important questions to be addressed regarding what we do not know about learning. Following are the responses of the various contributors posted in the order in which final versions were received and preceded by a linked alphabetically organized list of the authors and titles.

 
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Joint action, and the chiasmic inter-relating of spontaneously responsive, bodily activities

John Shotter
Department of Communication
University of New Hampshire
Durham, NH 03824-3586

Let me begin with a quotation from Vygotsky (1986): "The general law of development says that awareness and deliberate control appear only during a very advanced stage in the development of a mental function, after it has been used and practiced unconsciously and spontaneously. In order to subject a function to intellectual and volitional control, we must first possess it" (p. 168).

As I see it, the main unsolved problem in learning and teaching is the spontaneous, expressive responsiveness of our bodies to events that matter to us in our surroundings - to those events that, as Bateson (1972) so famously put it, are a difference "that makes a difference [to us]" (p.286).

I want to emphasize the importance of our spontanous, bodily responsiveness, because I want to draw attention to how the chiasmic (i) or dialogical-intertwining of influences from two or more distinct sources of embodied living activity makes possible a special kind of first-time creativity, the creation of new forms of living activity, not possible in any other way. Only in this way is it possible to develop a way of acting in response to, or in relation to, the unique character of our current surroundings, to develop a practical way of "going on," in Wittgenstein's (1953) terms, in relation to the concrete world around us (Shotter, in press).

In referring to a "first-time" creativity, I have in mind a phrase of Garfinkel's (1967). In his discussion of a community's shared "accounting practices (ii)," he remarks that by their use, a member of a community "makes familiar, commonplace activities of everyday life recognizable as familiar," and that, on each new occasion, it is done for yet "'another first time'" (p. 9). This is because, as well as being known to us as the objects they are, we also require a shaped and vectored sense of their presence (see Shotter, in press again), i.e., how in their otherness they act as agencies in our lives inviting us to act toward them in some ways while discouraging us from acting toward them in others. Not only is this apparent to us in our physical movements - that those around us have a valency for us in that we must avoid them - but especially in our utterances. Indeed, as Bakhtin (1986) puts it: "...the word is expressive, but... this expression does not inhere in the word itself. It originates at the point of contact between the word and actual reality, under the conditions of that real situation articulated by the individual utterance. In this case the word appears as an expression of some evaluative position of an individual person..." (p.88, my emphasis).

This means that when someone acts, their activity cannot be accounted as wholly their own activity - for a person's acts are always partly 'shaped' by the acts of the others around them - and this is where all the strangeness of the dialogical begins (see Shotter, 1980, 1984, 1993a, 1993b). This kind of continuously occurring, first-time, unpredictable, and unanticipated but nonetheless (once it has occurred) intelligibly evaluative creativity, has not yet, I want to claim, been adequately appreciated and characterized in our social thought.

Indeed, the pervasive Cartesianism (Taylor, 1955) at work in our everyday accounting practices, has led us both to locate the sources for all our social activities as cognitions inside the heads of individuals (iii) and to characterize these sources in terms of rules, or laws, i.e., in terms of regularities and repetitions within single, systematic orders of connectedness!!! It has led us also, to ignore precisely those events which occur not only between people and which occur only once without repetition, but the importance also of all those complex events involving the chiasmic intertwining of influences from different multiple sources (Merleau-Ponty, 1968).

Why is such chiasmic intertwining of such importance? Both Merleau-Ponty (1962, 1968) (iv) and Bateson (1979) take binocular vision as a paradigm. Bateson, in his discussion of the question of "What bonus or increment of knowing follows from combining information from two or more sources?," notes that it takes the unmerged combining (v) of "at least two somethings to create a difference" (p.78 ). In particular, something special happens, he notes, in the optic chiasma (the crossing of the optic nerves from the two eyes in the hypothalamus of the brain): "the difference between the information provided by the one retina and that provided by the other" works to help the seer add "an extra dimension to seeing" (p.79), the dimension of depth. Instead of seeing things as just large or small, we see them as near or far.

But in considering seeing with two eyes, are we, perhaps, getting just a little ahead of ourselves, and moving to a higher level of complexity before considering seeing "something" with just one eye? Perhaps we should consider, first, what is involved, even with one eye, in scanning over a face and seeing it - with all its changing expressions - as the same face, only now as a smiling face, now as frowning, now as sad, as welcoming, as threatening, and so on? How do we join together all the different fragments collected at different moments into a coherent, unitary whole, into the "seeing" of a person's face? That seeing a person's face as a face - evaluating it as a face - is an achievement in which it is possible to fail, is shown by Sacks's (1985) Dr. P. Although he knew perfectly well what eyes, noses, chins, etc., were, he could not spontaneously recognize people's faces as such, and thus it was that he mistook his wife's face for his hat.

Thus, to understand what is possible for us within such dialogically-structured events, and only within such events, we must think of such relations in some radically new ways. Indeed, as we shall see, we must think of them in extra ordinary terms, in terms that can perhaps shock us into spontaneously responding to the events occurring around us in uniquely new, first-time ways.

What is at work here, as I see it, is the kind of understanding that Wittgenstein's (1953) characterized as that which "consists in 'seeing connections'" (no.122). It is a kind of understanding that we might call a "relationally-responsive" form of understanding, to contrast it with the "representational-referential" forms of understandings more familiar to us in our intellectual dealings with our surroundings.

But these relationally-responsive forms of understanding all entail our seeing connections and relations within a living whole, a whole constructed or created from many different fragmentary parts, all picked up in the course of one's continuous, living, responsive contact with a particular circumstance in question, whether it is a text, a person, a landscape, or whatever. So, perhaps we were not so ahead of ourselves in seeing the kind of chiasmatic interweaving that occurs in binocular vision, as paradigmatic of the creation of many further "relational dimensions" in other spheres of understanding. For, as Merleau-Ponty (1968) points out, this kind of chiasmatic interweaving seems to be involved in all our bodily understandings of our relations to our surroundings. "There is a double and a crossed situating of the visible in the tangible and of the tangible in the visible; the two maps are complete, and yet they do not merge into one" (p.134). Indeed, "my two hands touch the same things because they are the hands of one same body... [and] because there exists a very peculiar relation from one to the other, across corporeal space - like that holding between my two eyes - making my hands one sole organ of experience" (p.141).

These understandings - the creation of these relational dimensions - might range all the way from simply "seeing" a person's facial expression as a smile or their utterance as a question, to 'seeing' quite complex connections between people's behaviors in their lives - as, for instance, Margaret Schegel in E.M. Forster's Howard's End 'saw' connections between her forgiveness of Herbert Wilcox's sexual peccadillos and his lack of forgiveness of those of her sister. But all such understandings have their beginnings in those moments when something occurs which "moves" or "strikes" us, when an event makes a noticeable difference to us because it matters to us. "There is, it seems to us," remarks T.S. Eliot (1944), "at best, only a limited value/ in the knowledge derived from experience. The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,/ for the pattern is new in every moment/ and every moment is a new and shocking/ valuation of all we have been" (p.23).

In other words, for something to make a difference that matters to us, something must surprise us, be unanticipated, unexpected, fill us with wonder. But, as Fisher (1998) notes:

The experiential world within which wonder takes place cannot be made of unordered, singular patches of experience. We wonder at that which is a momentary surprise within a pattern that we feel confident we know. It is extra ordinary, the unexpected. For there to be anything that can be called "unexpected" there must first be the expected. In other words, years or even centuries of intellectual work must already have taken place in a certain direction before there can be a reality that is viewed as ordinary and expected" (p. 57, my emphasis).

In other words, taking into account both Eliot's and Fisher's comments, wonder occurs when something which we took to be not only complete but also finished in its growth or development, suddenly exhibits a yet further inner articulation. And it is when such an unexpected change as this occurs against the background of our orderly, everyday, shared understandings and accounting practices, that such events can 'strike us with wonder', can 'move' us, and can make a difference to us 'that makes a difference'. These are the moments when, as George Steiner (1989) puts it, "the 'otherness' [of the other]... enters us and makes us other" (p.188). It is our passion for wonder - a gift made available to us by our shared, chiasmically or dialogically-structured, accounting practices, by our shared expectation that the future will be an orderly continuation of the past - that distinguishes us from all other living animals.

The emphases here, then, on the importance of our body's expressive responsiveness to events occurring in our surroundings that make a difference to us, and the dialogically or chiasmically-structured nature of such momentary 'moving' events, suggests the following set of questions about the nature of learning:

Notes:

(i) In using the term chiasmic, I am following the lead of Merleau-Ponty (1968) who entitles chapter 4 - in his book The Visible and the Invisible - "The Intertwining - The Chiasm." I cannot pretend to say what "chiasmic or intertwined relations" in fact are. But what is clear, is that here is a sphere of living relations of a kind utterly different from any so far familiar to us (such as causal or logical relations) and taken by us as basic in our intellectual inquiries. All I can do here, is to begin their exploration.

(ii) As is well known, early work by Mills (1940), followed by Scott and Lyman (1968), directed attention toward the importance of all members of a speech community being trained into an extensive network of normative "background expectations." It is these anticipations that work to hold all the different actions within that community together as an intelligible whole. Members failing to satisfy such background expectations in their actions, will puzzle, bewilder, or disorient other members who will then question their conduct. An account is a linguistic device that prevents "conflicts from arising by verbally bridging the gap between action and expectation" (Scott & Lyman, 1968, p. 46).

(iii) Descartes (1986) discounted the spontaneously expressed 'intelligence' of our bodies entirely. As a result of his meditations, he claimed, that "I now know that even bodies are not strictly perceived by the senses or by the faculty of imagination but by the intellect alone, and that this perception derives not from their being touched or seen but from their being understood" (p.22).

(iv) Typical comments by Merleau-Ponty are as follows: "The unity of vision in binocular vision is not, therefore, the result of some third person process which eventually produces a single image through the fusion of two monocular images... it is not of the same order as they, but is incomparably more substantial... We pass from double vision to the single object, not through an inspection of the mind, but when the two eyes cease to function each one its own account and are used as a single organ by one single gaze. It is not the epistemological subject who brings about the synthesis, but the body..." (1962, p.232). And elsewhere: "The binocular perception is not made up of two monocular perceptions surmounted; it is of another order. The monocular images are not in the same sense that the things perceived with both eyes is... they are pre-things and it is the thing" (1968, p.7).

(v) I.e., not an averaging, or mixing, or fusing, or blending, but something emerges out of the relations occurring within their unmerged intertwining that is a new and unique living form with, so to speak, a 'life of its own', and furthermore, a life shaped by all the influences that went into its creation.

References:

Bakhtin, M.M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays. Trans. by Vern W. McGee. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Bateson, G. (1979). Mind in nature: A necessary unity. London: E.P. Dutton.

Descartes, R. (1986). Meditations on First Philosophy: with Selections from Objections and Replies. Translated by J.Cottingham, with an introduction by B. Williams. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Eliot, T.S. (1944). Four quartets. London: Faber and Faber.

Fisher, P. (1998). Wonder, the rainbow, and the aesthetics of rare experiences. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception (trans. C. Smith). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The visible and the invisible. Evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press.

Mills, C.W. (1940). Situated actions and vocabularies of motive. American Sociological Review, 5, 439-452.

Sacks, O. (1986). The man who mistook his wife for a hat. London: Duckworth.

Scott, M.D., & Lyman, S. (1968). Accounts. American Sociological Review, 33, 46-62.

Shotter, J. (1980). Action, joint action, and intentionality. M. Brenner (Ed.) The structure of action, (pp. 28-65). Oxford: Blackwell.

Shotter, J. (in press). "Real presences:" Meaning as living movement in a participatory world. Theory & Psychology.

Shotter, J. (1993). Cultural politics of everyday life: Social constructionism, rhetoric, and knowing of the third kind. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

Steiner, G. (1989). Real presences. Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press.

Taylor, C. (1991). The dialogical self. In Hiley, D.R., Bohman J.F. and Shusterman, R. (Eds.) The interpretative turn. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. pp.304-314.

Taylor, C. (1995). Philosophical arguments. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Vygotsky, L.S. (1986). Thought and Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical investigations. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Learning as systematic modification of shared experience

Vera John-Steiner
Presidential Professor of Linguistics and Education
University of New Mexico

At the most basic level, learning is the ability of humans to improve the conditions of our existence. This shared and distributed process implies both profound cognitive interdependence and individual capacities for growth and change. Starting with children's early dependence on their care-givers to the collaborative activities of knowledge construction, learning is a profoundly social activity. It takes place simultaneously between and within individuals. Even in solo endeavors like preparing this short paper I am engaged in dialogues with the organizer, the other contributors to the Book of Problems initiative, members of my cultural-historical (Vygotskian) community, and the texts and conversations that help me abandon traditional definitions of learning. These definitions invariably focus on the individual's acquisition of skills and information and on the individual brain/mind. An alternative definition may be as follows: that learning is a systematic modification of shared activities and practices as a consequence of previous experience on the part of communities and individuals. Or, put more broadly, human learning is a necessary aspect of human survival in coping with powerful natural, social, economic, political and technological challenges.

In our work in Native communities in the Southwest as well as with creative collaborators in the arts and sciences we have identified different types of learning.

A. Observational Learning.
Among the Hopi people planting corn is a difficult task of placing seeds carefully to be protected in an arid climate with little water. Young children observe their elders in this activity as well as in pottery and jewelry making. This form of observational learning is also common in apprenticeship situations as well as in scientific laboratories. Novices are part of the broader social practices of their communities and their growing knowledge becomes a resource for the group. (Lave, J. and Wenger, E. 1991).

B. Innovative/Exploratory Learning.
When confronted with unexpected challenges such as hurricanes, wildfires, 9/11 or AIDS human beings engage in new forms of problem solving. They draw upon the vast traditions of innovation where most inventors are anonymous. Exploration and a search for solutions start at a very young age. (See Gopnik et al, 1999) Data gathering and hypothesis testing is most fully documented in scientific work but it is a mode of learning that cuts across community, educational and family environments.

C. Institutional Teaching/Learning.
As Jan Visser wrote, most people see learning as "limited to what happens in a purposefully structured learning environment in which desired attitudinal or competence goals are to be achieved along the lines of well designed processes" (2002). The large majority of studies on learning focus on this restricted range of activities where the teaching process is primarily verbal or where children's activities are narrowly focused. In attempting to broaden our sense of learning we need to go beyond the confines of traditional classroom environments.

These three modes of learning form a dynamic functional system within a set of problems or within a particular context. The most important tests of learning are not those administered to frightened children but to whole societies whose ability to build on the consequences of their past experience will lead to innovative change. And, while individual learning is part of the process it is not limited to it. In summary, learning is not restricted to an individual trait but is a social activity. It is in building upon each others knowledge through dialogue, collaboration, and the effective use of humanly crafted artifacts that we develop resilient communities that can address the increasingly complex challenges of our times.

Based on the above considerations the question thus becomes: How would our understanding of learning be transformed if its purpose were joint discovery and shared knowledge rather than competition and achievement?

References

Gopnik, A., Meltzoff, A. N. & Kuhl, P. K. (1999). The scientist in the crib: Minds, brains, and how children learn. New York, NY: William Morrow and Company, Inc.

Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate periperal participation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Visser, J. (2002). The book of problems (or what we don't know about learning). Proposal for a Workshop with Interactive Discussion Session for the International Conference of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology, Dallas, TX, November 12-16, 2002 [Online]. Available http://www.learndev.org/BOP-AECT2002.html.

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The acquisition of values and dispositions: Are there lessons to be learned from socialization and acculturation?

Gavriel Salomon
University of Haifa, Israel
 

The truth is that we have quite a bit of expertise in the field of learning. But our expertise is limited to mainly scholarly learning, particularly the acquisition of facts, concepts, formulae and organized bodies of knowledge. This kind of expertise we have is badly limited in three respects: (a) We know how information is acquired but know far less about how it is being transformed by the solo learner and by a team of learners into meaningful knowledge. Only recently have we come to realize that information is not knowledge and that the acquisition of the former is hardly a necessary and surely not a sufficient condition for the latter. (b) We know even less about ways of turning knowledge into usable, rather than inert knowledge. (c) Most importantly, though, is the fact that we know how intellectual stuff is learned, but we know far less about acquiring human values and learning to live by them. There is expertise out there about the acquisition of values through authoritarian indoctrination, on the one hand, and on the effects of life-long socialization, on the other. However, the former counters our own democratic values while the latter is not in the hands of educators. So, no wonder that the domain of value education is not one in which we have enough expertise.

More specifically, I am concerned about two learning (inter)related issues of which we know very little. The first follows directly from the last point made above: What does it mean to acquire a stable, positive value disposition toward peace and peaceful ways of resolving painful conflicts? What does it mean to acknowledge the "contribution" of one's own party to the conflict in which it is involved? What does it mean in terms of one's sense of collectively-rooted identity? What does it mean in terms of adherence to one's own collective narrative? We seem to have some fair and empirically grounded approaches to attitude change. But is this all that constitutes the kind of value disposition alluded to here?

Related is the question of acquiring value dispositions - peacefulness, honesty, responsibility, social commitment - via teaching and coaching versus socialization and acculturation. This is one of the major questions about learning in general: How does the acquisition of knowledge, attitudes, skills or dispositions via deliberate teaching differ from their acquisition via subtler routes of slowly and gradually progressing socialization. The difference between the two is analogous to that between the slow drip effect whereby rocks become shaped by dripping water, versus the quick shot-in-the-arm effect caused by a deliberately applied instructional force. Smedslund's old research of the sixties on the acquisition of Piaget's concept of conservation showed that the "natural route" is far more resistant to misleading information than the instructional route. But there isn't much additional research to show what underlies the two routes more deeply.

The issue is of lesser concern when it comes to the acquisition of academic knowledge and skill, since these are more within the domain of instruction-based learning. Reading, geography and violin playing are among the disciplines the acquisition of which is a matter mainly of teaching and coaching. But what about values and dispositions? Are these learnable via direct instruction? Such acquisitions more likely belong to the domain of socialization. One acquires one's values mainly through the slow processes of socialization and acculturation. However, society cannot rely on this "natural route" of socialization for the acquisition of desired values such as commitment to a community. Thus, what we'd need to study is what makes socialization and acculturation so effective and how their "active ingredients" could be incorporated into instruction.

Reference:

Smesdlund, J. (1961). The acquisition of coservation of substance and weight in children III: Extinction of weight acquired "normally" and by means of empirical control on a balance scale. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 2, 85-87.

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Can we know too much?

Leon Lederman
Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy

Suppose, just suppose a serious scholar of learning poses a question to a man of science, one who has spent a lifetime in trying to understand the workings of the physical universe at its most fundamental level.

The scientist who also teaches his graduate students and learns from them (or so he thought) and he also, by preference, teaches undergraduates the various sub-disciplines of his science over the years and learns from that activity (or so he thought). Now he is faced with a new question, a question somewhat like the child who asks: "Mother, what is a "phase"?" "A phase," responds Mother, "is something you go through." "Ah!" says the child, "I am going through a phase!" (Mrs. Miniver) Learning? To a scientist, learning is "French" or "Algebra", i.e. a mastery of a new language or a method of solving quartic equations or how to use the fork and knife. (An Episcopalian's greatest learning transgression is when he uses the salad fork for the meat.) But then there is another kind of learning that, in my ignorance and naïveté, would seem to deserve a different word. From Howard Gardner and his colleagues (Gardner & Boix Mansilla, 1994, Winter), it is "learning for understanding." Here the test is more difficult: it is an interview, the giving of a colloquium, and the writing of a thesis. Rethinking this, I realize that the learning of a new language may indeed involve some of the most complex of brain functions but this I really don't know. I am not sure I want to know.

So, two types of learning, let's distinguish: learning, as in French-and learning, as in science. Both must be learned mostly in classrooms, but also in "life" e.g. the laboratory. The learning we are to discuss in Dallas is (is it?) largely in the classroom or classroom-like settings in which I include museums and even educational TV (an oxymoron?). It makes sense. I learned my science early on, in classes, supplemented by lectures, books, corridor and barroom conversations with peers. Then came ideas generated by puzzles presented by scientists working at the boundary of knowledge. Why can't we find a decay of the muon into a neutrino and a gamma? Is it forbidden? If so, what law of nature would be violated? Can it have been missed in the experimental searches?

What takes place is a mélange of creativity rising up out of the morass of one's knowledge and experience base. Also supposed is the profound and intense desire to know. This struggle for ideas is typical of science. One must organize what is known and what is assumed but not known. Were it not for misconceptions, science would find fewer puzzles and go faster. There is one other interesting factor in science knowing and learning. For certain types of minds, mostly in theoretical physics, too much knowing is a disadvantage, "intellectual baggage", which blocks access to fresh new insights. Wolfgang Pauli, at age 18, wrote a definitive and critical essay on general relativity-but at age 30, he wailed, "Ach, I know too much!"

But what is the connection to learning? I believe that one can structure learning processes that train the mind to make this clear separation between what we do know and understand and what we have casually included as knowledge but which is knowledge faux. In the misconceptions of younger children: light doesn't travel, it shines. Heat doesn't flow, it feels. Misconceptions abound.

It would seem as though the powerful combination of educational technologies and our increased knowledge of cognition science would have radically changed the classroom in our schools. But it has not and this is a major burden on education.

It is astonishing how little the technologies of computers, of graphing, of simulation and imaging are used in the classroom. They are used here and there in spotty applications that someone has packaged. However, the technologies and the power of "problem-based learning", which is stressed at IMSA (Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy), should have had the role of reorganizing the entire school curriculum. Surely, as an important example, sixth graders should already have learned something of the structure and function of atoms. Knowing this, it would then be eminently sensible to deepen and strengthen that learning in ninth grade physics thereby revolutionizing how one learns tenth grade chemistry and eleventh grade biology.

To summarize, my entry into the BOP is how to construct a dossier of misconceptions, of "natural" assumptions that must be viewed with suspicion. One should, if one knew how, add the ability to recognize and delete irrelevant (ah, but how to identify?) knowledge, which blocks creativity. Perhaps, the mind-in-training needs a rating system for knowledge: "A" is good stuff, tried and tested, safe to use and to re-examine for new ratings only under the most dire of crises. "B" is useful in working hypotheses, rarely re-tested. All lower ratings are caveat emptor, e.g. "well, just for the sake of discussion . . ." and delete, delete. Implementing such a rating system would, at the least, provide full employment for a new cadre of educators. The hope is voiced that educational technologies and advances in "how we learn" will help with these classifications. But who really knows? And how many of us "know too much".

Reference

Gardner, H., & Boix Mansilla, V. (1994, Winter). Teaching for understanding in the disciplines—and beyond. Teachers College Record, 96 (2), 198-218. Paper prepared for the Conference on Teachers Conceptions of Knowledge, Tel Aviv, June 1993.

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Knowing beyond the five senses?

David L. Solomon
BBDO Detroit & Learning Development Institute

Humanity has the ability to experience life beyond the five senses (Zukav, 1989) . In his book, The Seat of the Soul, Zukav describes an eternal force which he believes is the next step in our evolutionary journey; although, the vocabulary to address it is not yet born.

Zukav uses the term "multisensory" to describe human capabilities, which he believes opens up opportunities for growth and development. His premise is that five-sensory human beings have come to know the world in concrete ways - to perceive physical reality. The perceptions of a multisensory human extend beyond physical reality to the larger "dynamical systems" of which physical reality is a part.

Zukav distinguishes between personality and soul. The personality is a reflection of the five-sensory human being - a characteristic that a person is "…born into, lives within, and will die within time" (p. 29). He posits that every person has an immortal soul and he suggests that the larger frame of reference of the multisensory human allows learning to occur in a way that is not limited to the five senses.

Gary Zukav asks some important questions which are germane to the Book of Problems:

What does it mean to say that an "invisible" realm exists in which the origins of our deeper understandings are located? What are the implications of considering the existence of a realm that is not detectable through the five senses, but that can be known, explored, and understood by other human faculties?

When a question is asked that cannot be answered within the common frame of reference, it can be classified as nonsensical, or it can be dismissed as a question that is not appropriate, or the person who is asking the question can expand his or her consciousness to encompass a frame of reference from which the question can be answered. The first two options are the easy way out of a confrontation with a question that appears to be nonsensical or inappropriate, but the seeker, the true scientist, will allow himself or herself to expand into a frame of reference from which the answers that he or she is seeking can be understood.
(pp. 28-29)

Reference:

Zukav, G. (1989). The seat of the soul. New York: Fireside Books.

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Beyond what and when, Understanding learning mechanisms

Alison Gopnik
Dept. of Psychology
University of California at Berkeley

Over the past thirty years we have learned more about children's spontaneous learning than in the 2000 preceding years. In particular, we know that even infants both know more to begin with, and learn more, than we ever would have thought before. We also know that much learning seems to involve powerful capacities for theory formation and change, analogous to the capacities of sophisticated adult scientists. However, most of that new knowledge has still consisted of knowing what children learn when, rather than why and how they learn what they do. The nature of the underlying mechanisms for learning, in children or in science, is still obscure.

This general obscurity about mechanisms leads to several specific questions and mysteries. First, there are still descriptive questions. How domain-specific versus domain-general are learning mechanisms? Traditionally, there has been an opposition between more nativist accounts of learning which emphasized domain-specific triggering mechanisms, and more empiricist accounts that included forms of associationism or connectionism. It is increasingly clear that neither of these approaches is correct, but the right balance between domain-generality and specificity is still obscure. Similarly, the relations between learning in "natural" contexts and learning artificial skills such as those acquired in school is also still not clear empirically. Are these two types of learning fundamentally similar or different? And in a related vein, the relation between learning in young children and in adults is not clear. Do these types of learning involve the same underlying mechanisms or different ones? Finally, though it seems clear that social influences play an important role in much human learning, their exact contribution is still very obscure. How much do human children have to rely on implicit tuition from others to accomplish their feats of early learning?

There are even more profound questions about the computational mechanisms that underly learning. In the past, learning has been one of the chief weaknesses of existing computer systems, though again the advance of connectionist modeling has begun to remedy this. Still there is an enormous gap between the sort of learning that involves the acquisition of structured hierarchical types of knowledge and the sort that involves extracting patterns from input. Moreover, there are no computational accounts currently available that seem at all realistic given the likely restrictions on human memory and information-processing capacities. And finally, no computational systems that we know of seem capable of the kinds of qualitative conceptual change we routinely see in young children

Finally, there are profound unanswered questions about the biological mechanisms for learning. Unlike other cognitive capacities, learning is not localized in the brain, and it seems unlikely that, for example, current imaging techniques can be very illuminating. Instead, understanding how neural plasticity and cognitive change are related seems to require much deeper and more fundamental new insights into brain function. This is even more true when we try to consider the apparently paradoxical relationship between genes and learning. What is there in our genetic instructions that itself leads us to be able to overcome those genetic instructions and routinely invent radically new forms of behavior and interaction? How are our learning capacities related to the more generally difficult questions of gene expression and morphological development? In both cases we know that a limited handful of genes somehow interacts with the environment to construct new structure, but we do not know in either case, what these mechanisms might be like or how or whether they are related to one another.

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The mental, the feeling, and the body

Basarab Nicolescu
Centre International de Recherches et d'Études Transdisciplinaires

The following seven questions come to mind:

  1. If we distinguish three types of learning, the mental (cogintive), the feeling (affective) and the body (instinctive), how important are, for a given type of learning, the other two types?
  2. How can one reach an equlibrium between the mental, feeling and body learning? Can we assert that this equilibrium corresponds to a new type of learning (a learning that is "all comprehensive")?
  3. What is the role of the traditional methods of meditation and relaxation for the process of learning?
  4. Can we imagine that, in the future, learning through initiatives outside formal institutional settings will be more important than in institutional settings? How can one help the development of such an evolution of learning?
  5. Are questions more important than answers in the process of learning? How can one generate a science and an art of questioning?
  6. What is the practical role of the included middle (paradox, oxymoron, etc.) in the process of learning ? How could the included middle build transcultural and transreligious attitudes?
  7. Could life stories stimulate the process of learning?
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Shifting the ground for our conversations

Ron Burnett
Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design

I am concerned with the evolving role of the disciplines within universities and the challenges that a new context is introducing into the environment. What is that new context? Well, it is not one thing or one phenomenon; rather, I believe that we are in the midst of a 'sea change' in our understanding of the communication's setting that is the underpinning for learning, pedagogy and education. This is a bold claim. For example, it is not possible, in my opinion to examine what we teach without linking that to the networked world. Information now flows from so many venues that what we mean by content needs to be examined from many different and sometimes-conflicting perspectives. Educational institutions are becoming one of many possible places that learners can seek information and knowledge. An interesting phenomenon which exemplifies this point and which is enhanced by using the Internet is auto-didacticism, people who teach themselves. A good example of this is in the computer sciences where students as hackers learn programming from each other as well as from sources that are sometimes legitimate and other times not. Or the many different ways in which young people alter the computer games that they play. There is a vast movement of gamers who have learned how to 'patch' games and introduce 'mods' which transform not only the aesthetic of the game, but often its intentions. The marvel of auto-didacticism is the extent to which at least in the digital era, learning turns into networked dialogue among anonymous individuals who dedicate themselves to projects that they are working on. The development of the LINUX operating system is a further example of this growing and important shift in how ideas and information are exchanged.

The digital revolution has disrupted and will continue to disrupt what we mean by learning and how we organize our disciplines. Suffice to say, that to think about interdisciplinarity in a networked world is to think about disciplines in a different and evolving context. The fluidity is sometimes startling, but a necessary if not creative condition which can transform the exchange of ideas. Or, put another way, the agora no longer needs the particular forms of dialogue to which we have grown accustomed and new forms will have to be developed, which doesn't make universities redundant as much as it shifts the ground for the conversations that we can have and even has significant implications for the classroom as a place and space of interaction.

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Learning to be: Transforming information into personal knowledge

Federico Mayor
Fundación Cultura de Paz

The methodology regarding learning to know and to do is widely developed. Teachers all around the world have a treasure of experience and best practices in these fields. However, we know far less about learning to be, to transform informat