Rene’s Assessment

I attended a very interesting seminar this afternoon by Zoltan Dienes about unconscious knowledge. While the seminars  focused more on how to assess unconscious knowledge, it was the underlying models about knowledge and decision making that caught my attention. Zoltan presented 4 basic ways of making decisions:

• Guessing
• Intuition (based on a subconscious understanding)
• Rules (based on a conscious understanding)
• Memory (based on identical previous situation)

Modes of decision making

It struck me that each of these are a compromise between accuracy and generalisability, as depicted in the illustration on the right. In formal education we tend to focus on rules. It all seemed logical at the time, but now I can’t help but wonder why.

I’m quite ok with ignoring guessing and memory, they represent extremes of the spectrum that either have very little accuracy, or very little applicability. But intuition actually seems very valid, especially ina world in which rules and facts are changing at an ever increasing speed.

Intuition is crucial in domains where rules are non-existent, or too complex to support a timely decision. But it is also important to recognise that intuition can be a precursor to a more  conscious understanding of rules. In both cases, experience, wether actual or through games and simulations, are crucial media for learning. Ideally this learning should include at least 2 very different experiences based on the pattern we wish to develop. In the case of the further development and refinement of this intuition towards rules, these games could be followed by a meta game, or game analysis, in which rules are reconstructed.

This model is a replacement of the model that uses facts as a precursor to rules. That model perhaps had some validity in a more static world, requiring a highly specialised workforce. But today I think this has little value, and we are better off developing our instincts, then ourknowledge of facts.

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Time for some reflection, and answer the big question for December 2008: what did you learn about learning in 2008? And in doing so, perhaps time to come clean about my own learning disabilities.

Geek Inside

I’m a classical geek: A bit of a recluse, overly rational and sometimes perhaps lacking a bit in some social graces. On most days I read more then my girlfriend talks. I will trust you to correctly apply the stereotypes in that sentence. They are characteristics that, for the most part, have actually served me quite well. Our education system has bestowed the most extraordinary amount of positive action on the minority of people like me. People that can, and are willing to, learn at least some things solely by engaging with the written word.

The problem is of course that this is not how most people learn, and it’s not how the most important things are learned. But it’s easy to stick with something that works, and so it has taken me quite a bit of time to really understand that. To understand that we only really learn by (inter)acting. And while the education system is still accepts, and even favours people with similar disabilities to mine to cling to their narrow learning habits, modern social and professional life make it increasingly hard to be successful with that disposition. Because this disposition is suited primarily for information gathering. And information is of course just another commodity, and an increasingly cheap one.

But aside from this personal realisation, this is something that needs to be translated to our practices, and our institutions and systems, which is not trivial. How are we going stimulate learning, if we are not teaching? How do we verify that learning has taken place, if we aren’t sure how create authentic and valid assessments for the competencies we are now aspiring to instil? And aside from solving these challenges on an intellectual level, how will we actually implement them and change the entrenched system of education in which we work. It’s a worthy challenge, one for after the Christmas holidays…

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My brother pointed out this great TEDtalk to me yesterday by Susan Savage-Rumbaugh, called Apes that write, start fires and play Pac-Man. it’s a great watch, and if you have 20 minutes I would certainly recommend you have a look, as it is quite amazing how much these primates are like us, and how much they can learn. I was also intrigued by what she said about how they learn:

“The most important thing is not to teach them.”

The Bonobos pick up things very naturally and freely  as long as they are in an environment that is fun, with meaningful individuals that they like to interact with. They watch, experiment and learn. And in this Bonobos are probably a lot like us. I think most of us are starting to understand that learning isn’t about knowledge transfer. It is about making connections to concepts, activities and individuals that are meaningful to us in some way. And doing so is not something we can be told to do, it is something we have to want to do, and allowed to do freely, because it has a relevance, an importance to us.

Anyway, I thought it would be a good motto for 2009: The important thing is not to teach them!

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As some of you might know, I’m an avid listened of podcasts (mainly to make my daily hour long commute seem a little less wasteful). Two of the recent casts I listened to grabbed my specific attention.

The first is a presentation titled Republic 2.0 by Cass Sunstein. In this presentation mr. Sunstein explains the risks of web 2.0 to democracy. While the increased access to the expression and consumption of information and opinion seems like a wonderful thing, there are downsides to how we engage with blogs, wiki’s and social networks. Due to the vast amount of information out there, but also because of the nature of these new social artefacts, we tend to expose ourselves only to information and opinions from those that we are close to (ideologically or otherwise). Research has shown that in homogeneous groups like these, polarisation takes place: views and opinions become more singular and extreme.

This is a concern in itself, and something to keep in mind when considering aspects of our education system, such schools based on subgroups of our society over dimensions such as religion, class or even geography. The concern got a new dimension for me however after listening to one of the seminars of the Long Now Foundation In his talk, Ignore Confident Forecasters, Philip Tetlock shares some insights from his research on peoples ability to make appropriate predictions about complex future events (in this case in world politics). He found 2 types of thinking, leading to 2 distinct patterns of predictions. one group was classified as ‘hedgehogs’. These were people that had a single specialism or conviction, and tried to explain everything in the world from this single perspective. The second group, the ‘foxes’ were more broad in their thinking, and the constructs they applied to solving problems. Foxes significantly outperformed the hedgehogs.

So this begs the question: If we allow ourselves to be exposed only to those views and people that we have sympathy with, something the web increasingly allows us to do, are we really depriving ourselves of the tools for a balanced and effective mental development?

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The idea that responsibility and creativity are slowly dying by neglect has bothered be for a while now. I’ve never really been able to put my finger on what the problem was, but now I have had some help by two very distinguished thinkers:

The first person to lift up some of the veil was Peter M. Senge. I recently read his book “The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization”, which I thoroughly enjoyed. In it he discusses much about how people, but also organizations, learn. More importantly, he addresses why they often don’t. A lot of that links back to the systems we use to enforce and measure. Systems that, by their constant need for satisfaction, lead us to shorty term symptom driven thinking and compliance, in stead of long term holistic and creative problem solving. I am looking forward to reading Dr. Senge’s treaty on education “Schools That Learn: A Fifth Discipline Fieldbook for Educators, Parents, and Everyone Who Cares About Education“, in which I hope to gain some insights in how to make changes to our education system in order to create an environment in which students are once again challenged to be creative, in stead of pummeled into being compliant.

Last Thursday I coincidentally had the opportunity to attend a lecture by one of our visiting professors: John Seddon. His crushing analysis of the effects of the target and regulation driven framework that is destroying much of our public services fitted seamlessly into the seeds sown by My earlier reading. I would recommend visiting the vanguard website to have a look at some resources or events that are planned.

I see lots of parallels between these management paradigms, and concepts that keep us busy in education. The discussions about formal and informal learning, the pros and cons of instructional design, and the problem of over-assessment all seem to be based in similar (mis-) conceptions over what makes us learn and thrive. There are parts in our education system, and more so even in the collection of professional bodies governing some of the qualifications and licenses, that seem to be tailored towards breeding armies of self-confirming professionals, in stead of critical and independent thinkers. And while this seems comfortable at first, I do believe we are slowly digging ourselves some enormous holes.

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Update: I gather that the podcast of John Seddon’s talk is now available.

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