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Cognitive Maturity
Posted by Wade Schuette on 11/19/2007
In Reply To:Cognitive Maturity Posted by Alice Squires on 11/18/2007
Alice, and others - I feel strongly that there are technologies that can simplify teaching concepts, many of them not inside some standard vendor's SD package (e.g. Vensim or iThink). By "simplify" I mean by an order of magnitude, or convey the concept at all versus not at all.
The first example of this I came across in my own teaching was trying to convery the concept of mean and standard deviation of a normal bell-shaped curve. One approach was to use words and equations and writing on the black or green board (Yeh, I'm showing my age.) The other was to put a computer in front of the student with two controls, or sliders that involve significant motion of an arm and hand - where one control changed the mean and the other control changed the standard-deviation, in real time, as you slide them around.
The first approach took 1-2 weeks, and had maybe 50% retention a month later, if that. The second
approach took 1-2 minutes, and I think had more like a 95% retention rate.
Moral of the tale - humans are cybernetic creatures and can relate very easily to something if it can connect to their body or through their body to their brain. I feel pretty secure in my observation of that, but I'm open to someone quoting Piaget back at me saying I'm all wet.
So, as you can imagine, I was immensely sad to see that the "flight simulator" mode of Vensim, for example, is reserved to the expensive version. That's a rational business approach, as there is great value in that for "persuading" managers of what you're talking about, so they can "see" and "believe" it, but it is truly wretched for educational purposes and reaching much wider audiences. We need the basics of this in open course-ware.
Looking at the crucial concepts of "perspective", I think Piaget pegs this around 12-adolescence, and too many adults I know have no ability to even imagine there is another valid way to look at something than the one that is obvious to them. But, Piaget preceeds video games, with multiple window views and "zoom" controls. With those, I think, you can put player one's view in a window above his head, and player two's view in a window above her head, and you can quick see that they see the world differently, but equally validly. ( The soup can looks round from above but rectangular from the side, etc.)
One can imagine a scene where there is one world visible at a small scale, but as you zoom outwards and get a wider view you realize that you weren't seeing the whole picture.
Again, if this was done methodically with clear educational goals, I think these concepts could
be "taught" (or realized without much teaching and reinforced by success in the game) in a few hours of play time.
Similarly cause and effect with delay, or cause and effect in a loop, can be modeled in a game scenario, or in Second Life of some equivalent virtual world, so that people could quickly realize that some effects are delayed, but if they "fly up" and look down they can see why, as the effect is heading around the long track and finally comes back in from the other direction, via animation and participation.
I learned many of the necessary concepts when I was in 7th grade, reading the Radio Amateur's Handbook and Heathkits and playing around with analog circuit components that quickly get more complex than most SD models. I think I "got it" since I taught an Adult Ed course in Radio and TV repair, and was an electronics technician for 5 years, repairing multi-stage amplifiers, superheterodyne transmitters, etc. Again, hacking around on a "breadboard" with signal generators and lights was sufficient to overcome a lack of mathematical background, or more precisely, to give me real world insight I could relate the math to.
Then there is recent work in "hybrid images" which look angry if close, but smiling far away, or vice versa, or look like Einstein if viewed at 2 feet but like marilyn Monroe if viewed at 15 feet, that are very persuasive of what differences can occur among perfectly competent observers.
(See my post http://newbricks.blogspot.com/2007/10/discussion-of-hybrid-images.html ,
or conflict-resolution and hybrid images here: http://newbricks.blogspot.com/2007/10/hybrid-reality-and-conflict.html and a picture that is of Einstein viewed close up but of Marilyn Monroe viewed far away at the U Fla. site here:
http://www.wu.ece.ufl.edu/courses/eel6562f07/project_topics.html
or at larger scale on my weblog here: http://newbricks.blogspot.com/2007/08/its-all-in-wrist.html )
So, all this says, I think many core concepts here are analog and non-verbal, and can be introduced as early as Kindergarten, or sooner, via computer imaging and video-game technology and game playing. I suggest we get that much in place as a basis for building on from there.
Wade
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