Category: Cognitive Science

The more we learn, the less we know?

When I first started learning taekwondo, I didn’t really think of myself as a “martial artist”, I didn’t feel like part of the martial arts community, nor did I see myself as a core part of my own taekwondo school. This is not a reflection on USMA or the people within it, because it is a most welcoming school for students of all ages and from all backgrounds. It is much more about the way in which I viewed myself, my capabilities, and my reasons for being there, compared with the way in which I viewed the other students in the school on these dimensions.

The initial phase of learning for me was very focussed on the pragmatic aspects of learning sequences of movements and techniques – where to put my hands and feet and how to coordinate the most basic of actions. A blog of my “journey in taekwondo” was really a bit like a homework diary on learning something as an outsider with no particular skill at it, and recording my experience in an easily accessible place in case other people like me wanted to know some of the things a novice might need to learn (eg what are the movements in 3 step sparring? what is the student oath? etc). I have received a few emails from complete strangers asking exactly these sorts of things.

However, as I mastered performance of these physical aspects to a greater or lesser degree, I began to understand how much more depth there is in each movement than just the basic physical execution. I also started to understand some of the theoretical aspects of the martial art and to start seriously considering the philosophical underpinnings of martial arts in general. This was in the context of my own research work in cognitive science, but also in the context of teaching and learning, and in terms of my own understanding of morality and social justice.

The “journey” stopped being a purely physical one in terms of how to kick and punch and learn my patterns and perform in front of an audience, and has become much more of a philosophical one focussed on how these things fit with in with “moral culture”, discipline and ways of thinking. I also started to get to know my fellow students and to become an insider within the school. I can no longer comment on martial arts as an outsider or observer, as I am now very much part of the USMA community, and through this association, with the broader taekwon-do community. I am no longer anonymous, and my views, while still my own, are no longer *just my own* – as an assistant instructor at USMA, even my personal views will reflect on the school itself, as will my personal conduct in the rest of my life. In particular, any views I have on instruction or hierarchy or NGBs or martial arts politics will to some extent be taken to reflect on my own Instructor irrespective of whether they align with his views. In any event, in the martial arts world it is probably not appropriate for a first dan to comment on such matters publically.

At this point in my “taekwon-do journey”, I see taekwon-do as a martial art, and see a martial art as a way of life which does not neatly turn off when I leave the dojang. Similarly, my professional life as a cognitive scientist and psychologist does not magically turn off outside the office and nor does the belief system and ethical position attached to it. And I remain a mother, daughter, friend and colleague for various people whether I’m in the dojang or my office or not. The trick is how to reconcile the disparate views of the world encompassed in these various roles and relationships and make an integrated whole. The more we learn, the more we see how different ideas might relate to each other and how much more there is to know in order to understand the world. The more people we know, the more we are exposed to different ways of looking at the world.

And the more we know people, the more we know the myriad ways we can be misunderstood, misinterpreted and misrepresented despite our best intentions, and the best intentions of others. Audience matters, and although I am willing to defend most of what I say in public or private, sometimes it is important to know the motivation and intent of the potential audience.

Of course, having said that, you might well ask why on earth I would keep a blog on the internet if I care about who might be in my audience? It’s a good question, and a difficult one to answer. Probably because I think it is important to hold our views up for scrutiny, even just the self-scrutiny involved in writing them down. And the web was the tool of a much smaller (mostly academic) community when I first started using it.

More importantly though, I think that I am identifying the fact that, as taekwon-do for me has moved from being an “activity” to a “way of life”, my taekwon-do blog has evolved from being a blog about “ooh wow, great excitement, I broke a board”, and “here are 5 2-step sparring drills to remember” to a blog of thoughts about how we live, how we learn, and how we relate to each other. These are much more personal insights which at some level involve other people in my life and so require a greater level of thought in terms of how (and whether) they should be written.

Perhaps as I start training seriously for my second dan grading, my taekwon-do views will become more focused on specifics that are more publically sharable. There’s nothing like a grading to focus the mind – and, as I write, I suspect the frequency of my blog posts is actually most closely related to the frequency of gradings … an self-insight that is worth re-considering in the broader context of teaching and learning.

Fashions in Cognitive Science

“Spring and Fall Fashions in Cognitive Science” is the text of the first presidential address given to the Cognitive Science Society in 1986 (twenty years ago). It was the 8th year of the Society and the address was given by Zenon Pylyshyn whose book on “Seeing and Visualizing” is my latest fave. This paper is reasonably short and, unlike most of Pylyshyn’s writing, reasonably accessible due to the fact that:

“It was an after-dinner talk and should be read in that spirit, even though there is a serious message hidden in there somewhere”.

The serious message is a very important one. (Pylyshyn’s work is only “inaccessible” due to the information density of each sentence – he writes clearly, concisely and pleasingly, but each paragraph has rich and deep concepts to be considered making it difficult to read quickly – and this is not a criticism by any stretch of the imagination !!!)

Fashions come around again, and just as clothes are moving through the 80’s cycle, so it appears, are issues in cognitive science. Although perhaps it would be fairer to say that it has taken twenty years for people to understand the nature of these issues sufficiently to begin to consider them.

Interestingly, I am also only just beginning to appreciate the real quality of the Monash Psychology Department in which I spent my formative academic years: it was a purely experimental department (ie had no clinical programs) and had the reputation of being focussed on “rats and stats”, but in reality, it was a true cognitive science department with strength across all the fields which would currently constitute cognitive science of the sort alluded to below.

Finally, my conclusion. What do I think of Cognitive Science, I heard you ask (didn’t you?). I have always found psychology depressing because I came into it from physics and engineering thinking that, since it experimentally studied the human mind it was a science. I soon realized that it was not a science but a catalog, and a methodology for adding to the catalog. I don’t doubt that it is a useful catalog: it’s certainly important to know such things as how to help people who are depressed or to understand how people’s memory or opinions can be changed in emotional contexts or by clever questioning (say in eyewitness testimony). But many of us had hoped that there was a theoretical science like physics or chemistry there somewhere and we were disappointed. I now believe that the problem is simply that there is no unitary subject matter for psychology — it is not a natural scientific domain. But I find renewed hope now that within psychology lies one or more natural scientific domains, and that cognition, suitably circumscribed to include those aspects that are explainable in terms of symbol processing operations (together with the nonsymbolic mechanisms required to support symbol processing) may be one of those natural scientific domains.

I think that Professor Ross Day, founding chair of the Monash Psych Department, did an excellent job in circumscribing a natural scientific domain as the focus of his experimental psychology department.

Simulations in aviation and medicine

I gave a talk last week on simulations in aviation and medicine as part of the MUVES seminar series at the University of Melbourne. It covers a wide range of ideas that I hope to capture better over the next few weeks and months.

– Link to powerpoint slides and notes

As an aside, I have recently installed Office 2004 for Mac and this is the first time I’ve used this version of Powerpoint – against all odds, I’m pretty impressed with the Presenter Tools which allow a timer, the notes and upcoming slides to show to the presenter while mirroring only the slideshow itself to the audience. I am also reasonably happy with the web output as per this link. It is now pretty straightforward to prepare a presentation, present it and post it on the web. And with the “save as picture” option for slides, Powerpoint becomes a fairly useful tool for preparing diagrams.

When the tool actually does the job I want it to, I am much less inclined to bag it – though I reserve the right to be deeply offended when people use the wrong tool for their job.

Taekwon-do and cognitive science

I haven’t written in my taekwon-do blog since our new dojang opened in January – but I have been thinking a lot about the way in which my study of taekwon-do has informed my thinking about cognitive science.

Let me be clear about this: there are three elements to my study of taekwon-do which have been pivotal in influencing the way I think.

1) my Instructor, who introduced me to the martial art in an accessible way, showing the theory and practice, the moral culture and application, and most of all, demonstrating through everything he does the ongoing level of passion and commitment required to become a martial artist.

2) the 15 volume encyclopedia of taekwon-do (and its condensed version), written by General Choi, which documents the martial art itself and the structure of the taekwon-do syllabus through which a martial artist can learn his or her art form.

3) the conceptual mapping across perceptual learning, motor learning and meta-cognitive awareness of learning principles through which my Instructor is able to relate theory and practice and through which he gave me sufficient insight and desire to understand the depth and richness of the curriculum developed by General Choi.

As I have remarked elsewhere in my taekwon-do blog, the structure of the taekwon-do curriculum, bringing together the martial arts of east with the educational system of the western military (US Military Academy), is a masterpiece of curriculum design and exposition. However, based as it is on curriculum design principles for a military curriculum, there is no specific curriculum framework for children. I have also discussed elsewhere in my blog the special facility my Instructor has in working with young children and older people, two groups who are not the traditional focus for martial arts instruction.

The focus I have had in previous posts on martial arts and instructing children have been based around motivational factors in terms of learning most likely because I was involved in educational design of “learning materials”. However now that I am reading Eleanor Gibson (Principles of Perceptual Learning and Development), Williams and Hodges(Skill Acquisition in Sport), Johnson-Frey (Taking Action: Cognitive Neuroscience Perspectives on Intentional Acts) and such things, focusing on perceptual learning and cross-modal sensory-motor integration, I am seeing other aspects of the taekwon-do syllabus that are masterful in terms of design.

I am currently working with concepts of dynamic coordination and constraints in skill acquisition, which fit pretty nicely with the taekwon-do concept of sinewave, and how these fit in with instructional models. This approach contrasts sharply with traditional instructional approaches emphasising verbal instruction, active cognitive processing of knowledge, and dependency on feedback from instructors. The role of the instructor or coach in the dynamic approach is

“to ensure the correct ‘discovery environment’ through the manipulation of task and environmental constraints in an attempt to guide exploration of the dynamics of the perceptuo-motor workspace … if one uses the metaphor of a ‘story’ to conceptualise the skill acquisition process in sport, then the end-state form (the skill) to be acquired by each individual is not prescribed at the outset, but is painstakingly and creatively written ongoingly. In such a ‘self-reading and self-writing’ dynamical system (Kugler, 1986), practitioners have a major say in the development of the individual’s unique storyline by creating localised pressures (as constraints) so that functional global systems behaviour emerges from practice time. The implication is that there is a need for significant research programmes in the sport and exercise sciences to gain a broad understanding of how constraints shape the individual ‘stories’ of skill acquisition in different sports contexts.”

The constraints-led model asserts that the set of possible movement solutions for a skill to be acquired can be limited by the dimensions of the perceptuo-motor workspace imposed by the coach or training environment. Directed coaching or training environments with limited dimensionality will only support a very narrow search process, whereas unbounded workspaces allow unconstrained search which can be unrewarding, inefficient and potentially unsafe. An important role of the coach or instructor from this perspective is to support the perceptuo-motor search process by manipulating constraints so that exploration occurs within the optimal area of the perceptuo-motor workspace.

Interactions between the coach and student are minimised during early stages of learning so that the important dynamics of the movement task are revealed through discovery.

“In a soundbite, the key point is: Let the learner begin to write her own story. Direct coach intervention at this stage may well assist in the short-term assembly of coordinative structures as temporary solutions, but the ongoing process of establishing control may be delayed as a result of inappropriate (i.e. textbook and non-individualised) coordinations early on. In fact, the adoption of generalised ‘textbook’ approaches can be likened to the short-term solution of ‘plagiarism in our analogy of writing a story. In other words, the learner may come to rely on these ‘neatly packaged’ temporary solutions for immediate performance effects in specific environments. But the unique relationships between movement subsystems, which influence long-term performance transfer to novel situations, will not be established early in learning” Williams et al 1999, p322.

This all starts sounding very like the ideas I was trying express early in my blog in the article on Teaching Kids.

Corruption in evidence presentations – Edward Tufte

I have just received my copy of “Beautiful Evidence” and I love it already …

“Making a presentation is a moral act as well as an intellectual activity. The use of corrupt manipulations and blatant rhetorical ploys in a report or presentation – outright lying, flagwaving, personal attacks, setting up phony alternatives, misdirection, jargon-mongering, evading key issues, feigning disinterested objectivity, willful misunderstanding of other points of view – suggest that the presenter lacks both credibility and evidence. To maintain standards of quality, relevance, and integrity for evidence, consumers of presentations should insist that presenters be held intellectually and ethically responsible for what they show and tell, Thus consuming a presentation is also an intellectual and a moral activity.”

Decision making at universities

from The Age: Melbourne Uni row over degrees

“If you take heads of departments somewhere and tell them we’re about to climb Mount Everest with one sherpa and no oxygen, they’ll say ‘of course’,” he said. “It’s only when you get to camp two they say, ‘Why are we doing this?’ and ‘I didn’t realise I was going to have to carry my own provisions.’ “
Professor Stuart MacIntyre – Professor of History

This quote captures the problem of corporate-style decision-making in the age of marketing and spin – who needs to worry about the details when the glossy brochures looks so good? Only nerds seem to read the fine print or worry about the substance of an argument these days, and then – shock !! horror !! – they are so surprised when things go pear-shaped in ways apparently noone could have foreseen – at least not while wearing their HHGTTG peril-sensitive sunglasses.

LMS Governance Final Report

For most of the past 9 months, I have been working with my colleague James Quealy on a Melbourne Monash Colloborative Project on Learning Management System governance.

The final report was posted on the Melbourne/Monash Committee for Collaboration in Educational Technologies website for 18 months and was available for download as a PDF. This website had disappeared in the new-look University of Melbourne website, so I have taken the liberty of posting it here.

The major conclusion from our research was that enterprise LMS software is primarily an administrative tool for delivery of subject-based content and for communication rather than a vehicle for pedagogical transformation of tertiary teaching. Therefore an LMS, as a piece of software, doesn’t require any particular special governance so long as good IT governance practices are already in place.

Most of the governance issues relating to LMS are either academic governance issues, IT governance issues, or derive from the mistaken belief that “new technology” has so radically transformed the educational world that old academic principles no longer apply, and anyone who says otherwise is in denial and/or a dinosaur, and is not worth arguing with.

In our report. we have attempted to outline issues of IT governance in higher education, and we have tried to outline an online future (“Elearning 2.0”) where LMS is largely irrelevant, and online tools are so much part of the furniture that they don’t need governance.

The Annotated Bibliography is a work-in-progress. It was originally housed at http://www.mdhsonline.unimelb.edu.au, but given that the server has been decommissioned, I have taken the liberty of moving it to my own wiki site (Aug 2007). Maybe James and I might find some time to continue working with it …

Cults of thinking – science versus dogma?

(cross-posted at yabber)

This excerpt from The Cults Of Military Thinking: Fools Never Differ by Darryn Reid and Ralph Giffin seems to suggest that educational technology and online learning are not the only areas suffering from whims of fashion and dogma rather than good science!!

“We explore the deeper reasons behind the formation of intellectual cults around fashionable ideas. Mistaken attitudes about rationality lead investigators to attempt to prove the truth of their ideas by accumulating supporting evidence, and to disingenuously evade scrutiny. The refutation of an idea is mischaracterized as personal failure. “

Some thoughts on being a good student

I have learnt a huge amount over my lifetime, but I have rarely been a classic “good student”. I didn’t do my homework and I didn’t attend lectures regularly (unless the lecturer was particularly good or I had friends who were “conscientious” and were taking the same classes) although I always went to tutorials and prac classes because they were “hurdle requirements”. To make up for my slackness, I read the textbooks and recommended reading and constructed my own study notes around the headings in the course outline. I came from an academic family and a background where books abounded and reading was a favorite leisuretime activity – reading the texts was a “lazy way out” for me in terms of study. I paid the penalty for my slack study habits of rarely getting top marks although I usually did pretty well. Of course, in hindsight, I realise that my poor study habits were actually pretty good lifelong learning habits – finding out from the “community of experts” (my lecturers) what they thought I should know, reading up on it, and only asking them questions when I knew enough of their domain to be taken seriously (the point at which their expertise became meaningful to me). I tended to be accepting of their right to dismiss me not because they were superior or smarter, but because I knew that I had rarely paid them the courtesy of listening to their lectures so I was probably asking about things that I should already know.

This is not “confessions of a slack student” but more an understanding that the things define being a good student may not necessarily promote the best long-term learning. The things that result in the highest grades may not necessarily reflect the best long-term learning either. But it doesn’t mean the structure shouldn’t be there. We may put structures in place with a particular purpose in mind, but although the type of scaffold will determine what we are capable of supporting, we may not know ahead of time whether we will be planting climbing roses or passionfruit or ivy. Even if we take care to plant one thing, it may well be that something else ends up growing in its place.

And from the other side of the fence, I take great care in preparing lectures or presentations or articles – the time and effort that goes into preparing content is not at all commensurate with the importance of that content to the audience or to the size of audience. And more often that not the prepared content is only loosely related to what I end up saying. However the process of content preparation is critical to my role as an academic and critical to my ability to share knowledge and be part of a community. In fact it is critical to my identity as a person – for me, I am what I know about.