Cognitive Science – Page 5

Stephen’s Web ~ by Stephen Downes ~ Dr. Jonassen- Let Us Learn to Solve Problems

“Now let me be clear – all this is *not* to say that experimentation and empirical data play no role in science. Rather, it is to say that what counts as empirical evidence and experimental methodology is almost always determined from *within* a paradigm, and seldom ever adjudicates between them.

Stephen Downes writes about the nature of empirical evidence for effectiveness of learning in different situations as a result of discussion on ITFORUM about problem-solving (web archives of the list now require a login, so I won’t link to it).

My source of dissatisfaction with the discussion of problem-solving was not so much with the absence of empirical evidence for assertions made by various participants, but more with the notion that learning takes place in the context of problem solving rather than in the context of problem definition. I still think that Douglas Adams captured it best with Deep Thought: “The answer … is 42 … I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you’ve never actually known what the question is. …”

In my experience, the thing that psych students found so disturbing and unsatisfying about psych lab classes we ran was the fact that we did not provide clear hypotheses for them – it was their job to identify the specific questions to be answered by the data, and then to analyse the data accordingly. Students were often outraged that there were no “correct” questions (although there were plenty of “incorrect” ones), and that the data analyses depended on the questions they had formulated. They were sure they would “learn better” if we told them the right answers rather than letting them wander confused through a problem-space.

This relates not only to the question of problem-solving and learning, but also to the question of student-centred learning in so far as students very often have very little insight into their own learning process until after they have “learnt”. My own empirical observation of Honours students, PhD students, and people preparing for Blackbelt Gradings in taekwon-do is that there is a (necessary?) period of disillusionment with (good) mentors / supervisors / teachers at some point prior to completion of the the major goal (thesis, grading, presentation) … which is part of a process of transcending being a “student” per se (ie needing to receive someone else’s wisdom) and having ownership of one’s own knowledge base. Only when one feels secure and comfortable with knowledge within can one then reflect on the process of reaching that comfortable state. This suggests to me that students are not in the best position to know what they need to learn in a particular discipline, and it is very difficult for students to set appropriate challenges for themselves and monitor their own progress without a mentor / teacher. Whether the mentoring / teaching is done in a formal learning institution or informally is a completely other question – I like the fact that formal courses set me some time constraints and specific objectives and hopefully link me with people who share my interest rather than the fact that the course defines what I need to know.

Plagiarism detection – is technology the solution?

I went to a lunchtime seminar by John Barrie on Turnitin, the plagiarism detection software from iParadigms. I can see the practical merits of Turnitin and I can see that it is scalable into the near future, but I wonder if we have actually identified the correct problem to solve, and whether the Turnitin approach is scalable or even sensible into the future? The idea of the entire internet being fingerprinted is reminiscent of the scenario of enough monkeys and keyboards to produce Mozart … at what level is anything truly original?

The title of the presentation was “Vetting academic work for originality: Saving the world from unoriginality” – very catchy for sure, but perhaps not particularly interesting or realistic. At an undergraduate level, the content of most submitted work is not primarily focused on originality, but on accuracy. When writing a first year psych lab report on “The Stroop Effect”, perhaps there is a real limit to the number of ways of expressing the content before the information actually becomes incorrect in pursuit of originality. Maybe instead of detecting plagiarism, we should be trying to generate assessment tasks which are not affected by plagiarism – rather than have one academic grade one thousand papers, perhaps we would do better to have one academic produce ten papers of different quality on the one topic and have 1000 students grade those 10 papers.

Alternatively, if university staff / student ratios were appropriate so that proper assessment of individual undergraduate students could take place (eg presenting a paper to a tutorial group and then submitting a written version for marking, and having shared marking across tutorials), there would be a disincentive to cheat. The thing that would alert teaching staff to plagiarism would be a mismatch between the ability to present the content orally and in written form. If end-of-semester assessment was by essay style (hand-marked) exams requiring generative capabilities, there would be more opportunity to match student voice with their written output.

At the undergraduate level, there is a serious question to be asked about whether it is more important to be able to generate an original piece of work than to recognise which piece of work most accurately reflects “the right answer” (assuming there is such a thing)? If we can string together appropriate pieces of information wherever they come from to produce a coherent article (be it a “term paper”, an essay, a lab report, a computer program), we at least are showing that we understand the content area appropriately. I believe this is a necessary but not sufficient precursor to being able to produce something original. I actually have grave doubts as to whether true originality at the undergraduate level would be recognised by the average tutor, let alone encouraged or rewarded. It requires substantial academic expertise to evaluate the quality of original work in a discipline area.

It seems that plagiarism is considered a serious issue because we like to claim that a prime objective in teriary teaching is to instill in our students the concept of academic integrity and of scholarship. However, to my mind, academic integrity (coupled with academic freedom) is associated with a whole moral philosophy regarding knowledge, sharing of knowledge and how academic work contributes to the greater good of human endeavour. Academic values and moral philosophy are taught by example (intellectual and behavioural modelling) rather than by policing. If plagiarism is rampant in the younger generation, we should be looking to the values implicit in our education system rather than to policing strategies to effect cultural change.

If you look at the highly structured curriculum favoured by our secondary education sector and the templated way much of the “knowledge” is presented, it is not surprising that plagiarism is rampant – what is the difference between plagiarising and rote-learning? What is the difference between a “fact” and an “idea” and do facts as well as ideas have citable sources?

In terms of values and behavioural modelling, if you also look at business ethics (or attitudes to speed cameras) in the past 15 years, the emergent theme is that anything that is not expressly forbidden is implicitly allowed. No matter what the written rules say, if it isn’t policed, you’re allowed to do it. And if you’ve got away with doing it for a while, it violates your rights to suddenly start policing it. Steve Vizard and Rene Rivken come to mind on the business front … what did they do that was wrong???

Intellectual property and copyright law seems not to be about integrity and moral philosophy at all, but are much more about how to protect the ability of an individual or institution to make money from creative endeavours rather than to share that creative output with the rest of the community (which in the past funded academic institutions to pursue the creation of new knowledge for the greater good of humanity).

Two other factors which have affected academic integrity in a subtle but seriously insidious way are mentioned in passing below. Both of them affect the behaviour of academics which is then modelled by those who are learning from them creating a different academic culture and set of standards.

1) Measuring research output by number of publications rather than quality of publications (counting is easier than assessing quality) so that there is a strong career incentive to make as much publication mileage as possible out of each random academic idea no matter whether it leads to institutionally-endorsed rampant self-plagiarism, a proliferation of poor-quality journals, and/or a sense of dissatisfaction with the entire peer-review and publishing system.

2) A strong push to “reusable content”, without ever clarifying the difference between acceptable / appropriate reuse and plagiarism – acknowledgement of the source is an obvious difference to a trained academic, but the fine line between paraphrasing and substituting synonyms is a tougher call to make for a layperson. Maybe, in the end, the only difference is the wider vocabulary available to most academics – an academic’s lexicon already contains the synonyms that a layperson searches for in a thesaurus, but the paraphrasing process is still the same – when does restating an idea “in your own words” become stating something original? And do I have to cite that Tom asked this question of me in the corridor tonight or can you believe that I thought of it first? And if I did, have I now “beaten Tom to press” so that he will have to cite me in the future?

Back to reuse of content, consider particularly the concept of reuse and acknowledgement of source in the teaching context (which is often the only context in which students see academics at their work). Clearly the ideas being presented in the classroom are not original because we are teaching people about the current state of agreed-upon knowledege in a field.

Lectures and visual aids associated with lectures provide a context for assigned reading and other research activities. Often, lectures provide a specific context or elaboration on material sourced from “the textbook”. If you now consider how the process of generating lecture resources for a “traditional lecture” has changed during my 20 years as an academic

– (circa 1985) I gathered together a set of slides or overheads illustrating key points, and wrote key points on the blackboard

– (circa 1990) I prepared overhead transparencies with illustrations and key points

– (circa 1995) I prepared Powerpoint presentations which were distributed via an intranet

– (circa 2000) I prepared Powerpoint presentations which were placed on the web

By the early 2000s, in common parlance, the Powerpoint presentation became “The Lecture”, and because it resided in a public place free of the context in which it was presented and the words which were uttered explaining the origin and content of each idea and image, issues of copyright and intellectual property started to arise. The overheads of annotating each idea and image became a disincentive to preparing interesting additional resources for teaching, and the idea that providing enrichment to one group of students but not to all students (where different staff taught different streams) undermined the sense of academic responsibility for teaching material as well as undermining the atmosphere of collegiality.

It seems to me that institutions have only recently become deeply interested in the issue of plagiarism detection in the context of selling curriculum, selling degrees, selling research output and gaining competitive advantage from the intellectual property of their workforce of academics. The sense of academic integrity and moral philosophy associated with being part of an international community of scholars whose combined knowledge belongs to humanity has been seriously eroded by treating academic output as a saleable commodity and applying “business models” to academia using totally inadequate analogies.

I guess one aspect of writing in a blog that is simultaneously a real strength and a serious weakness is about to be demonstrated – I want to post this now because I know I won’t come back to it properly in the next few weeks to fill out the gaping holes in the line of argument. I think I know how to fill them, but I don’t have the time right now. Is it better to put the half baked idea “out there” (even if I’m the only person who goes back to read it) or is it best to let it drown in a sea of other half baked ideas? And furthermore, is this enough to ensure that I at least mark a line in the sand to say “I thought like this on this day, even if I don’t get to rethink it and publish it properly until a lot later on …”

Language and Taekwon-Do

I have been thinking about a range of relationships between taekwon-do and my own discipline area of psychology. Today’s thoughts are built around the idea that fundamental movements are the words of taekwon-do, sequences of fundamental movements form phrases and sentences (e.g step sparring, where there are small structured conversations through to free sparring where there is an ongoing dialogue) and patterns are exemplar formal writing – the sonnets of taekwon-do, where choice of movements, the way they are put together, the underlying symbolic structure, the philosophical tone, the grace and coreography are all part of a carefully crafted and deeply meaningful story.

In considering fundamental movements as words, it occurs to me that the movements within fundamental movements are like phonemes and syllables – so that the way we turn our foot at the execution of a turning kick or side kick, or the way that we move our hips through various hand techniques are like pronunciation of individual syllables or sounds. If I lisp, it will affect the way I say certain words, how I put together certain sentences, and whether or not I am able to speak in a way that is correct or easily understood. If I don’t turn my foot properly on executing certain taekwon-do techniques, it will permeate through all my taekwon-do movements.

Another parallel with language relates to the concpet of universal generative grammar.

Reinforcement – can only say things that have been said before
Generative grammar, abstract rules – can say an infinite variety of things that are understandable by other native speakers who have the same ruleset.

Syntax – the way things are put together – applications can lead on or can be sterile

In understanding foreign languages – the difficult part is to identify word boundaries. When you speak word-by-word, it is very stilted and often doesn’t make sense. When you speak fluently, the words flow together so that the boundaries between words are indistinct. If you look at the sound spectrum of spoken speech it is still the greatest challenge in speech recognition software to recognise word boundaries. Speaking to a speech recognition system requires you to calibrate the system very very closely to your own speech and to use a very closed vocabulary.

Teaching kids

Through my involvement with the USMA Schools Program, I have recently had an opportunity to watch Sabum Cariotis teaching young kids who are completely new to taekwon-do. This has given me cause to consider my own approach to young kids and how this fits with the message that Sabum Cariotis has been expressing lately that “Adults are easy, but until you have taught young children, you cannot call yourself an instructor.”

One thing that has always intrigued me is that in a martial art in which “discipline” is paramount, Sabum Cariotis does not enforce discipline on young kids in the straightforward way that I would approach it. I tend to say “Do this!” and then stay and wait until it is done. I am reasonably good at this form of “crowd control” and have assumed that crowd control is a necessary pre-cursor to “learning readiness”. In other words, I have implicitly been operating from the assumption that before the kids can learn anything, they need to be quiet and listening but I haven’t considered whether it matters at all how they got to be quiet and that once they are quiet, how you actually get them to listen actively rather than passively to what you are saying. Although in my professional role as an educator, I spend a lot of time considering teaching and learning strategies for adults and I have always argued that understanding how to talk to kids is one of the best preparations for teaching adults, I actually haven’t spent much time relating what it is that kids are “listening to” back to the teaching situation – I teach in the tertiary sector, I teach concepts, and I am very much a person of words, so I automatically think of listening as being focussing on what I am saying despite being aware personally and professionally that “active listening” involves a whole lot more than that. I am also aware that younger kids in particular will naturally understand the inflections in speech which carry the emotional content of what is being said irrespective of whether they understand the semantic content (ie the meaning of the words). They read “body language” in its natural form in a way that many adults (sadly) have been taught to filter out.

So although I might think that I succeeded a bit in teaching kids by ensuring that they are under control and doing as I say, what I see Sabum Cariotis doing is capturing his students from the inside out. He captures their attention and motivation from within themselves in contrast to my approach of trapping them in a corner and forcing my will onto them. It occurs to me that the essential difference will be in terms of “ownership” of what the students learning – when I force my will on someone in a teaching situation, they might “learn the basics” much more quickly because of my enforced discipline than if I try to achieve self-motivation for learning first, but I have probably stifled their ownership of learning, their willingness to seek out knowledge on their own and, in the longer term, their creativity. This loss of creativity is hugely important and is something that can’t easily be rectified.

When Sabum Cariotis talks to children (and adults) about taekwon-do, he tells stories and these stories are constructed at multiple levels. He tries to place the taekwon-do story into a context that matches the level at which the students can comprehend. Within a multi-age class, each story has strands that are accessible to each different level and many stories are told simultaneously in choice of words, in emotional tone, in choice of analogy and metaphor, in physical demonstration. Very few instructors have the depth of knowledge combined with passion for the content combined with respect for their students to engage with people in this way. I see many parallels in what Sabum Cariotis does and the way that a passionate academic teaches in their discipline area. What I haven’t really thought through before is the skill involved in inspiring passionate interest in young children for something (eg biology or history or even cooking and gardening) … it is easy to get kids to do activities relating to these things copy-cat style, and it is even straightforward to get them to be excited about bringing their work to you for your praise. But it is a wonderful and entirely different thing to inspire a passion that can feed their creative spirit throughout their lives so that they do things for themselves.

A very common theme for people who excel in a particular area is that a single great teacher stands out as their inspiration. This is unlikely to be the teacher that sat everyone in straight rows and made them follow the lesson plan to the nth degree!! It is far more likely to be the unconventional teacher who reached out to them in their world and built their self-belief and creativity while sharing their own passion for learning in their discipline.

The thing that is emerging for me in writing this is not directly related to taekwon-do, but relates more to the tertiary sector that I work in. In the mid eighties, before the huge and rapid expansion of the university sector, it was considered quite inappropriate to lecture even at first year level in a discipline area in which you were not an active researcher – if a topic was outside your core area of expertise, who were you to think that you could teach in it?! But as student numbers and teaching loads increased (and $$$ became critical), it sounded a bit precious to say you needed to be an expert to teach first year. These days it is unlikely that even at third year level it would be considered necessary to be an active researcher in an area to lecture in it. But what is lost is the depth of knowledge, the multilayered “stories”, and the passion that experts have for their domain. The subtlety of how things are put together to lead into a capacity for creativity in an area is lost if you don’t have the depth of knowledge to understand how an area is structured and how it relates to other areas and other concepts. The subtlety of good teaching is replaced by “process” around things like learning objectives, lesson plans and a need to be very explicit about assessment. With structured lesson plans, people who don’t know the content area think they can teach, and worse still, that they can judge quality of expert teaching even though they are not in a position to judge the actual content … this approach is very misguided and depressing and spiritless, and probably says a lot about our current social, cultural and educational values and the lack of passion and creativity in our lives – and this uplifting thought is probably a good place to stop writing for the moment … it can only go downhill from here !!!

Warm-ups

Although my blog has been quiet for the past year or so, I’ve actually been thinking a lot about taekwon-do as a martial art and how it relates to exercise sciences and to my cognitive neuroscience discipline area – perhaps it’s time to start articulating these ideas a bit more formally, and blogging seems as good a way to start as any other … and warmups seems like a good topic to begin with.

We have a number of different black belts at our club who from time to time take the warmup session of our classes. It is always interesting to see the variety of approaches, and the different ideas that are expressed through these warmups. Most people work to their strengths, so the aerobically fit people tend to emphasise aerobic aspects of warming up, the flexible people emphasise stretching, the exercise scientists and physiotherapists talk at length about the biomechanics of each aspect of warmup, the powerful people emphasise different ways of building sets of muscles – it is all informative and it allows us to see the full range of what it takes to develop our bodies to their full potential while at the same time learning a bit more about the people we train with.

What also tends to happen is that each class member enjoys different aspects of a warmup, and through talking about these differences, a range of motivation and expectations with respect to taekwon-do are revealed. In considering a range of opinions and approaches, I found my own conceptual understanding of warming up and of “fitness” in general has been challenged and extended, and I have developed a renewed respect for the depth and layers within taekwon-do as a martial art.

Three things that stand out to me are the expectation from taekwon-do students 1) that taekwon-do training will build their aerobic endurance and their flexibility (true), 2) that this can happen through their twice weekly 90 min taekwondo classes (true but only to a fairly limited extent), and 3) that the purpose of the warmup is to build aerobic fitness and flexibility (not true).

Significant aerobic endurance can only be built by performing aerobic activity for a reasonable duration *every day* – for example by walking, running, swimming or cycling for at least 30 mins most days at moderate intensity with at least one day a week devoted to a longer session at lower intensity. The resulting aerobic endurance will depend on the intensity and frequency of training. This is not going to happen in two 90 min sessions per week, and certainly not via the 15 – 30 mins of aerobic warmup. It does not make any sense to expect that it is possible. In order to be aerobically fit for taekwon-do (eg to spar in tournaments), an aerobic training program (eg running including sprint work and hills) outside of classes is required.

Improved flexibility involves lengthening muscle fibres, and ensuring that muscle pairs are lengthened and strengthened in a coordinated way. For example, if you have very strong thigh muscles (quads) and they can contract powerfully to lift your leg, you will need to make sure that your hamstrings are sufficiently flexible and strong to cope with being stretched when the quads and other muscles contract during for example a front kick. If the hamstring is not strong, it can easily be torn by the more powerful antagonist muscles during a kick. When the hamstring has been appropriately conditioned, the next muscle to feel the strain is the calf muscle – hamstring injuries are probably more common than calf injuries because if both muscles are equally unconditioned, the hamstring will stretch and tear first, thereby protecting the weakness of the calf from being demonstrated.

In order to lengthen your muscles, you need to warm them and stretch them slowly beyond their current extent. There are lots of ways to do this, but the result of lengthening a muscle is to render it weaker for at least a couple of hours afterwards. So generally, you would *not* want to do a serious stretching routine for increasing flexibility before or at the beginning of your taekwon-do training session because it would be counter-productive.

The stretching that is done during a taekwon-do warmup is designed to warm your muscles and take your joints and muscles through their full current range of motion so that the work that you do during training is at your current maximum level. For example if you warm up properly so that your side kicks are being performed at the maximum height you can currently attain, you will build your strength at that level and although this will undoubtedly allow you to gradually increase your range over a period of training, it will not improve your flexibility dramatically or quickly.

So what is a warmup all about, and how does this relate to fitness? The first and most important point is that the concepts of “warmup” and “fitness” are meaningless without a context. Warmup for what? Fitness for what?

The warmup for an activity depends entirely on the activity and the context in which it is taking place. A warmup for cycling is different from a warmup for swimming which is in turn different from a warmup for sparring. A “warmup” in 35 deg heat is different from a warmup in 12 deg and serves a completely different purpose. In 35 deg heat, you want to ensure that your body temperature control systems are activated properly and your fluid regulation system is operating well rather than that your muscles have reached an appropriate warmth (which will be taken care of by the ambient temperature). In the cold, there will be more emphasis on ensuring adequate blood flow to peripheral muscles and getting the heart rate into an appropriate zone. In both situations, you want to ensure that the joints and muscles you will be using are comfortably moving through their full range of motion at their correct operating temperature.

In the taekwondo context, a warmup for patterns will be different from a warmup for sparring and different again from a warmup for jumping techniques because they use different muscles. However there will be some aspects of warming up that are consistent. We will almost always be kicking, so we will almost always want to do some front snap kicks and front rising kicks to stretch our leg muscles. We will also generally want to do side kicks and turning kicks maybe with speed, maybe with power, to get our lower backs and hips operating.

One specifically taekwon-do exercise that we do frequently involves squatting with one leg extended to the side with the toes pointing up and the foot of the other leg flat to the floor. This exercise will stretch the hamstring of the extended leg so long as flexibility of the supporting leg is sufficient to allow you to go low enough. Many people cannot squat low with their supporting foot flat on the floor and so they lift their heel to get much lower and also use their hands to support their weight. We are told to keep our heels flat to the floor and not to use our hands when swapping from side to side but most of us ignore these instructions in favour of getting much lower. In a year of doing this, I did not improve my strength or flexibility in this exercise. However since I have chosen to try to do it properly and to focus on keeping my body upright, I have actually improved my strength and power in kicking dramatically, although the height of my kicks has not increased much.

What I have actually realised is that most people do not have well-balanced muscles in their legs, thighs and groin area. Some muscles are strong and flexible, some are strong, some are flexible, but to do the exercise properly (and to kick properly) it is necessary to have balanced strength and conditioning across all the muscles involved. So by maintaining proper form and then “bouncing” (a controlled small movement not an uncontrolled bounce) at the boundaries of movement, we can strengthen the muscles in a coordinated way and move through the whole range of motion using the balanced power of the whole muscle set. This is much more valuable than extending one of the muscles (in an unbalanced way) while supporting our weight in the wrong position with our hands. It is very useful to *feel* the limiting factor in each exercise and to work on that, so that we focus on our weakness rather than working to our strengths. For me, the flexibility of my calf muscle to allow my foot flat to the ground and the strength of the muscles around my supporting knee are the first limiting factor for this exercise, not anything to do with my hamstring of the extended leg.

When I first started taekwon-do and the instructor said to “bounce”, I thought I knew better than to do this old-fashioned thing which tears musles rather than making them more flexible, but over a period of time and after listening to the instructions more carefully, I am aware that we are not bouncing to increase flexibility (an outdated and damaging approach because it causes micro-tearing which actually stiffens and shortens the muscles), but are moving in short controlled bounces to increase the strength of the muscle at its full extension, which is exactly where the full strength is needed in a martial art. When we kick, we want to contract our muscles in perfect timing at the full extent of our kick for maximal power unlike in most sports where the maximum power is in the middle of the movement.

Basically, a superficial biomechanical context-free analysis of the exercise might lead people to do it differently and in a way that does absolutely nothing to improve kicking, whereas a deeper analysis in context reveals the exercise as a perfect warmup and conditioning exercise for taekwon-do.

Furthermore, once you go context-free and start analysing exercises purely for their biomechanical outcomes, you start needing to know details of agonist and antagonist muscles and working to balance work with one muscle group against work with its opposite … to ensure a balanced approach requires quite deep level knowledge of muscle groups. However, if you remain within a context such as taekwon-do, and you do each movement slowly and quickly and in the variety of ways that occur in fundamental movements, patterns and step sparring, you will build balance across all the relevant muscle groups without ever having to know their names or think about anything other than excellent taekwon-do technique. In one fell swoop, you replace a nit-picking detailed muscle analysis and spiritless list of “do this 15 times followed by that 20 times, then drink this many mililitres of this and eat 25 gms of that” with a tapestry of techniques layered together with a depth and intricacy so that every time you look, you can see different aspects of a picture with new horizons and possibilities.

Just as the concept of warming up relates specifically to what it is that you are warming up for, the concept of fitness itself is not context free. I was unaware that definitions of fitness in exercise physiology incorporate the not only the physical aerobic, power and flexibility notions one would expect, but also incorporate skill level, such that technical and cognitive skill are important aspects of fitness and fitness can only be determined with a purpose in mind.

The technical aspect of fitness in taekwon-do deserves some consideration and is possibly worthy of an article of its own since I haven’t really thought it through completely. When I started taekwon-do, although I was about 10 kg overweight, I was pretty “fit”, riding around 150 – 250 km per week and playing indoor soccer. However I found the L-stance quite uncomfortable because it put my rear leg in a position it was not used to, with the outside of my ankle feeling sore and some little muscles on the outside of my knee and my inner thigh feeling quite stretched too. I also found it hard to move backward and forward maintaining good balance and good stances because my inner thigh muscles and various other leg muscles were not strong enough to support me strongly through the whole transition from one stance to another. So my technique was poor because the appropriate muscles to support good technique were not developed. So my fitness for taekwon-do was significantly lower than for cycling. Also once I have a deeper understanding of taekwon-do movements and their purpose, I use less extraneous energy doing things that are not relevant to taekwon-do. For example, overly extragavent movements are wasteful of energy and this bad technique will render me less “fit” than if I conserve my energy appropriately. Poor breath control will render my techniques less powerful so I will need to compensate by expending more energy and I will be less fit on two counts.

The many layers of taekwon-do come to mind when we consider that part of the discipline involved in training is that until we are told to relax, we hold the last position we were asked to take up. This is good mental discipline, but it is also an important part of strength training and of technical training – if we hold a good L-stance with guarding block (or sitting stance, or walking stance or whatever) for an extended period of time while the instructor is talking, we are training our muscles isometrically in a specifically taekwon-do stance, and we are developing “muscle memory” for that position and ensuring that it feels comfortable and natural. If we stand tall and with good posture in our stances and during our “relaxed” time in taekwon-do, we are developing our core body muscles through taekwon-do – it makes more sense to do this via taekwon-do movements than to bring pilates or context-free VicFit style training into our training since we are training for our own martial art, not for something else.

The section in the Encyclopedia on dallyon underscores the depth to which General Choi went in putting together a complete martial art which would train body and mind in a coordinated and balanced way to achieve the full human potential. This is probably as good a place as any to stop writing for the day 🙂

Beginning a “real” blog

It’s always hard to begin writing a series of ideas because few ideas have clear beginnings and few ideas can claim completeness. For each idea, there is a desire to justify, to qualify, to assure potential readers that residual ambiguities have already been considered. There is also a secret fear that some very obvious refutation has not been considered, rendering the idea dead-on-arrival.

A personal voice takes time to develop especially when the audience is unknown. Conversations into cyberspace hang in the air longer than the spoken word, and can be analysed at greater depth. “Lurkers” can choose whether to reveal themselves as part of your audience and have much longer than a “live” audience to consider the worth of your ideas before endorsing, or challenging, or dismissing them.

The two identifying features of blogging for me are

1) the journal style of writing regularly and frequently in an event-based (temporal) sequence and
2) the fact that blogs are published to a wider audience

For me, good blog entries vacillate between the immediate and personal uncensored passion of a personal diary and the more well-reasoned, supportable, edited, less emotive writing for a known audience. The challenging aspect of blogging as a genre of writing is to write in immediate response to things that inspire or confront me intellectually, politically, socially or spiritually and thereby reveal a less-tailored, more personal glimpse of my thought processes than would appear in normal highly-edited academic writing. The powerful aspect of blogging lies directly in this challenge – the development of robust ideas, of inspirational writing, of effective communication requires a critical, analytical audience, and the fact that my ideas are “out there”, whether or not they are read by anyone other than me, requires that I write them more rigorously than I would need to in a personal diary. And in writing more rigorously, I need to think more rigorously, and to return to an academic writing discipline that to me is the essence of scholarship.

Why did I start my “real blog” today in particular? I have been reading Don Watson’s “Death Sentence: The decay of public writing” as I wade through endless pages of writing on educational design, learning theory, online learning theory and educational technology and I decided that although “Resistance is futile” and there is a fair chance in my academic lifetime that we will all be assimilated, perhaps it is worth questioning woolly thinking and vacuousness embodied in the “debased, depleted sludge” that is our public language and is rapidly becoming our academic language.

Some random examples below come from an article I was reading today on the Theory and Practice of Online Learning. In fairness to the authors, it is fairly typical of much of what I’ve read in the area in the past 6 months and is the kind of thing (like Vogon poetry) that I might find myself writing in the foreseeable future if I don’t attempt some resistance (e.g. in the form of this blog … )

“Online learners should be provided with a variety of learning activities to achieve the lesson learning outcomes and to accommodate learners’ individual needs. Examples of learning activities include reading textual materials, listening to audio materials, or viewing visuals or video materials …”

Does this ever need to be written?

“Strategies should be used to allow learners to perceive and attend to the information so that it can be transferred into working memory.”

Is this Cognitive Psychology or common sense – “Make students pay attention !”

“Behaviourist, cognitivist and constructivist theories have contributed in different ways to the design of online learning materials, and they will continue to be used to develop learning materials for online learning. Behaviourist strategies can be used for teaching the facts (what); cognitive strategies to teach the principles and processes (how); and constructivist strategies to teach the real-life and personal applications and contextual learning. There is a shift toward constructive learning, in which learners are given the opportunity to construct their own meaning from information presented during the online session.”

The problem for me with this paragraph is that the three theories are competing theories of learning and have quite different conceptualisation of what constitutes learning, knowing, understanding, acting. If you use a mixture of strategies derived from these theories, you are no longer theory-driven. You are outcome-driven. There is nothing wrong with being outcome-driven but you can no longer claim a theoretical foundation for what you do.

But already, I digreess. Another feature of a blog entry (in my view) is that it should contain a single coherent theme related directly to its title. So I will stop here. And publish this as my first blog entry in my Online-Learning-Unit-hosted blog. I should say at this point that nothing written in this blog has any implicit endorsement of the expressed views by the institution for which I am employed although I sincerely hope that the institution endorses my right to express such views and thereby make them open for discussion and debate.

(originally posted on my work blog)