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Contents 1 Title Page and Abstract 1.1 Abstract 1.2 A Personal Philosophy of Education 2 Preface for Potential Authors and Editors 3 Chapter 1: Introduction to Education 3.1 Learners and Teachers 3.2 History of Informal and Formal Education 3.3 Change 3.4 Educational Systems 3.5 ICT Applications to Education 4 Chapter 2: Goals of Education 5 Chapter 3: Expertise 5.1 High Level of Expertise in an Academic Discipline 5.2 Research on Expertise 5.3 Summary and Self-Assessment 5.4 Research on Expertise 6 Chapter 4: Academic Disciplines 6.1 To Memorize or Not to Memorize: That Is the Question 7 Chapter 5: Problem Solving & Other Higher-order Cognitive Processes 7.1 George Polya 7.2 Building on Previous Work 8 Chapter 6: Scholarship of Teaching and Learning 8.1 Learning Theory 8.2 Teaching Theory 8.3 Bloom’s Taxonomy 8.4 Lower-Order and High-Order Knowledge and Skills 9 Chapter 7: Brain Science 10 Chapter 8: Human and Artificial Intelligence 10.1 Communicating with a Computer 10.2 Human Intelligence 10.3 Artificial Intelligence 10.4 Computational and Procedural thinking 11 Chapter 9: Possible Futures of ICT-Integrated Education 12 Chapter 10: Distance Learning 13 Appendix 1: Especially for Elementary School Students 13.1 Intended Audience 13.2 Note to Authors and Editors 13.3 Developing a Lesson Plan 14 Appendix 2: Especially for Middle School Students 15 Appendix 3: Especially for High School Students 16 Appendix 4: Especially for College Students 17 Appendix 5: Especially for Adult Learners 18 References 19 Author or Authors

[edit] Title Page and Abstract

Dave Moursund

This is the Title Page for a book writing project. My personal initial goal is to develop an outline for the book, along with some possible content for each chapter. After this has been done, readers are encouraged to write sections of the book, and I will add content when the muse hits me.

Initially, all of the content of the book is organized into one Wiki page,with the page divided into sections and subsections. Eventually, each chapter will become a separate page.

I have struggled with what to include in the initial list of chapters and what to include in these chapters. This seems to be a struggle of wanting the book to be all things to all people, and the book being quite limited in length and designed to fit limited needs of a limited number of possible readers. Thus, I expect major changes to occur as I and others do the actual writing of this book.

[edit] Abstract

The audience for this book is the stakeholders who have a direct interest and involvement in our educational system. This audience includes students, parents, educators, school boards, and elected governmental officials, and so on. Throughout the world, such people are facing the educational system challenge of Information Age changes.

In the United States, the Information Age began in 1956, when the number of white collar workers first exceeded the number of blue collar workers. Nowadays, we tend to think of the Information Age in terms of widely used computerized toys and tools such as cell phones, Internet and Web, digital cameras, digital musical instruments, music and video storage and playback machines, global positioning and electronic map systems, game machines, social networking systems, and computers.

All of these toys and tools empower their users. The Web provides an excellent example. The Web is by far the world's largest library, and it is continuing to grow quite rapidly. By use of two pieces of software—a browser and a search engine—I can quickly and cheaply meet many of my personal information retrieval needs. In addition, I can publish what I write, participate in multi player games, and be engaged in a variety of social networking systems.

Email and cell phones provide another excellent example. I can reach out to individuals throughout the world, and they can reach out to me. I can readily and rapidly communicate with a large circle of friends and acquaintances.

Here is another way to think about information and communication technology (ICT). The Industrial Revolution was based on developing machines that could do physical work. The Information Age is based on developing machines that do mental work. Moreover, these two types of tools can work together. I am empowered by what the Industrial Age tools and the Information Age tools can do for me.

The pace of change of ICT is far exceeding the ability of our formal educational systems to accommodate change. There is a widening gap between the routine ICT uses that people have learned through our informal educational system, and appropriate use of these tools in our formal educational system.

This interactive, multi-author, multi-editor electronic book is designed to help people learn about informal and formal education that will better serve themselves and others in our Information Age. you have undoubtedly hear the statement, "Knowledge is power." Through reading and thinking about materials in this book, you will gain knowledge that empowers you.

[edit] A Personal Philosophy of Education

Dave Moursund

"You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink." ( Ancient Adage, 1546 or older)

"However, if the horse is thirsty, this intrinsic motivation will cause it to drink. (Modern Educational Theorist)

Each of has our own insights into what constitutes a good informal and formal education. We each think we know what we and others should be learning. We even think we know how others should be taught and how they should do their learning. Most of us could benefit by more careful thinking about how our educational insights tie together into a philosophy that will appropriately serve ourselves and others.

I have been a student and a teacher for a very long time. One of the things that I have learned is that no two people are the same. The two quotations given above provide a short overview of some of my insights into education.

One of the things that I have learned over the years is that each person is both a lifelong learner and a lifelong teacher. As teachers, we help ourselves learn and we help others to learn. Some of us get paid for helping others to learn. I have found that this is an enjoyable way to make a living.

I have also learned that each of us can get better at being a learner and at being a teacher. Through appropriate informal and formal education and through reflective practice, we can each get quite a bit better at learning and in helping others to learn.

Still another important thing I have learned is that our world is changing relatively rapidly, and some of these changes create a significant challenge to our informal and formal educational systems. For example, our world has become "smaller" through improvements in transportation and communication. The yearly worldwide sales of cell phones is now roughly the same as the total number of telephones installed worldwide 15 years ago. A good education helps prepare people for foreseeable changes and lays the groundwork for a person adapting to unforeseeable changes.

When most people think about education, they think about schools and other aspects of our formal education systems. Further reflection may lead to including the "school of hard knocks." Still further reflection may lead to a conjecture that many (most?) people learn far more outside of the school setting than they learn in the school setting.

Here is a rather simple-minded analysis of informal versus formal education systems. In a formal education system, such as a school, somebody tells the students what to learn, provides guidance in how to learn it, and assesses the results. I think of this as a teacher driven system rather than as a learner-centered system.

In informal education, there are a very large number of "teachers." While many of these teachers are human beings, other types of teachers include radio, television, print materials, infrastructure, toys, pets, and so on. Moreover, internal reflections and formulating our ideas as we communicate with others are both major aids to learning.

In this simple-minded analysis, I think of formal education as when someone tells us what to do and learn, and informal education as where we each decide for ourselves what to do and learn. In this way of looking at things, a parent, teacher, or clergy person "lecturing" to a child all represent formal education. A parent, teacher, or clergy person role modeling or demonstrating desired behavior provide examples of a different type of formal education.

Formal education tends to come from a "one up" position—"I know more about something than you know, and I am going to try to make you learn what I know." Informal education tends to come from a learner centered point of view—"I am intrinsically motivated to learn and I'll do it my way." The intrinsic motivation may well come from one's genetic endowment, such as the innate ability and drive to learn to talk, crawl, and walk. As a learner gains in physical and mental maturity, conscious intrinsic motivation can be a major driving force in learning. (Look back at the two quotes given at the beginning of this section.)

It is easy to see how improvements in transportation and communication affect informal and formal education. They affect access to people, ways of communicating with people, and access to information. They affect access to the tools and toys that are products of newer scientific and technological developments. It seems to me that the impact has been much stronger on informal education than on formal education.

Each new invention affects education. For example, the development of a throwable spear (as distinguished from a stabbing spear) greatly changed hunting. Hunters benefited considerably from learning to make and use a throwable spear. While they did not go to school to learn about the new tool, they undoubtedly received formal instruction in spear making and spear use from other hunters. In some sense, this was an apprenticeship type of educational system, perhaps with children learning spear making from the better spear makers and spear throwing from the better spear throwers.

The invention of writing led to the need for formal schools to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. It takes a learner a long time to gain a contemporary level of expertise in the three Rs. Good teaching by a person with a reasonable level of expertise in the three Rs was found to be very helpful.(Of course, in my childhood I read books about Tarzan and how he taught himself from books that he found in his dead parent's jungle house. However, this was fiction.) There was an economy of scale inherent to bring students together in a classroom, where one teacher could work with a number of students and students could help each other.

That was more than 5,000 years ago. Some might say, "and all the rest is history." Formal school systems developed into what they are today as they adapted to changing social, political, technological, and other changes.

It is the technological changes and challenges that I find particularly interesting. The Industrial Revolution beginning in England somewhat over 225 years ago led to the creation of public schools with required attendance. Such schools kept children out of the factories and off the streets. The Industrial Age brought us very powerful aids to transportation and communication.

In the United States, we are now more than 50 years into the Information Age. The Information Age has brought us continued improvements in transportation, and it has brought us phenomenal improvements in communication as well as in information acquisition, storage, processing, retrieval, and use.

As adults, we find that our children are learning many useful and important things that we do not know. Many adults saw this first when the VCR in their homes displayed a blinking 12:00 and they did not know how to fix this or program the VCR to come on at a particular time and record a program. Their children figured out how to do this. Still more recently we have a host of electronic tools and toys, including computers. Many adults are quite willing to admit that their children know more about these devices than they do.

My personal educational philosophy emerging from the types of ideas mentioned above includes:

1. Students of all ages are quite capable of learning much more than they are currently learning.
2. Students of all ages will learn more, better, faster, and retain what they learn better and longer if they are intrinsically motivated and more empowered in in deciding what to learn, how to learn it, how to demonstrate successful learning.
3. A "one size fits all" educationally system is poorly suited to the needs of learners. The same statement holds true for teachers.

We are engaged in an ongoing struggle between a mass production factory-like system for both students and their teachers, and a system that empowers both students and their teachers. To a large extent, politicians take a top down approach to trying to improve education, and they do this in a manner that takes power away from students and teachers. Information Age technology tends to empower its individual users, and it tends to facilitate a bottom-up approach to improving education. The struggle is to achieve an appropriate balance that leads to learners getting a better education.

I believe that one key to a better educational system is to place heavy emphasis on each student becoming an independent, self sufficient, intrinsically motivated, responsible learner. As young students gain in physical and mental maturity, they should be given more and more independence and power in controlling their own education.

The Web provides one of the main support systems for helping a student move towards greater independence as a learner. Quick access to the world's largest library means quick access to far more information than any individual teacher knows. There is a steadily growing collection of instructional material available on the Web—computer-assisted learning, distance learning, and textbook materials. Thus, a key part of helping a student to become an independent self-sufficient learner is to help the student learn to learn in the environment made available on the Web.

Think about the following question:

What type of education prepares a student to ask a "researchable" question—one in which the research can be done in a library such as the Web or through other resources readily available to the student—and to have the wherewithal (the reading, understanding, and Web access knowledge and skills, etc.) to answer the question?

An Information Age Education should have a strong emphasis on preparing a student to get started in question asking & answering and problem posing & solving endeavors, and then to get better and better at these activities through more years of formal and informal education. Each of the disciplines a student studies in school opens up more researchable questions and provides the background to find and understand answers to the questions. In each subject area studied, a student should be making progress in being able to self assess the quality of the answers and solutions he or she is able to generate—both for self-generated questions and problems, and for those generated by others.

Here are some other quotes that help capture my philosophy of education.

"They know enough who know how to learn." (Henry Adams)

"People rarely succeed unless they have fun in what they are doing." (Dale Carnegie)

"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." (Chinese proverb)

"Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it." (Samuel Johnson)

"If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend six sharpening my axe." (Abraham Lincoln)

"Once you have learned how to ask relevant and appropriate questions, you have learned how to learn and no one can keep you from learning whatever you want or need to know." (Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner. Teaching as a Subversive Activity.)

"The illiterate of the 21st century will not be the one who can not read and write, but the one who can not learn, unlearn, and relearn." (Alvin Toffler)

"Mankind owes to the child the best it has to give." (United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child, 1959)

Students cannot possibly learn everything of value by the time they leave school, but we can instill in them the desire to keep questioning throughout their lives. (Grant Wiggins, 1989)

[edit] Preface for Potential Authors and Editors

This Information Age Education writing project was initiated by David Moursund. He has been an author or co-author of a number of different books. However, this is his first attempt at facilitating and contributing to a Wiki collaborative approach to writing a book-length document.

Moursund provided an initial listing of possible chapters and brief introduction/overviews of these chapters. As a contributor to this document, you should feel free to make significant changes and additions that you feel will increase he usefulness of the book and/or help other contributors.

There are now many Wiki-based documents available on the Web. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia provides an excellent example of a document written and edited by many thousands of authors. It has several advantages over this Information Age Education project. Among them are:

1. It consists of tens of thousands of relatively short and self-contained entries. While many of these entries are linked to other entries in the Wikipedia, each stands alone. The Wikipedia is a reference document, like a dictionary, thesaurus, or more traditional encyclopedia.
2. Essentially any topic that interests a potential contributor is allowable content. The Wikipedia is not restricted to one somewhat narrow topic, such as Information Age Education.

Initially in this writing project, it is assumed that potential authors will familiarize themselves with the entire current document and the general ideas included in the Personal Philosophy of Education section. Think about editing and writing in a manner that includes the characteristics:

1. The results are consistent with and supportive of the topic Information Age Education.
2. The writing is aimed at the targeted stakeholders, such as students, parents, teachers, teachers of teachers, school administrators, and so on. Indeed, after working on a particular chapter of the book, consider translating some of the ideas into specific short sections to be added to the appendices.
3. When editing or writing within a chapter, the writing should be consistent with and supportive of the chapter content and purpose. A similar suggestion holds for editing an existing section or creating a new section within a chapter.
4. To the extent possible, references should be given to material available at no charge on the Web and that have a reasonable chance of remaining available for a number of years. From time to time it will be desirable to provide a reference to material that is not available free on the Web, or that is only available in hard copy. Authors should try to keep such references to a minimum. Often, in such cases, it is desirable to also provide a Web-based reference that is linked to related work. Thus, for example, you might want to use a quote from a book written by Howard Gardner. You could accompany this reference with a link to Howard Gardner's Homepage or to a somewhat related article of his that is available on the Web.

=Preface for Readers=  ::::::::::::"Imagine a school with children that can read or write, but with teachers who cannot, and you have a metaphor of the Information Age in which we live." (Peter Cochrane)

"We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge." (John Naisbitt )

The quote from the entrepreneur and futurist Peter Cochrane captures the essence of classrooms in our current schools. We have many teachers who are poorly prepared to help their students gain an Information Age education. To a considerable extent, our educational system is rather conservative and backward looking.

Information overload is one of the challenges our educational system faces. A somewhat different way to think about this is that we have a problem overload, and that attempts to address this situation have resulted in an information overload The Web is a huge and rapidly growing Virtual Library. Millions of people are contributing to this library, and a typical day sees millions of pages on the Web being added, deleted,and/or edited.

This Wiki book is designed to help students, parents, teachers, and other stakeholders improve our educational system.

Some major aspects of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) covered in this book include:

1. Information. Better access to information and better aids to processing information.
2. Open Source. A growing library—growing in size and in “intelligence.” The totality of collected human knowledge (data, information, knowledge, wisdom, and foresight) is growing quite rapidly. We can teach for each. But there is far too much for a person to “learn it all.” Book scanning projects—what is legal or apt to be legal? Intellectual property rights.
3. Change. We live at a time of rapid change, and the pace of change is increasing. A good education is forward looking, preparing students for both now and the future. It is particularly important that students learn to learn and to become lifelong learners who can adjust to the changes going on in our world.
4. Physical and mental aids. You might find it helpful to think about the Industrial Age as being a time of rapid development of aids to our physical capabilities, and the Information Age as a time of rapid development of aids to our mental capabilities. However, this tends to be overly simplistic.

Long before recorded history, humans were developing aids to their physical capabilities. Writing, first developed about 5,200 years ago, is an excellent example of an aid to our mental capabilities.

The Industrial Age was "fueled" by the development of steam power, electrical power,and internal combustion engines. People and machines that aid their physical capabilities can far out perform people alone or people using the simpler tools of previous generations.

The Information Age has brought us faster, less expensive, and more powerful aids to the collection, storage, processing, retrieval, and use of information. People and machines that aid their mental capabilities can far out perform people alone or people using the simpler tools of previous generations.

The combination of Industrial Age and Information Age tools has provided us with smart machines that can carry out or help us carry out physical and mental tasks. We live at a time of a rapid pace of improvement of such smart machines.

Our current education system is strongly rooted in teaching and learning ideas developed during the first century of the Industrial Age. While there have been a number of important changes in our formal educational systems during the the past 50 years, the pace of change has been slow relative to the pace of change of Information Age ICT.

As a consequence, our formal precollege and higher education systems are not nearly as good as they could be. Indeed, there is a rapidly growing gap between the informal education that students of all ages find relevant and useful, and the formal education being provided by our school systems.

This book explores ways to improve our informal and formal education systems to help students of all ages get a better education.

[edit] Chapter 1: Introduction to Education

"It's not only what we do, but what we fail to do, for which we are accountable." (Moliere)

If the playwright Moliere were alive today, he might well observe that our school systems are failing to help students gain an education that prepares them for their current and future life in our rapidly changing Information Age society.

People learn by building new knowledge and understanding on their current foundation of knowledge and understanding. This is called constructivism, and it is an important theory of teaching and learning.

Each reader brings his or her own knowledge and understanding to a reading task. This presents a challenge both to the authors and to the readers. The authors would like to be able to assume a somewhat uniform background among readers. Each reader would like the authors to write in a manner that is well suited to the reader building new knowledge and understanding on the reader's current foundations.

This first chapter is designed to provide background information that the authors want to assume. As a reader, you will likely find:

• Some of the content is "old hat." That is good, because it means that you have part of the background that the authors are assuming.
• Some of the content is new, or presented in a manner that is not particularly familiar to you. It is important that you to note these situations and make the effort necessary to fill in holes in your background.

[edit] Learners and Teachers

The human brain is naturally curious. It is very good at learning and making use of what it has learned. Thus, every person is a lifelong learner. Moreover, every person helps him or her self to learn, and each person helps others to learn. Thus, we are all lifelong teachers, teaching ourselves and the people we interact with.

The goal of this Wiki writing project is to help all learners and teachers to get a better education—one that is appropriate for life in our current and future Information Age.

Of course, there is no general agreement on what constitutes a good education for our current and future Information Age. Thus, this Wiki book will explore a wide range of topics in both informal and formal education, and in both learning and teaching. These topics will be explored from a Information and Communications Technology (ICT) point of view. However, there will be many different points of view as to what students can or should be learning, what teachers can or should be doing to facilitate this learning, and how this learning can or should be assessed and evaluated.

[edit] History of Informal and Formal Education

The history of formal schooling designed to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic goes back more than 5,000 years, to the time of the invention of writing. The 3Rs are mind tools—aids to the human brain. It takes considerable time and effort to develop a level of expertise in these disciplines that meets contemporary standards.

Your current level of expertise in these areas is useful to you in your everyday life and in your academic pursuits. You routinely use this expertise in representing and solving problems that you encounter in your everyday life.

[edit] Change

In terms of transportation and communication, the world is growing smaller. The population is increasing and the demands upon the resources are growing faster than the increase in population.

• Enduring value of read, write, speak, listen, understand and communicate with people in one’s own society, understand and communicate with people in other societies.
• The world is getting smaller (in terms of communication and transportation) and more crowded (in terms of population).

Music and lyrics for "It's a small world" are available at http://www.niehs.nih.gov/kids/lyrics/smworld.htm.

In 2005, with some revision in a 2006 edition, Thomas Friedman's book "The World is Flat" discusses how improvements in communication, transportation, and education are contributing to making the world smaller. See http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=5581.

Introduction to Education Perhaps much of this gets written after later chapters. Look for the underlying knowledge about education assumed in later chapters.

Towards a general theory of teaching and learning.

Learners learn. They are facilitated by informal and formal teachers and by all kinds of other aids to learning. They get better at learning through experience and through self-taught and formally-taught aspects of learning to learn.

History of Informal and Formal Education

Constructivism. Learners and Teachers. Learners learn. They provide external evidence of this learning in many different ways. However, there is the more subtle aspect of any piece of learning affecting all of what one thinks and does, with most of the effect being so small that it is not readily detectable in what is visible to the outside observer.

The essence of now versus the essence of when the current schools, their curriculum, their instruction, their assessment, and so on were developed. I suppose this is what struck me about the articles I was reading in Technology Review this past week. How dos one educate students and the teachers for so much change in such a relatively short period of time?

[edit] Educational Systems

This document is about formal and informal learning and teaching for life in our current and future world. We are all innately lifelong learners. In addition, we all innately help ourselves and others to learn. Thus, we are all teachers.

The history of information goes back to long before the development of written language. The first development of written language occurred about 5,200 years ago. This created a need for formal schools that taught reading, writing, and arithmetic. Archaeologists have discovered 5,000-year-old ruins of classrooms arranged substantially like some that are still in use today.

Formal schooling today is based on more than 5,000 years of collected teaching and learning experience and research.

What constitutes a good education for now and the future? There are many possible answers. These answers vary considerably among different stakeholder groups such as students, parents, educators, business people, and governments. Thus, there are wide variations in educational systems throughout the world. In the United States, there are wide variations from state to state, from school district to school district within a state, and even from school to school within a school district.

In all cases, stakeholders are faced by the rapid pace of technological and social change. These changes are being fed by a very high rated of change in Information and Communication Technology (ICT).

Each country is challenged by the task of achieving an appropriate balance among Agricultural Age, Industrial Age, and Information Age activities and emphasis. Each country is also faced by the challenges of designing its educational system so to represent the interests and needs of the various stakeholder groups. The result is that throughout the world, there are major differences in the design and purpose of educational systems.

These wide variations in design and purpose make it difficult to compare the quality of education that students throughout the world are receiving. Indeed, it is even difficult to compare the quality of education that students receive in different parts of our country. This is because we have a highly decentralized education system in this country.

Thus, if you are looking for successes and/or failures in your local schools as compared to other schools in your state, country, or the world, most likely you can find examples where others do much better and examples where others do much worse than your local schools. This document explores some of the characteristics of Information Age Education. The underlying orientation is on improving educational systems so that they better service current and future needs of students. This document focuses specifically on ICT and education. Chapter 2: What is the Information Age?=

Up until about 12,000 years ago, all people on earth lived in hunter-gather societies. Then agriculture was developed. People began to raise crops and farm animals. They settle in small communities and build permanent settlements. Over a period of thousands of years, most of the earth’s people became farmers. Now, very few people live in hunter-gatherer societies.

Agriculture supported a significant increase in population. Eventually, cities with tens of thousands of people developed in some agricultural regions. One of these regions was called Sumer. It was located in what is now the southern part of Iraq, in the Fertile Crescent. It was there that writing was first developed, approximately 5,200 years ago. It was there that formal schools were first developed to teach the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic.

The development of written language helped to increase the pace of technological, scientific, and social change. Information could be collected in written form, transported to other parts of the country or world, and passed on from generation to generation. In the early days of formal education, curriculum design was relatively simple. A select few went to school, and they learned reading, writing, and arithmetic. The vast majority of people remained illiterate.

About 250 years ago, England began to move into the Industrial Age. The steam engine began to be put to practical use to pump water in mines, and then to provide power for machines in factories. Eventually many people left the farms and began working in factories. Young children could perform many of the factory jobs—including some quite dangerous jobs.

This exploitation of children led to the development of a combination of child labor laws and required schooling for children. This was in the early 1800s, about 5,000 years after the invention of written language. The elementary schools were called grammar schools, and they focused on reading, writing, and arithmetic. They were set up in a “factory-like” manner, with large number of same-age students in a class, marching through a curriculum somewhat like the way in which products are manufactured in a factory.

Our current educational system still strongly reflects these schools from 200 years ago. They have many factory-like characteristics, and they close during the summer. The summer closure made sense when children were needed to help tend and harvest crops. Today, it is a long outmoded holdover from the past.

Industrialization moved at different paces in different parts of the world. At the time of the Revolutionary War in the United States, fully 90% of people lived and worked on farms. About 180 years later, the United States became the first country in the world to move past the Industrial Age and into the Information Age.

The Information Age officially began in the United States in 1956, when the number of people working in a variety of "white collar" service and information-types of jobs first exceeded the number working in "blue collar" manufacturing jobs. Mental power and interpersonal skills were becoming of increasing importance. Clearly, the Industrial Age was ending and major change was afoot (Naisbitt, 1984).

Currently in the US, very few people live as hunter-gathers, although hunting is a popular sport. About 2% of the work force is directly engaged in raising crops and animals. About 15% of the work force is engaged in industrial manufacturing. The rest of the working population is engaged in service jobs such as clerks, teachers, doctors and nurses, government employees, and so on.

[edit] ICT Applications to Education

ICT affects both informal and formal education. It brings us aids to teaching, aids to learning, and new content to be learned. It obviates the need to teach and learn some traditional content. Some possible topics include:

1. Assists to one’s physical and mental capabilities. What is possible, and what are the educational implications.
2. A growing library—growing in size and in “intelligence.” The totality of collected human knowledge (data, information, knowledge, wisdom, and foresight) is growing quite rapidly. We can teach for each. But there is far too much for a person to “learn it all.” Book scanning projects—what is legal or apt to be legal?
3. Computer ethics, including intellectual property rights.

[edit] Chapter 2: Goals of Education

These vary from person to person, and from stakeholder group to stakeholder group. In some sense, the issue becomes the specific individual learner versus everybody and everything else.

I have conceived of education in this essay as the deliberate, systematic, and sustained effort to transmit, evoke, or acquire knowledge, attitudes, values, skills, or sensibilities, and any learning that results from the effort, direct or indirect, intended or unintended. This definition obviously projects inquiry beyond the schools and colleges to a host of individuals and institutions that educate—parents, peers, siblings, and friends, as well as families, churches, synagogues, libraries, museums, settlement houses, and factories. And it clearly focuses attention on the relationships among the several educative institutions and on the effects of one institution's efforts on those of another. What is needed most for a sound historical understanding of these relationships—or linkages, as I have called them here—is a variety of investigations that study them in their own right, with explicit educational questions uppermost in mind (Cremin 1978, 567)

A version of Varenne’s article is available free at http://varenne.tc.columbia.edu/hv/edu/delib/tcr/varnnherv07diffcoll-main.html

[edit] Chapter 3: Expertise

“In short, learning is the process by which novices become experts.“ (John T. Bruer. Schools for Thought, 1999, page 13.)

“Through learning we re-create ourselves. Through learning we become able to do something we never were able to do. Through learning we re-perceive the world and our relationship to it. Through learning we extend our capacity to create, to be part of the generative process of life. There is within each of us a deep hunger for this type of learning.“ (Peter Senge, 1990)

Figure 3-1 is a general-purpose expertise scale. At the left end of the scale, a person’s knowledge and skills in an area may be so limited that some unlearning needs to occur to move up the scale. For example, this situation exists in some parts of science and medicine, where a person’s initial learning is wrong and does not serve as a useful foundation for future learning.

Figure 3-1. General-purpose expertise scale.

Consider a limited sub discipline you have not previously encountered. Then think about the level of expertise you might achieve in this sub discipline in 1 hour, 10 hours, 100 hours, 1,000 hours, and 10,000 hours of study and practice. (See Figure 3-2.) The level of expertise you will achieve depends on a number of things, such as your current level of expertise in closely related areas, your innate ability in the area, the quality of instruction and coaching you receive, and your dedication and perseverance. This simple set of observations lies at the very heart of education. A well-designed and well-implemented educational system helps students gain expertise faster than they would gain it without any outside help.

Figure 3-2. Time to develop expertise.

“Be all you can be” lies in the 10,000 to 100,000 hours range, combined with 10 years or more of concerted and guided effort. The level you reach depends on many things, such as quality of instruction and coaching, natural abilities, intrinsic motivation and drive, and extrinsic motivation. However, you can develop an island of expertise (a narrow pocket of expertise) in much less time and with much less effort. In gaining an increased level of expertise in any area, both nature and nurture are important. It is not clear whether the extent to which your final level of expertise in an area depends more strongly on your innate abilities (nature, genetic disposition) or on the nurture you receive (Ericsson, n.d.). Moreover, there is the issue of intrinsic motivation and drive versus extrinsic motivation, or being coerced to do the studying and practice. The following quote from Jonah Lehrer (2006) helps capture the basic elements of nature-versus-nurture arguments:

Two obvious rebuttals to the argument that talent is just a matter of learning by doing are Mozart and Tiger Woods. Mozart famously began composing symphonies as an eight-year-old, and Woods was the world’s best golfer at 21. But do they really contradict the “learning by doing” principle?

Not so much. Mozart began playing at two, and if he averaged 35 hours of practice a week—his father was known as a stern taskmaster—he would, by the age of eight, have accumulated Ericsson’s golden number of 10,000 hours of practice. In addition, Mozart’s early symphonies are not nearly as accomplished as his later works.

Lehrer goes on to say:

Thanks to an encouraging father who happened to be a golf fanatic, Tiger [Woods] took his first golf swing before he took his first steps. When he was 18 months old, his dad started taking him to the driving range. By the age of three, Tiger was better than most weekend amateurs.

This allowed Woods to get a head start on his current competitors, but what really made him great is how he practices. For starters, his routine is merciless. Rain or shine, Woods sets out. More importantly, he always makes sure his practice sessions revolve around learning by doing. He analyzes sequential snapshots of himself playing, relentlessly scrutinizes the elements of his swing, then drills these subtle alterations into his nervous system through thousands of repetitions. Of course, more practice leads to more new ideas, which leads to more practice. The quantity 10,000 hours is frequently mentioned as the amount of time it takes to achieve one’s potential or come close to achieving one’s potential. (The figure 10 years is also often used as an estimate, instead of 10,000 hours.) Thus, for example, suppose you have never played a game of chess. In 1 hour, you can learn the rudiments of what constitutes a legal move and what constitutes winning a game. In 10,000 hours, you will have made considerable progress toward being as good as you can be.

In chess, however, additional hours of study and practice will likely continue to move you up the expertise scale. For example, the current average age of the world’s top-ranked human chess players is about 30. These people have put in 30,000 to 40,000 hours or more in gaining their current level of chess expertise.

While there are some young prodigies in music performance, world-class instrumentalists typically have put in 20,000 to 30,000 hours to achieve their current level of expertise.

[edit] High Level of Expertise in an Academic Discipline

Consider a faculty member with a doctorate who has just been promoted to an associate professorship in a research university. This person has probably put in well over 20,000 hours to achieve his or her current level of discipline-specific expertise. Most of these hours of time were spent during upper division undergraduate specialization, four to six years of graduate school, and five to six years serving as an assistant professor.

This figure of more than 20,000 hours can be contrasted with the time invested by a student before beginning serious work in a college major. For example, consider a student who begins to receive some formal instruction in math while in kindergarten, and then takes math every year up through his or her freshman year in college. I would estimate that this student has invested about 2,000 hours of time at school and home in developing the level of expertise that he or she has attained.

[edit] Research on Expertise

There has been substantial research on expertise and gaining expertise in various disciplines. Some of this is summarized in Ericsson (n.d.), who discusses ideas highly relevant to higher education in any discipline:

The difference between experts and less skilled subjects is not merely a matter of the amount and complexity of the accumulated knowledge; it also reflects qualitative differences in the organization of knowledge and its representation (Chi, Glaser & Rees, 1982). Experts’ knowledge is encoded around key domain-related concepts and solution procedures that allow rapid and reliable retrieval whenever stored information is relevant. Less skilled subjects’ knowledge, in contrast, is encoded using everyday concepts that make the retrieval of even their limited relevant knowledge difficult and unreliable. Furthermore, experts have acquired domain-specific memory skills that allow them to rely on long-term memory (Long-Term Working Memory, Ericsson & Kintsch, 1995) to dramatically expand the amount of information that can be kept accessible during planning and during reasoning about alternative courses of action. The superior quality of the experts’ mental representations allow them to adapt rapidly to changing circumstances and anticipate future events in advance. The same acquired representations appear to be essential for experts’ ability to monitor and evaluate their own performance (Ericsson, 1996; Glaser, 1996) so they can keep improving their own performance by designing their own training and assimilating new knowledge.

The quoted paragraph is a good example scholarly writing that is dense with important ideas. One of the key ideas is that experts learn how to learn in their area of expertise, and they learn how to self-assess. This suggests that we might want to place more emphasis on these two general ideas in all of our teaching.

A nice summary of some of the research on expertise—with a special emphasis on research on chess experts—is available in Phillip Ross’s (2006) work. In talking about long-term working memory, Ross says:

The one thing that all expertise theorists agree on is that it takes enormous effort to build these structures in the mind. Simon coined a psychological law of his own, the 10-year rule, which states that it takes approximately a decade of heavy labor to master any field. Even child prodigies, such as Gauss in mathematics, Mozart in music and Bobby Fischer in chess, must have made an equivalent effort, perhaps by starting earlier and working harder than others.

…

Ericsson argues that what matters is not experience per se but “effortful study,” which entails continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond one’s competence. That is why it is possible for enthusiasts to spend tens of thousands of hours playing chess or golf or a musical instrument without ever advancing beyond the amateur level and why a properly trained student can overtake them in a relatively short time.

I find the educational implications of these statements quite interesting. Experts in a discipline have learned to do the effortful study that advances expertise, and they put in the thousands of hours of effort needed to move to a high level of expertise. A good teacher or a good coach helps students learn to do this type of effortful study.

Ross also gives a brief summary of studies that attempt to get at the issue of nature versus nurture in achieving a high level of expertise. He concludes that, “the preponderance of psychological evidence indicates that experts are made, not born. What is more, the demonstrated ability to turn a child quickly into an expert—in chess, music and a host of other subjects—sets a clear challenge before the schools.”

[edit] Summary and Self-Assessment

One of your goals in school is to increase your level of expertise in solving problems and accomplishing tasks. You now realize that computer technology is a useful aid to solving problems and accomplishing tasks in every discipline. Thus, as you take courses in various disciplines you will want to increase your ICT knowledge and skills that are relevant to these disciplines. You might think of this in terms of building an island of ICT expertise that is quite specific to a discipline you are studying or a course you are taking.

You are used to the difference between a generalist and a specialist. A generalist tends to have a useful but limited level of knowledge over a very broad range of areas, while a specialist has a very high level of expertise in one specific area. The generalist versus specialist idea even holds within a specific discipline, such as medicine. A general practitioner can handle a wide range of medical problems, but will often refer patients to a specialist. Of course, the specialist has a broad general background, but has far greater depth and experience in one narrow area than does the general practitioner.

As you plan your higher education, think about this idea of generalist versus specialist. What seems to fit best with your insights into yourself and your goals for the future? This type of thinking is useful in any discipline, including ICT. You may want to be a computer science major, perhaps going on to graduate work in this field. Alternatively, you may want to just develop the functional level of ICT knowledge and skills that are or will be useful to you in the various other areas in which you are developing expertise.

High Level of Expertise in an Academic Discipline. Academic Disciplines. The main idea here is that there is a huge and growing totality of knowledge. This knowledge is organized in ways that humans find helpful for storage and retrieval, and helpful for teaching and learning. This chapter lays a foundation for talking about Expertise, or can be a part of the chapter on Expertise.

[edit] Research on Expertise

[edit] Chapter 4: Academic Disciplines

The terms discipline and academic discipline have been used repeatedly in earlier parts of this book. I did not define the terms, since I am sure that you already know what I am talking about. However, in this section I wan us to take a deeper look into academic disciplines. I use the term discipline when I am talking about a large and inclusive discipline of study, a sub discipline, an interdisciplinary discipline, and so on. Each academic discipline or area of study can be defined by a combination of general things such as:

• The types of problems, tasks, and activities it addresses.
• Its accumulated accomplishments such as results, achievements, products, performances, scope, power, uses, impact on the societies of the world, and so on.
• Its history, culture, and language, including notation and special vocabulary.
• Its methods of teaching, learning, assessment, and thinking. What it does to preserve and sustain its work and pass it on to future generations.
• ts tools, methodologies, and types of evidence and arguments used in solving problems, accomplishing tasks, and recording and sharing accumulated results.
• The knowledge and skills that separate and distinguish among: a) a novice; b) a person who has a personally useful level of competence; c) a reasonably competent person, employable in the discipline; d) an expert; and e) a world-class expert.

Notice the emphasis on solving problems, accomplishing tasks, producing products, doing performances, accumulating knowledge and skills, and sharing knowledge and skills. Suppose that you are taking a course in which the book you are currently reading is part of the required readings. You are browsing along, perhaps even enjoying the reading, and you come to a list such as the one given above.

“Hmm,” you think. “What should I do now? I wonder if the teacher expects me to memorize this bulleted list. What are the chances it will be on a test? Maybe all I need to do is understand the general idea that an academic discipline tends to be broad and deep, and it takes a person many years to achieve a high level of expertise in such a discipline.”

One of the challenges in taking a college course is to decide what you want to learn versus what the teacher wants you to learn. You know yourself, and you can look into your own mind as an aid to deciding what you want to learn. However, it is difficult to read the teacher’s mind, even if the teacher provides a clear syllabus, assignments, and lectures.

Let me help you read my mind in this particular instance. I am writing a book to help you and other students who are taking college courses. I want you to learn to take increased responsibility for your own learning, and I want you to increase your expertise as a learner.

I, personally, have not memorized my bulleted list that helps to define a discipline. I developed the list over a considerable time, I have used it in several books, and I have revised it a number of times. What I actually carry around in my head is roughly, “the general idea that an academic discipline tends to be broad and deep, and it takes a person many years to achieve a high level of expertise in such a discipline.”

However, I have though about the details in the list. I have used them to examine various disciplines that interest me. When I am talking and writing, the word discipline has a relatively broad and deep meaning and is an important part of how I view my work. The word is part of me. It is stored in my brain’s neurons and I have grown many neural connections that help tie the word in with my other knowledge.

Thus, as an author and teacher, I want the word discipline to become part of your working vocabulary—part of you and your world views. I want you to have a rich set of neural connections that give meaning to the word in your brain. Memorizing the bulleted list in order to pass a test, and then soon forgetting what you have memorized, contributes very little to your education. Suppose instead that you select a discipline that interests you and where you have some knowledge and skills. Examine each bulleted item from the point of view of your insights into the discipline. Where are your strengths, weaknesses, interests, and disintersts? What have you done to achieve your current level of expertise in various aspects of the discipline? What helps and encourages you to learn and to increase your expertise in various aspects of the discipline?

Next, do some of the same thinking over again, but now think specifically about how ICT is affecting the discipline and what you know about the discipline. Do you have knowledge of how computers have changed and are changing the discipline? Have any of the courses you have taken in your precollege and college education included a modern discussion of roles of computers in the discipline? Are you skilled in using the Web and other electronic resources to retrieve up to date information in this discipline? What other pieces of software do you know how to use that are relevant to the discipline?

Notice that these are thinking exercises, and you are in charge of doing the thinking. This thinking builds neural connections; it changes your brain! As you think about the questions I have provided, you will likely develop other questions that you feel are more important and more appropriate to you. If that happens and you indeed spend time thinking about a discipline of interest to you, the learning that I want to occur will occur. I cannot guarantee that this will lead to you getting a good grade in a test over this part of the chapter, but likely it will help. I can guarantee if you routinely practice the line of thinking I am encouraging, it will help you to become a more self-responsible and better learner!

[edit] To Memorize or Not to Memorize: That Is the Question

Researchers in the area of expertise distinguish between rote memory (which involves little understanding) and the type of memorization being done by experts in a discipline. Rote memory is useful in problem solving. However, a focus on rote memory tends to be a poor approach to building a useful level of expertise in any discipline.

As Ericsson (n.d., in press) notes:

The primary goal for all experts is to excel at the representative tasks in their domains. For example, chess experts need to find the best moves to win chess matches and medical experts have to diagnose sick patients in order to give them the best treatment. … As part of performing the representative task of selecting the best move, the experts encode the important features of the presented information and store them in accessible form in memory. In contrast, when subjects, after training based on mnemonics and knowledge unrelated to chess, attain a recall performance comparable with that of the chess experts, they still lack the ability to extract the information important for selecting the best move.

The ideas in Ericsson’s quote have deep educational implications. Many students resort to rote memory with only modest understanding in order to pass tests and the course. The long-term retention of such memorized information tends to be quite low and this approach to learning does not contribute much to building a useful level of expertise.

[edit] Chapter 5: Problem Solving & Other Higher-order Cognitive Processes

Problem solving is part of every discipline, and it is a discipline of study in its own right. Computers are a powerful aid to solving problems in every academic discipline. This chapter includes an introduction to roles of ICT in problem solving.

In discussing problem solving situations, I include the following:

• Question situations: recognizing, posing, clarifying, and answering questions.
• Problem situations: recognizing, posing, clarifying, and then solving problems.
• Task situations: recognizing, posing, clarifying, and accomplishing tasks.
• Decision situations: recognizing, posing, clarifying, and making good decisions.
• All situations: using higher-order critical, creative, wise, and foresightful thinking to do all of the above. Often the results are shared, demonstrated, or used as a product, performance, or presentation.

You have been solving problems and accomplishing tasks all of your life. My goal here is to broaden your internal model of the terms problem and problem solving. I want you to have a mental model that fits with developing a high level of expertise in any discipline you decide to study in depth. It may surprise you that the list places so much emphasis on posing questions, problems, and tasks. Gaining skill in such posing is an important part of increasing expertise in a discipline. Think about this when you are taking a course. From time to time as you listen to a lecture or participate in a discussion, think about what deep, penetrating questions you might raise and/or that you are learning to answer.

Here is a definition of problem that I have found useful in my teaching and writing: You (personally) have a problem if the following four conditions are satisfied:

1. You have a clearly defined given initial situation.
2. You have a clearly defined goal (a desired end situation). Some writers talk about having multiple goals in a problem. However, such a multiple goal situation can be broken down into a number of single-goal problems.
3. You have a clearly defined set of resources that may be applicable in helping you move from the given initial situation to the desired goal situation. These typically include some of your time, knowledge, and skills. Resources might include money, the Web, and the telecommunication system. There may be specified limitations on resources, such as rules, regulations, guidelines, and timelines for what you are allowed to do in attempting to solve a particular problem.
4. You have some ownership—you are committed to using some of your own resources, such as your knowledge, skills, time, and energy, to achieve the desired final goal.

In many problem-solving situations, ICT and computerized tools are resources of the type mentioned in the third part of the definition. These resources have grown more powerful over the years. That is one reason why it is so important to integrate the use of computers in problem solving thoroughly into the basic fabric of the courses you are taking and the areas you are studying. The fourth part of the definition of a problem is particularly important. Unless you have ownership—through an appropriate combination of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation—you do not have a problem. Motivation, especially intrinsic motivation, is a huge topic in its own right, and I will not attempt to explore it in detail in this book. Edward Vockell (n.d) maintains an online book, Educational Psychology: A Practical Workbook. The fifth chapter provides a nice discussion of motivation.

[edit] George Polya

George Polya was one of the leading mathematicians of the 20th century, and he wrote extensively about problem solving. His 1945 book, How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method, is well known in math education circles (Polya, 1957).

In a talk to elementary school teachers, Polya said:

To understand mathematics means to be able to do mathematics. And what does it mean doing mathematics? In the first place it means to be able to solve mathematical problems. For the higher aims about which I am now talking are some general tactics of problems—to have the right attitude for problems and to be able to attack all kinds of problems, not only very simple problems, which can be solved with the skills of the primary school, but more complicated problems of engineering, physics and so on, which will be further developed in the high school. But the foundations should be started in the primary school. And so I think an essential point in the primary school is to introduce the children to the tactics of problem solving. Not to solve this or that kind of problem, not to make just long divisions or some such thing, but to develop a general attitude for the solution of problems. (Polya, 1969)

Polya’s statements about mathematics apply to any academic discipline. A student who takes one or more college courses in a discipline should gain an understanding of the general nature of the types of problems it addresses. The student should make some progress in thinking like an expert in the discipline.

Polya (1957) provides a general heuristic strategy for attempting to solve any math problem. I have reworded his strategy so that it is applicable to a wide range of problems in a wide range of disciplines—not just in math. This six-step strategy can be called the Polya Strategy or the Six Step Strategy. It is a heuristic strategy. There is no guarantee that use of the Six Step Strategy will lead to success in solving a particular problem. You may lack the knowledge, skills, time, and other resources needed to solve a particular problem, or the problem might not be solvable.

1. Understand the problem. Among other things, this includes working toward having a well-defined (clearly defined) problem. You need an initial understanding of the Givens, Resources, and Goal. This requires knowledge of the domain(s) of the problem, which could well be interdisciplinary. You need to make a personal commitment—have ownership—to solving the problem.
2. Determine a plan of action. This is a thinking activity. What strategies will you apply? What resources will you use, how will you use them, in what order will you use them? Are the resources adequate to the task? On hard problems, it is often difficult to develop a plan of action. Research into this situation suggests that many good problem solvers “sleep on the problem.” That is, after working on a problem for quite a while with little or no success, they put the problem out of their minds and do something else for days or even weeks. What may well happen is that at subconscious level the mind continues to work on the problem. Eventually, an “ah-ha” experience sometimes occurs.
3. Think carefully about possible consequences of carrying out your plan of action. Focus major emphasis on trying to anticipate undesirable outcomes. What new problems will be created? You may decide to stop working on the problem or return to step 1 because of this thinking.
4. Carry out your plan of action. Make appropriate use of physical and cognitive tools in this activity. Do reflective thinking as you carry out your plan. This thinking may lead you to the conclusion that you need to return to one of the earlier steps. Note also that this reflective thinking contributes to increased expertise.
5. Analyze the results achieved by carrying out your plan of action. Then do one of the following:

A. If the problem has been solved, go to step 6.

B. If the problem has not been solved and you are willing to devote more time and energy to it, make use of the knowledge and experience you have gained as you return to step 1 or step 2.

C. Make a decision to stop working on the problem. This might be a temporary or a permanent decision. Keep in mind that the problem you are working on may not be solvable, or it may be beyond your current capabilities and resources.

1. Do a reflective analysis of the steps you have carried out and the results you have achieved to see if you have created new, additional problems that need to be addressed. Reflect on (do metacognition on) what you have learned by solving the problem. Think about how your increased knowledge and skills can be used in other problem-solving situations. Work to increase your reflective intelligence!

Many of the steps in this Six Step Strategy require careful thinking. However, there are a steadily growing number of situations in which much of the work of Step 4 can be carried out by a computer. The person who is skilled at using a computer for this purpose may gain a significant advantage in problem solving over a person who lacks computer knowledge and skill. This type of knowledge and skill in using computers is a way to build on the previous work of others. Step 6 emphasizes metacognition. There is considerable research to support the contention that metacognition is a key to building expertise and getting better at problem solving. It is a process in which you think about what you already know and how what you are doing ties in with what you already know.

Every problem-solving activity that you do during your everyday life provides an opportunity for metacognition.

• You make a decision. How and why did you make that decision? How do you know it is a good decision?
• You pose a question. What led you to pose this particular question? In the process of thinking about the question, did you also posit the answer you expect to get or find? Did you think about the usefulness of possible answers? Was the question carefully constructed so that an answer can be found and will prove useful?
• You solved a relatively challenging problem. What knowledge and skills did you draw on? What did you learn during the problem solving process that will likely be useful when you encounter other somewhat similar problems in the future?

[edit] Building on Previous Work

One of the most important ideas in problem solving is to build on your own previous work and on the previous work of others. That is, one way to solve a problem is to retrieve from your own memory either a solution to the problem or a method for solving the problem. Another way is to retrieve this information from another person, from a physical library, or from a virtual library such as the Web.

The human race’s accumulated knowledge is stored in tens of millions of books, monographs, journals, Web publications, and other forms of publication written in many different languages. Much of the accumulated knowledge in a discipline is only accessible to those who have studied the discipline at a graduate school level. While it is easy to talk about the importance of building on the knowledge of others, it can take many years of hard work to develop the knowledge needed to read and understand the accumulated research knowledge in a discipline.

Moreover, most of the accumulated knowledge in any specific academic discipline is not readily available or easily retrievable. It is scattered throughout the libraries of the world, it is written in many different languages, and much is stored in people’s heads. Over time, such difficulties of accessing materials will decrease as the materials are digitized and become accessible through the Web. Progress in the computer translation of languages will help, as will the development of better expert systems (a type of Artificially Intelligent computer system that has a relatively high level of expertise in a narrow field).

Perhaps you don’t know much about expert systems. This topic is covered in Chapter 4. For now, it suffices for you to know that thousands of artificially intelligent expert systems are in use. Each has a very narrow range of capability. For example, nowadays if you apply for a loan at a bank, the decision as to whether to grant you the loan will likely be made mainly by a computer system. Because of progress in this small area, there are far fewer human loan officers working in banks. To summarize, one goal in the study of an academic discipline should be to learn to access the accumulated, discipline-specific knowledge that is appropriate to their educational level and needs and to learn to use this accumulated knowledge to solve problems and accomplish tasks. Certainly you will want to learn what aspects of jobs in your chosen area of study are likely to change significantly or even disappear because of the increasing capability of computer systems.

[edit] Chapter 6: Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

There is a field of study called the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, or the Science of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). This discipline contains considerable information that is useful both to students and to teachers. Since you routinely help yourself and others to learn, SoTL is doubly useful to you.

The unifying theme of this chapter is the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning—sometimes called the Science of Teaching and Learning. We will use SoTL to refer to both and will not attempt to differentiate between the two.

Some major components of this chapter include:

1. Brain science, human intelligence, and cognitive development theories.
2. Teaching theories. This might include topics such as: feedback; computer-assisted learning; distance learning; and learning from and/or through simulations and games.
3. Learning theories, including constructivism, situated learning, transfer of learning, study skills, leaning styles. Learning on one’s own, an d self assessment.

Here is a possible reference for higher education: Chickering, Arthur and Gamson, Zelta (1987) Seven principles for good practice in undergraduate education. Retrieved 6/14/07: http://learningcommons.evergreen.edu/pdf/fall1987.pdf. “Seven Principles” originally appeared in the March 1987 AAHE Bulletin.

1. encourages contact between students and faculty,
2. develops reciprocity and cooperation among students,
3. encourages active learning,
4. gives prompt feedback,
5. emphasizes time on task,
6. communicates high expectations, and
7. respects diverse talents and ways of learning.

[edit] Learning Theory

[edit] Teaching Theory

[edit] Bloom’s Taxonomy

[edit] Lower-Order and High-Order Knowledge and Skills

To Memorize or Not to Memorize: That Is the Question

[edit] Chapter 7: Brain Science

“Did you mean to say that one man may acquire a thing easily, another with difficulty; a little learning will lead the one to discover a great deal; whereas the other, after much study and application, no sooner learns than he forgets?” (Plato, 4th century B.C.)

“If we understand the human mind, we begin to understand what we can do with educational technology.” (Herbert A. Simon)

Right now, computers are not very smart. However, steady progress is occurring in making them smarter. Here is an amusing and/or thought-provoking pair of statements:

1. The typical car has an engine rated at approximately 1,000 “person-power.” When it comes to physical strength, machines are much stronger than people.
2. The typical modern microcomputer might be rated as approximately .01 “human-brainpower.” When it comes to brainpower, people are much smarter than computers. However, computers have by no means reached their upper intellectual limits Some futurists suggest that microcomputers will exceed 1.0 “human-brainpower” sometime in the next 30 years (Kurzweil, 2001).

Measuring computer capacities in terms of “human-brainpower” is suggestive but misleading. In some areas, such as brute force computation, computers are a billion times as capable as human brains. However, it is still a far out, wild prediction to suggest we may have artificially intelligent computers and robots equivalent to a 5-year-old human within 15 to 20 years or so.

This chapter explores educational implications of the cognitive capabilities and limitations of humans and machines. You are very good at some things that computers are not good at, and vice versa. This observation leads us to explore the general idea of humans and machines working together to solve cognitively challenging problems.

[edit] Chapter 8: Human and Artificial Intelligence

[edit] Communicating with a Computer

The core idea in this chapter is the human-computer interface. We can educate and train people in various ways to communicate with a computer system. We can design computer systems that better” understand” the communications they receive from people.

[edit] Human Intelligence

[edit] Artificial Intelligence

[edit] Computational and Procedural thinking

[edit] Chapter 9: Possible Futures of ICT-Integrated Education

Curriculum content, instructional processes, and assessment all designed to empower students and their teachers in an Information Age world.

I have written a fairly recent book on this topic. What I hope will happen is that others will write or help write this chapter.

[edit] Chapter 10: Distance Learning

I tend to integrate Computer-Assisted Learning into this topic.

[edit] Appendix 1: Especially for Elementary School Students

[edit] Intended Audience

This Appendix contains short pieces that are designed to be read to elementary school students or to be read by elementary school students. Most adults have had little experience in writing for non-readers, or for students who are just learning to learn by reading.

Initially, most students find the challenge of learning to read so difficult that they have considerable difficulty garnering information and knowledge from what they are reading. With increasing vocabulary and fluency, students gradually get better at reading for understanding.

Students vary considerably in how easily they learn to read. However, in the United States a general rule of thumb is that at the K-3 grade levels students are focusing on learning to read, and after the third grade students are expected to be able to learn by reading. Of course, there is considerable emphasis on getting better at reading and learning to read as students progress on into the higher grades

Part of this emphasis is on learning to read in the various disciplines that students study. It is a considerable challenge to learn to read math and science well enough so that one can learn math and science by reading.

[edit] Note to Authors and Editors

Consider the teaching and learning wisdom that you have acquired throughout the many years of your childhood and adulthood. Now, Imagine you are talking to or writing for a third grade or fourth grade student. Think about what you can share with this student that will help him or her for many years to come. Remember the adage: "The way the twig is bent the tree is inclined."

I have never tried to write for elementary school students. I did write a book on problem solving for middle school students, and it had a fifth to sixth grade reading level.

Here is an attempt to write at a still lower readability level. The following text is written at a Flesch-Kincaid 3.1 grade level.

I’ll bet your head is always full of question. How do you find answers to your question?

Sometimes you can answer your own questions, just by thinking. For example, you might ask yourself, “Am I thirsty?” You might ask yourself, “Am I tired?” You can answer these questions by just thinking.

Perhaps you are in school. You might ask, “How long before school ends today?” You might be able to figure this out. Maybe you know what time school ends, and you know how to read a clock. Then you can figure out an answer to the question.

There are other ways to find answers to questions. You can ask a friend, parent, or teacher. Sometimes they will know an answer. However, it is easy to ask questions that they cannot answer. Also, sometimes there is no one there to answer your questions.

Still another way is to ask a book. That is, look for an answer in a book. Look for an answer in a library. Look for an answer on the Web. Do you know that the Web is the biggest library in the world? It is getting bigger all of the time. If you learn to use this library, you will have a good source of answers to your questions.

[edit] Developing a Lesson Plan

The short reading given above could easily be made into a lesson plan for use in a third or fourth grade classroom. The basic ideas in the lesson are:

1. Help students learn to ask "researchable" questions. Oral practice, with feedback from the teacher and from the students is a good way to do this.
2. Have students practice in asking questions that they can answer themselves, that their fellow students can answer, that a parent or teacher might be able to answer, and that might be answerable through reading reference material. There are lots of ways to make this into participatory activities in which the students are actively engaged.
3. Have students practice in asking and answering questions than can be answered through use of a search engine on the Web. Initially, in such an activity, the teacher is very apt to want to restrict the search to a very limited amount of the Web—such as to reference materials that have been carefully vetted and are written at a suitable level.
4. As students gain in experience, the lesson can be one in which students pose questions to each other, or are asked to find answers to challenging questions posed by the teacher.
5. Students can provide oral or written answers to the questions. As students gain in knowledge and experience, they can pose more complex questions that have more complex answers, and then write answers that are based on understanding several difference references.

Once students gain some experience in this type of question asking and answering activity, it can become a regular part of a lesson in any discipline that is being covered in the curriculum. Indeed, as a new topic is about to be introduced to the class, a good approach might be to have them pose questions that they feel are relevant to the topic. What might a student expect to learn by studying the topic? Think of such an activity as an advance organizer.

[edit] Appendix 2: Especially for Middle School Students

[edit] Appendix 3: Especially for High School Students

[edit] Appendix 4: Especially for College Students

[edit] Appendix 5: Especially for Adult Learners

[edit] References

Many of the references in this document are live links to resources available free on the Web. However, some excellent Web-based resources cost money (often, an abstract is available free), and there are many other excellent resources that are not currently available on the Web.

The current plan is for the References section of this document to contain all of the document's references.

Fisher, Douglas and Frey, Nancy (2007). Checking for Understanding: Formative Assessment Techniques for Your Classroom. ASCD. Chapter 5. Using Projects and Performances to Check for Understanding. Retrieved 11/28/07: http://www.ascd.org/portal/site/ascd/template.book/menuitem.6b8e5ca7dd1e8e8cdeb3ffdb62108a0c/?bookMgmtId=47fa22adb7765110VgnVCM1000003d01a8c0RCRD

Moursund, D.G. (May 2007). A College Student's Guide to Computers in Education. Access at http://uoregon.edu/~moursund/Books/CollegeStudent/CollegeStudent.html.

Moursund, D.G. (April 2007). A Faculty Member's Guide to Computers in Higher Education. Access at http://uoregon.edu/~moursund/Books/Faculty/Faculty.html.

Moursund, D.G. (August 2006). Parents' Guide to Computers in Education. Access at http://uoregon.edu/~moursund/Books/Parents/Parents-Guide.html.

Moursund, D.G. (June 2006). Introduction to Using Games in Education: A Guide for Teachers and Parents. Access at http://uoregon.edu/~moursund/Books/Games/games.html.

Moursund, D.G. (June 2006). Computational Thinking and Math Maturity: Improving Math Education in K-8 Schools. Access at http://uoregon.edu/~moursund/Books/ElMath/ElMath.html.

Moursund, D.G. (2006). Computers in Education for Talented and Gifted Students: A Book for Elementary and Middle School Teacher. Access at http://uoregon.edu/~moursund/Books/TAG/TAG.html.

Moursund, D.G. (2005, 2006). Brief Introduction to Educational Implications of Artificial Intelligence. Access at http://uoregon.edu/~moursund/Books/AIBook/index.htm.

Naisbitt, J. (1984). Megatrends: Ten new directions transforming our lives. NY: Warner Books.

Watson, John and Ryan. (November 2007). Keeping pace with K-12 online learning: A review of state-level policy and practice. Retrieved 11/28/07: http://www.nacol.org/docs/KeepingPace07-color.pdf. (146 pages)

[edit] Author or Authors

The initial author of this page is Dave Moursund.