The neuron basis of learning

from TED

On Knowing

When we refer to knowing something, we usually mean know-how and know-what. These are knowledge that get things done. Let's taking cooking curry as an example. The know-how is the recipe, the method of preparation, the know-what is the knowledge of the right combination of different types of spices to make the dish.

However, there are some useful know-x too. If I know someone who can make a good curry, I can ask. That is a know-who. If I know somewhere I can find good curry, I can go there and get what I want. That's know-where. Both of these (know-who and know-where) is a step "further" from the actual knowledge of making the curry. But it achieves the same objective - a good curry meal.

Talking about one-step from achieving my objective, there is a know-how2. If I know how to find the recipe, I can still get the recipe and make my curry. Here I am calling know-how2. There is an equivalent know-what2. Instead of combining the spices myself, I can get a curry powder - someone with the first know-what has used that knowledge to make the curry powder so that I don't need that original knowledge to achieve the aim. So if I know a good brand of curry powder (that's know-what2), I can also achieve my objective.

Let me elaborate a bit to drive home one message I would like to make in this post.

To cook the curry meal, I will need a pot, a stove, the actual ingredients themselves. There are specific knowledge embedded in the making of the pot, the stove, growing the spices and so on. In the example above, they were assumed and were not the focus of the path to make a curry meal.

In other words, we are now living in a highly entangled web of knowledge, many of these are assumed. If we go back to the "basic", we need to go back to the age when fire was first discovered, or even earlier. The environment we are living today has all the accumulated knowledge ever discovered by human.

As an individual, a pre-school child walking into a kindergarten already knows quite a bit of things. The only really "blank slate" is very likely the moment when the sperm enters the egg. From that fertilisation moment onwards, the baby is developed under the influence of the social environment we are born, initially via the food the mother is eating (which is obviously socially bound) to later the first sound a baby hear (still in mother's belly!) ...

In the brief discussion above, I have left out know-why. The development of theory, scientific theory is what I have in mind now, enables us to "explain" thing and hence to predict thing. When we ask the question why apples fall down, we answer with the theory of gravity. However, the theory of gravity itself is a generalisation of many carefully done observations of things falling towards the earth. The fact that this particular apple falls is (1) an evidence supporting the theory of gravity and (2) can be "explained" by the theory.

Another way of putting this. "Why x?" is equivalent to "do you know a generalisation (theory) of which x is an evidence".

Hence, for learning, if the focus was to solve a problem directly, one needs to know-why to find a theory and hence apply, or have know-how and/or know-what. If that's knowledge is not readily available, the next step would be to draw on know-who, know-where, know-how2 and/or know-what2. That said, a lot of the knowledge is in the community (all human experience combined).

We are in an exciting time. We are beginning to see knowledge moving from human into machine. But that's for another post.

A New Explanation For the Plight of Winter Babies

The initial comments at slashdots focuses on the accuracy of the data and soon shifted to speculation of the causes. In his book Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcom Gladwell writes about the birth month of players in the Ontario Junior Hockey League. More players were born in January than in any other month. Why? Read Chapter 1 of the book.

Want to know the answer now?

The explanation for this is quite simple. It has nothing to do with astrology, nor is there anything magical about the first three months of the year. It's simply that in Canada the eligibility cutoff for age-class hockey is January i. A boy who turns ten on January 2, then, could be playing alongside someone who doesn't turn ten until the end of the year—and at that age, in preadolescence, a twelve­-month gap in age represents an enormous difference in
physical maturity.

This being Canada, the most hockey-crazed country on earth, coaches start to select players for the traveling "rep" squad—the all-star teams—at the age of nine or ten, and of course they are more likely to view as talented the bigger and more coordinated players, who have had
the benefit of critical extra months of maturity.

And what happens when a player gets chosen for a rep squad? He gets better coaching, and his teammates are better, and he plays fifty or seventy-five games a season instead of twenty games a season like those left behind in the "house" league, and he practices twice as much as, or even three times more than, he would have otherwise. In the beginning, his advantage isn't so much
that he is inherently better but only that he is a little older. But by the age of thirteen or fourteen, with the benefit of better coaching and all that extra practice under his belt,
he really is better, so he's the one more likely to make it to the Major Junior A league, and from there into the big leagues.""

The cause, suggested by the original researcher can be found here.

Computer Program Self-Discovers Laws of Physics

While I have not given sufficient thinking on the implication of "The Petabyte Age" to have proper comment, I want to point out my underlying stance for scientific theory.

Science focuses on repeatable observable events. We throw a stone up, it falls back down. Do it again, it falls again. So, we try to *understand* a collection of similar events (throwing the stone up, forward etc) by proposing a theory. The utility of the theory is that we can use the theory to *predict* similar events.

As we progress, and hence have accumulated more observations, we want to develop more powerful theory which can predict more types of events. When one theory can also *explain* (i.e. predicts events) other events covered by other theory, we choose the more powerful theory.

At the same time, as the accuracy of observation increases, the demand on the theory also increases. The theory needs to predict to the same or higher accuracy of the observations.

An example is the relationship between Newtonian mechanics and Einstein's relativity. At human speed, Newton's laws of motion is perfectly fine in predicting the velocity of objects. As the speed approaches that of light, we need relativity to predict the velocity. However, at the same time, Relativity also produces the same prediction of velocity at human speed albeit the mathematics is more involved.

I also noted two interesting points on this process.
1. Terms are coined to represent very specific ideas used in the theory. For instance, momentum is defined as the mass times velocity. Such concepts are useful shorthand which can reduce the complexity of the theory.
2. Inevitably, mathematical models are used. Mathematics are tools developed entirely based on logic. In its purest form, mathematics are not independent of evidence or observation. Mathematics are pure conceptual construct - an art. Scientists find the logical deducing power of mathematical model useful to express complex observations. Almost all major advances of physical science is pre-dated by the development of a powerful mathematical tool. Most physical theories are now expressed in mathematical form.

The combination of (1) and (2) above makes learning science a highly demanding task. There are lots of terms to learn. These are concept shorthand and conventions. In order to be able to understand the theory, we must have working knowledge of all the terms used. As many physical theories are expressed in mathematical form, we must also have working knowledge of the system of mathematics which is used by the theory.

With these observations, I am not sure computer-based generation of theory would be useful for our understanding of the physical realm we live in.

How do you write the job description of a janitor?

While you are watching the video from TED below, take the following questions in the background.

What is the most difficult part of being a "good" janitor?
How to include the 'good' part of a janitor job into the job description?

How can we educate for a wiser generation?

Experience and Learning

From Ted.com: Jonathan Drori: Why we don’t understand as much as we think we do

Jonathan asked four questions near the beginning of his talk:
1. A seed weights next to nothing. Where does the stuff of the tree come from?
2. Can you light a little torch bulb with one piece of wire, a battery and a bulb?
3. Why is it hotter in summer than winter?
4. Can you draw the orbits of the planets?

Surprisingly, I was able to answer all questions correctly, honest! How about you?

The take home lesson of this talk is that learning is more than just collecting experience. Intuition, our collection of experience, is often wrong!

Watch the video to find the answers to the questions above. Near the end of the talk, Jonathan throws two more questions to us:
1. How does an aircraft's wing create lift? (ensure you also explain how planes can fly upside down.)
2. Why is the sea blue? (and why is it blue on cloudy days?)

Experience and knowledge 1

The recent exchange of posts and comments shows the difference between Stephen Downes and me is more than just on the semantics of the word "experience". So let me just state the meaning I attach to this word and let Stephen do the same if he so chooses.

To me, experience refers to the total stimulations, entered via our perception systems, that have caught our attention. Experiences should be able to be recalled.

Closely related to experience is the notion of "intuition" which is the belief (or world view) based on our past experiences. Note here that culture is built up via our part experiences in interacting with other human.

One of the interesting observation related to the examples I used in Experience *alone* is a poor teacher is that the current accepted truth in both cases are counter-intuitive. In fact, a lot of important discoveries are made when obvious intuitions are being challenged.

The point I was trying to make in that post was that experience ALONE is not the sufficient condition to enable learning. In many cases, however, experience provides a good foundation for understanding.

Learning is a deliberate effort by the learner. Speaking and hearing is almost effortless if one is bought up within a community using that language. Writing and reading, however, requires deliberate effort - one needs to learn to read and write. Experience alone, i.e. seeing groups of letters on newspaper every day, does not lead to understanding of the news.

In this era, knowledge is the kind that requires learning - beyond just experience.

Experience *alone* is a poor teacher

Stephen Downes left a thoughtful comment to my last post pointing out the poor example given by Halpern & Hakel, 2003:

In fact, experience is a very good teacher - if we listen to it consistently and with rigour. And indeed, it is the only teacher we have.

I agree. The emphasis should be on the word *alone*.

Let me try to give examples:
If we push an object along a horizontal surface, our experience will tell us that when we stop pushing, the object will eventually stop moving. No matter how many times you repeat this experiment, it will have the same answer.

For all practical purposes, including building high-rise building, we can treat the sruface of Earth as flat.

Science now tells us that both of these experiences are wrong. We now know that these experiences are wrong^*. In the first case, our experience is masked by 'friction'. In an ideal situation where is no friction between the object and the surface and when there is no other external force acting on the object, the object will move at constant velocity forever - inertia! In the second case, the Earth being spherical can be noticed when we are watching a ship sailing towards the land. The highest point of the ship will come in sight first because the Earth is NOT flat!

We have millions of experience daily. Among those, a large amount do not attract our attention any more. For instance, our excitement of being able to brush our own teeth has long fainted away. Yet a lot has been repeated so many times that they have become "truth".

The key to use experience as a teacher is to "triangulate" and seek coherent explanation beyond just the experience itself. The additional effort beyond experiencing the experience is where the real learning occurs.

^*In light of the comment by Stephen Downes, I have changed this sentence. See today's post.

Experience alone is a poor teacher

from Applying the Science of Learning to the University and Beyond; Teaching for Long-Term Retention and Transfer
Halpern, Diane F., Hakel, Milton D.. Change. New Rochelle:Jul/Aug 2003. Vol. 35, Iss. 4, p. 36

Experience alone is a poor teacher. There are countless examples that illustrate that what people learn from experience can be systematically wrong. For example, physicians often believe that an intervention has worked when a patient improves after a particular treatment regime. But most patients will improve no matter what intervention occurs. If the patient does not improve, then physicians may reason that he or she was "too sick" to have benefited from effective treatment. There are countless examples of this sort of erroneous thinking in both professional practice and everyday life, where current beliefs about the world and how it works are maintained and strengthened, despite the fact that they are wrong.

People, therefore, frequently end up with great confidence in their erroneous beliefs. Confidence is not a reliable indicator of depth or quality of learning. In fact, research in metacognition has shown that most people are poor judges of how well they comprehend a complex topic.

The fact that most people don't know much about the quality of their comprehension is important, because there is a popular belief that all learning and assessment should be "authentic"--that is, nearly identical in content and context to the situation in which the information to be learned will be used. But what is missing from most authentic situations--and from most real-life situations as well--is systematic and corrective feedback about the consequences of various actions.

To return to the example of physicians, many medical schools have now adopted simulated patients as a teaching and testing tool--actors trained to present a variety of symptoms for novice practitioners to diagnose--because unplanned clinical encounters with real patients can't provide the necessary variety and feedback.

fallacy: Necessary and sufficient conditions of creativity

I wrote about Sufficient condition of creativity, and the necessary condition for Eureka Moments, have I found the necessary and sufficient conditions for creativity? No!

If you think I have, you are in the trap of a logic fallacy. You see, the necessary condition is for Eureka moment - a type of creativity and the sufficient condition is for Darwinian evolution creativity, a different kind.

Eureka Moments

In Sufficient condition of creativity, I show that hard work can be called "creativity". Continuously improving designs until the working version is unrecognizable from it starting version. This is based on the Darwinian evolution concept.

Most Science advanced in the Darwinian way, paintakingly testing and disproving theories until an elegant new theory appears.

Other type of "great leap forward" is made when a sudden connection between two theories are connected and sparks off an insight. [see e.g. Brain Scans Show Working Memory, Moments Of Insight] This is the Eureka Moment - after the myth that Archimedes, fresh from discovering the principle of buoyancy during a bath, running naked through the streets of Syracuse yelling “Eureka!”

Since such Eureka Moment requires connection between previously considered unrelated theories, the necessary condition of Eureka Moment is the board scope of the creator. Without knowledge of the two theories, there could not be any connection. This again points to "diligence" as an important factor. In this case, a potential creator should read/understand a board scope of theories. When the spark lights, Aha! Eureka!

Learning

A man maie well bring a horse to the water, But he can not make him drinke without he will. A dialogue conteinyng the nomber in effect of all the prouerbes in the Englishe tongue by John Heywood (1546)

The job of today's educator is to make the horse always thirsty and be prepared when the horse lead you to the water. Albert IP (2008)

Ripples' Model

By Phil Race

I think these four 2-part questions that Phil has asked a lot of people are very inspiring. To get the most out of it, please type in your answer in the input boxes below (they will not be sent anywhere, just there to give you a place to jot down your answers.) You can then see the answers from most people by highlighting the blank space between the questions.

1. Think of something that you're good at, something that you know you do well.
How did you become good at it? Write a few words below.


practice
trial and error
having a go
repetition
experimenting


2. Think of something about yourself that you feel good about.
How you can tell that you feel good about this? What's your evidence to support this feeling? Write a few words below.


feedback
other people's reactions
praise
gaining confidence
seeing the results


3. Think of something that you're not good at, perhaps as a result of a bad learning experience.
What went wrong, and whose (if anyone's) fault it may have been? Write a few words below.


did not really want to learn it
could not see the point
bad teaching
could not make sense of it


4. Think of something that you did learn successfully, but at the time you didn¡¦t want to learn it.
What kept you going, so that you did indeed succeed in learning it? Write a few words below.


strong support and encouragement
did not want to be seen not able to do it
needed to do it for what I wanted next


How are you doing? What is/are the messange(s) in these four questions? Get the rest from the powerpoint linked to this post's title.

Collaboration and its fractal

(1) We usually think of collaboration as students group together to solve, collaborative, a problem. I can visualize this as a problem (or course) as at the centre with students working around it.

(2) When we are faced with a problem, we would try to find information related to the problem in order to find a solution. It is an inverse of the visualization above. A student is at the centre with different information surrounding him/her to solve a his/her problem.

(3) However, it is important to note that the simplistic visualization of (1) is inaccurate because each student in (1) also brings in a lot of information. So each student should be a visualization similar to (2).

The simplistic visualization of (2) is also inaccurate because each piece of information was a problem because and has been solved collaborative by a group of people. Hence each information in (2) should be replaced by (3).

Collaboration is a fractal recursion of information/problem/solution with people.

Do you agree?

Students demo cheating & my reaction

Jason Schultz posted 4 videos of kids demonstrating their favorite cheating techniques. Jason's reaction is "it's fascinating to see all these kids disclosing their favorite techniques"

Here are the videos. I will disclose my reaction after I saw these vidoes after them.





My reactions;
1. How clever these kids are (1st and 2nd videos) and how well they can present the information! Education has already succeeded!
2. The technical skills used in the third video already show that this guy can find a job in media with no difficulties.

Back to the 'problem' of "cheating". Yes, there is a problem here. But it is the way the examination is set up, not the students. Isn't obvious to you that the so-call cheat are memory-aides? When questions are set to measure memory recall, which any educator can atest to you is one of the lowest level of mastery of knowledge, these memory aides become cheat. when the questions are set to measure higher skills, they are useful information to help solving problems.

I program in Javascript day in day out. But every now and then, I need to do search on Javascript functions which I use less frequently. Is that cheating? Yes, of course. But that's part of the work process.

Our children are growing up in an era where information are abundant. Information are literally a few clicks away. To them, memorizing pieces of information is a waste of time and energy.

I wonder when school will reflect the reality and teaches our students to properly use the memory aide in solving authentic problems.

No Child Left Behind…There’s More Cheating than Ever, and the Teachers are Doing it

It may sound impolite for me to say that it is NOT new. In Chapter 1 of Freakonomics, titled "what do school teachers and sumo wrestlers have in common", the authors explain the phenomena clearly.

It is no use to trying the catch the cheater. It is the system and to solve the problem, we should fix the system.

What if when a school is found under-performing, a huge amount of resources are poured in to help. Then every school, in chasing the resources, will push up its standard to look under-performing!

Got it?

Coverage Equity - Part 2

The issue of a syllabus and the limited time we have as a teacher/instructor/guide is the tension between the breadth and depth of treatment of a subject area. Traditionally, as an information gatekeeper, the issue on breadth is an important choice to make. Today, when information are just a few clicks away, learners potentially can access whatever information that interest them. The information gatekeeper role has long gone!

I have been careful not to use 'knowledge' in a general sense to describe information. I believe there is a huge difference between 'information' and 'knowledge' - and this is particularly important in the information era. Bloom taxonomy and many other similar scheme come into mind when we are dealing with "knowing" something, but that is for another day or another occasion. The distinction here is that something needs to be known before it can be qualified as knowledge. The process of helping someone to "know" information is the task for the teacher/instructor/guide. The availability of information is now given.

When we give someone a piece of paper with something printed on it, this is NOT teaching. When we can ensure that the information has been read and understood, then that piece of information (not the paper on which information reside) has been transformed to a piece of knowledge for that special someone who manages to read and understand that is written on that paper.

However, this process of transformation - from information to knowledge - is an inner task which can only be performed by the learner. We cannot do that for anyone. One can only lead a horse to the water, right? The obvious task is to make the horse thirsty at the first place before we lead it to the water!

That comes back to the issue of coverage of a subject area again. How can we design a course which make the learner more thirsty the more the learn knows about the subject area?

Like pushing drugs, satisfying the immediate need is NOT the secret of the selling of drugs. It is the addictive nature of the drugs which sell themselves.

If we can arrange the coverage of a subject area in a way similar to drug - addictive to the learner and urges the learner to want to know more, we have a solution!

Only God Gets Things Right First Time

I really like the title.

Whether there is god or not, it is OK for us to make mistakes - not only the first time, but many times, again and again ... until it works!

Small successes generate fulfillment and encourage more try and error.

Small failures build experience and resilience.

"R & D" is "Repeat and Duplicate". Only after successfully repeat previous experiments and duplicated results that we can start making small change which may or may not lead to improvement.

Aha moment is the sudden connection between seemingly unrelated concepts which give insight (or a different angle) to the solution of a problem. Again that means the concepts have been in our mind for a long time and the problem has persisted enough to recognise the significant of the sudden connection. Experience, experience!

Coverage Equity - Part 1

Are teachers obliged to cover every part of a syllabus?

When I was teaching in Hong Kong, I used to tell my students that "I teach things that won't be examined and I set questions which I have not taught" (教不考,考不教.) Of course, in an examination oriented system, I got lots of protests.

BUT, I can explain. I told my students that there is no way I can predict what will be set in a public examination (even for those serving as question setters, they should not let their students know the question in advance, right?) The only way I can teach them (my students) to be well prepared is not by teaching them how to answer "a" question. The best way is to teach them how to answer "any" question. So those that I used as examples in my lessons, I promise them that they will not appear in the papers that I set for their examination. (This explains the first half.) For those questions that I set for their examination, I won't discuss in class! That's the other half.

It is better to teach how to fish rather than just give them fish!

But the same proclamation has also protected me from not covering every part of a syllabus.

I always asked my students to come to my lesson "unprepared". They need to bring no textbook (unless I explicitly asked them to do so in the next lesson). They only need to bring a working brain, a rough sketch book, pen and ruler to my class. I emphasis on a working brain, explaining that "day-dreaming" brain is NOT a working brain in my class!

I believe science is a journey, a process of exploration and discovery, a joy in discovering something new about nature and the things surrounding us. I ask questions, get them focus on the issue at hand and ask them to find the answer.

Discovery and innovation are slow and expensive (compared to duplication or copying, - just simple transfer of information). Hence it is often the case that I can only cover that much of material in the allocated time.

It was over 15 years ago. My role as a teacher was still very much an information age keeper. Obviously some students would/should hate me. But in real life, I found that I was one of the most favorite teacher. When I walked into a class empty-handed, students would love the class. When I walked into the room with a textbook, they knew that I was forced to cover material, in a quick hurry!

Today, information is widely and freely available. Many a time, students could be more knowledgeable in a special area than the teacher. Teacher no longer is the information gate-keeper. What should be our role? Should we insist on covering every aspect of a syllabus (to give the students a more "balanced" perspective on the subject area)? Should we allow students to specialise into parts of a syllabus? How should an evaluation system be designed to meet the new reality?

When Wikipedia Is the Assignment

via OLDaily

The use of wikipedia as an assignment should (and *will* as more teachers understand the value of doing so) definitely receive great support and wide appreciation. The assignment suggested by the article has the following advantages:
1. a real introduction to the community of practice the students are aspired to.
2. a solid contribution to the broader community by the work done by the students.
3. a good motivator for students - the work is REAL and is appreciated by many.

I believe there is ground of improvement too.

Not all academic work and progress are made in a big step. In fact, small steps are the norm. As students begin participation of their chosen community of practice, we should encourage them to take part and contribute in smaller steps. Instead of asking students to submit a whole article (and potentially creating the disappointment of being merged or deleted by the wikipedia community), an equally valuable contribution would be to make positive improvements to existing articles.

If the weighting of the assignment is 40%, students can be asked to make 40 improvements to a broad range of relevant articles (of their own choosing preferably). If the improvement survives after a given time interval (depending on the revision cycle of the article), the point is awarded. Those who made contributions which do not survive the wikipedia review process, they may be given an opportunity by making another improvement to another article etc (time permitting, of course under the current "fixed time" slotted school system).

This change will help to cover a wider range of topics too.