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Tuesday, 25 May

Interesting conversation about science, its relation to other forms of human activity, triggered in part by Crossing the lines of science and formal systems.  What gets in the way of science being a common part of everybody's life?  Why does everyone interact with music but not with science?  Where does the perception that one needs to be an "expert" to engage with science come from and can that be corrected?  Can we blend science/english minds instead of making choices between them?  What would that require of how science is presented/taught? See Science education (and science) as conversation and Put a little science in your life  and Put a little science in your life, extended.

Some further ideas about this arose from reading student papers linked to above ("Starting points").  The emphasis was on making courses things that all students can engage with.  One extreme possibility is to let courses be constructed based on student interests.  An alternative possibility is to structure courses around a theme that everybody is interested in, and allow student interests to influence the particular flows that a course takes at any given time.  In either case, there is a need to give up some teacher authority/autonomy in the interests of co-construction. And to assure that courses are structured so as to encourage students to believe that they in fact have things to contribute (cf Expertise?). 

Tuesday, 1 June

Rich discussion of the issue of what education is for, whether there is a way of teaching that is relevant for all subjects, levels, socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds.  Are there "universal tools" that students should acquire or should courses simply convey whatever different skills, perspectives, bodies of information they represent?  Rather than "prepare" students for particular future needs and challenges, should one instead or in addition progressively "empower" students to deal with unpredictable challenges? 

The problems of the "preparation" approach are exemplified in Mind over meds.  For some thoughts about generalisable ways of teaching, see Building a better teacher.  Among the suggested things to focus on as generalizable skills were

• analytic reasoning
• skepticism
• metacognition
• creative thinking

Is the model of "liberal arts" education, encouraging students to widely explore based on their own interests, relevant in other contexts?  Would "generalized" approaches be relevant/useful in vocational education?

Friday, 4 June

Some interesting reactions to our experiment in "open-ended co-construction." In comparison to other learning experiences, one finds oneself "thinking in many different ways."  Enjoyable but "problem of getting out of bouncing thoughts".  Maybe its "bouncing thoughts" that make birds better than people at Three Doors?  Maybe people seek "authority" in religion/science/etc to avoid bouncing thoughts/incoherence/depressive rumination?  Clearly the phenomena of multiple selves is relevant in an educational context. 

There are interesting and perhaps relevant parallels between multiple thoughts, multiple disciplines, and social conflict.  Could we think of multiplicity/diversity not as contentious but rather as generative?  Perhaps by not insisting that there has to be one overriding "Truth" but rather by allowing multiple, even conflicting, perspectives to stay in play at the same time?  Is there a need for a "fuschia dot" to help achieve this? 

One possible approach to this set of issues is to think more about "thinking" and what is involved in it.  Perhaps "thinking" is a way to notice and find potential resolutions for internal conflicts, and offers possibilities alternative to any of the contending understandings.  PG: "I don't fully understand what I actually think about something until I can formalize it, make a model of it".  Rather than trust an authority, oneself included, one should test understandings (see Inevitable Illusions by Piatelli-Palmirini).  A model of how birds might solve the Three Doors problem was offered, and might be extended to show both the strengths and limitations of "thinking." 

The question was raised of what distinguishes "thinking" from other processes going on in the brain.  Perhaps one can build up to "thinking" as per the following
Start with the "formal", thoughtless

• Add randomness
• Add monitoring of internal variables ("reward" is going up or down)
• Translate new observations into a new formalization (preference is digital rather than analog)
• Add abstract "objectives" that can themselves be modified?