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June 22, 2006
John Bransford on Learning, Innovation and Expertise
Notes from this afternoon's keynote by John Bransford, professor of learning sciences at the University of Washington, at the AALF conference. Most of my notes are not exact quotes. -andy
Humans have always been learners - as a species, it's our strength.A turning point was the transatlantic cable that linked the british isles with Newfoundland. You no longer had to wait for ships to carry information across the ocean. But it was super expensive - a dollar a letter, payable in gold.
But people were still place-based; this affects visions of the possible.
The emergence of global connectivity is just a little blip in human history. But we live in a very different era.
Blogging has become an emerging political power, at least in the United States. Wifi is changing lives . Cell phones are reshaping Africa.
A question comes up for me - what do we do with these awesome new tools?
We can use them for web-based virtual environment collaborations. He shows photos of U of Washington students using Second Life to participate in a virtual lecture - shows clip of Ben Stein lecturing in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Not exactly collaborative.
Maybe Star Trek can provide a better vision? Shows clip of futuristic classroom where students turn on lightbulbs rather than raising their hands; otherwise the classroom pedagogy looks like it could have been from the 19th century. Not exactly futuristic.
How do we help people develop the ability to make wiser choices to life decisions? One way to approach this is as a learning issue. What can we do as educators to take advantage of this unique time in which we live?
How do we change learning stereotypes, things like boys are better at math and science than girls? How do we create experiences that let people behave their way into new identities?
The LIFE Center: to unlock the mysteries and powers of human learning as it occurs in formal and informal settings, from infancy to adulthood.
Developing expertise involves lots and lots of practice - and practice is more important than "pure abilities." Whenever we try something new, we go through a period of feeling klutzy. How we interpret that klutziness stage directly affects whether or not we give it up. Helping people become aware of this is important.
People must be able to develop schemas. Test prep companies do this all the time. You help the learner understand the way the tests are organized. Eventually you learn to recognize the type of problem being presented. Letting people demystify this can be an important thing.
Practicing something helps people understand and notice things. He shows a video of a colleague looking briefly at a brain scan and being able to spout all sorts of knowledge about what she's seeing, with great fluency and expertise. And it's not just a skill that scientists have - he shows a clip of a houseboat owner being able to spout all sorts of insights after glancing at a photo of a houseboat. His experience allows him to glean details very quickly. Expert teachers, chessmasters, architects, policemen, etc can all do this.
He then has the brain expert and the houseboat see each others' clips. They have no clue what's going on. "Expertise is more importance than intelligence," he suggests.
Another part of expertise involves change and adjustment. Adaptive expertise - researched by Hatano and Inagaki. Bransford sometimes works with Boeing employees. For a long time, the company was really good at making efficient, faster prop planes. But eventually, you hit a brick wall; you can't go any further. You have to innovate and go a different route - in this case, jet engines. But making this leap allows you to push the envelope even further. Now they're saying aluminum is too heavy, so they make the jump to composites. This is a part of expertise that isn't about getting better progressively with practice. It's being able to change thinking and innovate.
Anders Ericsson's work says that if you want to be super good at something, you have to continuously resist automatize your methods. Look at Tiger Woods. He was great for a while, then he dropped off for a bit, then recalibrated his swing. Because his body grew, the swing he used as a teenager no longer made sense. He could have chosen not to recalibrate, but instead he hires a coach, actually loses efficiency for a while, but then gets back on track. Recalibration lets you reach a higher level of performance.
Working with a group of teachers, he asked a group of teachers to divide up into different groups each with a different subject area. All of them chose to be in the history group, because they weren't comfortable with math and science. He pointed out that they've just stepped into the role of the student and the discomfort they feel in the classroom. So he encouraged them to think about themselves and encouraging them to adapt and take more risks, getting out of their comfort zones, as a way of becoming better teachers in the long run.
Making America more innovative requires us to take more risks and try new things. But the university system discourages professors from taking risks, and instead focus on their areas of expertise to achieve tenure. Meanwhile, grants tend to go out to senior-level researchers rather than the younger risk takers, again stifling innovation. You also have to be willing to learn, and admit when you're wrong. Overconfidence in one's expertise can stifle innovation.
Margaret Mead: Traditional societies were likely to use apprenticeships to prepare people for work. But now we're in a transformational society, where there's a constant transformation of new technologies. Since young people have more time to keep up, they end up becoming greater experts than adults. But most institutions aren't organized to capitalize on this. It's nothing new. Farmers resisted students from land grant colleges to help them improve their techniques. That's why 4H clubs were invented - to give the children of farmers the chance to learn agricultural research and new techniques. The county fair then served as a showcase for the community to see what the young people had accomplished. It's youth expertise guided by mentors.
Organizational effects on innovation. Giving people space to make mistakes. In the business world, if you don't provide support for innovation, most people would leave. Yet in schools kids often don't get the chance to innovate or make mistakes.
Formal education does not support self directed learning. We've trained students to expect to be told what they're going to learn, he says, quoting Peter Vaill.
There's also the overzealous application of current knowledge. Stan Wineburg of Stanford worked with AP history students in high school, then worked with professional historians. The AP students knew more facts, but couldn't complete tasks like analyzing archival documents for discrepancies. The students jumped right in, but also jumped to conclusions when interpreting the documents, unable to examine the documents through the context of the time in which they were created. They're applying knowledge willy-nilly, while the historians held their theories lightly and let the results fall where they may.
We need to understand ourselves as learners. A frog describes to a fish what different land animals look like, but in his mind, the fish can only picture animals that look somewhat like other fish. We have to learn to break out of that pond.
Posted by acarvin at June 22, 2006 3:56 PM
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