Embodied Cognition – Matt Gaydos

There are two terms that are interchangeability used often, though they are different:

• Grounded Cognition – Grounded in many forms
• Embodied Cognition – Grounded in context, physical cognition, perception of sences

It is popular to think of the mind as a wax tablet, a computer. It is a move from symbols to something else that is in the context of sensory input.

What does embodied cognition say about cognition?

• Cognition is situated
• Cognition is offloaded (tools for thoughts)
• Cognition is for Action

Experiential learning therefore is an instructional design method based on the education psychology of EC.

Some readings on embodied cognition

• Wilson, M (2202). SixViews of Embodied Cognition
• Barsalou, L (2008) Grounded Cognition
• Glenberg, A (1997) What Memory is For

Paradigms of Educational Research Reflection

The task of synthesizing the readings surrounding the conceptual history of research paradigms is daunting, especially as it relates to making observations and recommendations concerning school reform. This semester we have traced notions of time, agency, the citizen, reason and statistical categories as they have slowly permeated global thinking, tracing the lives of grids of intelligibility that both reveal and obfuscate our world. We have seen faith in mathematics and reason overtake faith in anything can cannot be measured numerically, with the results of these measurements turning into objects that in turn nudge the culture that constructed them in unpredicted ways. We have seen entire paradigms of society and education come into being, attach to concrete actors and therefore become invisible actors themselves. In the next few pages I would like to look at two specific areas within higher education that exist as though they were objective truth, failing to acknowledge their own recent construction and internal limitations. Though this process leads to more questions than prescriptions, it is quite possible that the simple task of deconstruction will lead to insight. To begin, let us look at the notions that have answered the question: What is the purpose of Education?

In the 1900s, the democratic ideal and progressivism were beginning to take root within the popular vernacular and especially within the thoughts of education leaders such as Harper and Dewey. Midwestern universities such as Michigan, Wisconsin and Chicago were incorporating the “German Science model,” first seen at John Hopkins. Within a republic such as the United States, the citizen becomes an active agent in the governance and policy of the nation. The university therefore becomes a place to produce the leaders and guardians of its society’s democratic ideology. The university, in this view, is to “promote civic responsibilities, enable progress, promote human happiness, and provide policies, theories, and programs to grapple with the urban moral disorder” (Popkewitz Unpublished). According to Harper, the university acts as “an institution of government, the guide of the people, and as an ally of humanity in its struggle for advancement” (Harper 1905). Here the tone of education and democracy as a savior to society begins to become apparent.

Dewey makes the link between democracy and salvation even more clear as he states that democracy is not simply a political theory but a divine revelation (Dewey 1892). If democracy is a revelation from God himself, then Harper believed the university is its priest. “The university, like the priest, leads those who place themselves under its influence, whether they live within or without the university walls, to enter into close communion with their own souls – a communion possible only where opportunity is offered for meditative leisure” (Harper 1905).

With these two fathers of contemporary education policy, the union between government, education and a transcendent ideology has been made complete. To borrow from the title of an essay by Popkewitz, the university is a prophet, science is its messenger and democracy is its revelation. It is appropriate at this juncture to ask critical questions about the nature of this tightly defined spiritual calling of education. For example, what exactly is liberty? What “civic duties” will enable the individual to have such liberty? Who will the teachers and designers of this education be? How do these specific notions of progress interrelate with contrasting views? Does the faith of the university in itself and its practices lead to a blinding pride being transferred to its students? Does the belief that the university creates the leaders of society lead to a manipulation of what is taught so that the contemporary ideologies of power are simply replicated to another generation?

Another paradigm that heavily influences the practices and policies of education is the notion of statistics as a tool for social reform. The field of social statistics was conceived out of a desire to enable liberty and eliminate poverty in society (Desrosieres 1991). As the faith in reason has increased, social phenomena are translated into subjects that can be studied with numerical means, allowing for analysis to be performed on the abstraction.

In terms of education, student learning is one such attribute of the school that has been made numerical. Here at the university of Wisconsin, students are presented with various forms of assessment during their time of studies. These include paper and pencil math/science tests, essays, projects, and in large or distance classes, multiple choice and true/false tests are a favorite because computers can easily perform the grading. Usually the tests are performed in the context of a large room, in silence, each student working alone for a period of an hour or two with no outside contact or collaboration. It is absolutely an individual endeavor.

Here my first question rises: Why is testing almost always done as an individual when the practice of most every discipline is done in the context of a community?

Assessments require a rubric in order to quantify translate student work into a numerical value, a percentage. This single number is a proxy for student mastery, a percentage of perfection. In some cases, this number is corrected with a ‘curve,” a term derived from “The Bell Curve,” a popular psychology book that relates intelligence to social/economic condition by separating the elite, average and below average citizen (Herrstein 1994). This curve is used to correct for errors in testing by making sure that a few amount of students perform poorly and very well, and most students fall in the middle. The test values of a particular student’s work is processed through a weighted-average calculation and converted into an alphabetical symbol that puts each student into of seven categories (‘A’, ‘BC’, ‘D’, ‘F,’ etc.) from excellence to failure. These symbols are then converted back into numerical values into another weighted average to arrive at the final GPA number. The endgame of all this analysis really comes down to creating a system where students can be sorted into categories for the purpose of awards, acceptance into additional schooling or jobs.

Through the numerical process of abstracting all of a students work into a single value in the range of 0.00 to 4.00, comparisons can be made as to the value of the students learning. We have made a student into a number, and rarely is the translation questioned. As Hacking might explain, we have invented types of students because we have developed equalities between them. If only the numbers are viewed, student A with a GPA of 3.0 and student B with a GPA of 3.0 are the same, and different than student C with a GPA of 2.0 (Hacking 1986). And though the reality of the grade point average is purely constructed, it is attached to the decision-making processes of real institutions, thereby becoming real itself (Desrosieres 1991).

Where does one begin in reforming these practices? Do they require reform or is the abstraction process useful enough to give a benefit that outweighs its error? Can the numerical abstraction of student performance be replaced by something else that provides the same value or is the very notion of reducing an entire student to a number itself flawed?

One of the facilitating aspects of a paradigm is that, by definition, it colors and shapes the way we view the world. A paradigm may be impossible to authentically see, like a black hole that can only be observed by the way it affects its surroundings. It may not be possible to even conduct the research of paradigms without the influence of the scientific, sociological, philosophical influence of the enlightenment and a particular notion of history and agency. This said, I do believe that the endeavor of understanding the foundations of educational research and reform is not in vain, only that much work would be required to answer these questions intelligently.

References

Desrosieres, Alain (1991). How to Make Things Which Hold Together: Social Science, Statistics and the State. Discourses On Society: The Shaping of the Social Science Disciplines. Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Dewey, J. (1892/1967-1990). Christianity and democracy. The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882-1953. The Electronic Edition. The Early Works of John Dewey, 1882-1898. Springfield, IL: Southern Illinois University.

Hacking (1986). Making Up People. Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought. Standford University Press.

Harper, William Rainey (1905). The trend in higher education. The University of Chicago Press.

Herrstein, Richard J. and Murray, Charles (1994). The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. Free Press.

Chinese Pedagogic Discourse – Professor Wu, Zhejaing University

In a eurocentric field of education discourse (and all its baggage), Popkewitz’s introduction included this qoute from his work: “Disturb the common sense of western and chinese thought … to resist the demands of discourse that exist in public domains.”

Can we talk about Confucian heritage in terms of memorization? literary interpretation? teachers as the authority? students as the dependent? These are the words of education.

Key questions:

• What pedagogical vision is unveiled in Chinese dialog?
• What counts as knowledge and learning?
• Where does the meaning-making process occur?

Let’s look at Confusius talking to his student, Tsze-kung. Analects 1:15

When should the teacher speak?

“I never enlighten anyone who has not been driven into being ‘fen’ and never express to anyone who has not got into being ‘fei’”

The purpose of the teacher is to help the student express somethiing in language that they already have inside.

What should be talked about? What is offered by the teacher?

“To learn is to know the way of growing. By growing it means polishing, carving, transforming and vbecoming” No need to grow to fast.

He responds by using a cultual poem.

“Poetry is the saying of the unconcealedness of what is” (Heidegger)

“If you do not learn poetry, you will not know how to speak” (Analects 16:13)

So what is the contemporary Poetry?

Confucius refuses to talk about his poetry until the student who is ready. “Only the students who already understands can listen” (Heidegger)

If you go today to China, the classroom will look much different than what Confusious talked about. Subject has become object. They use “grids of specification,” like Foucault talks about.

A couple things about the modern thinking:

• Only the things that fit together in a system are worth knowing.
• Attributes such as author, phlosphor, teacher are new constructions.
• Qualification is the most important thing

History

What is History in this ancient view?  History is an active thing, happening right now. The historian is a neutral documenter, recoding what is done and what is dais, side-by-side.

We have to think about this because history is a very important source of meaning.

How can we evade value judgement?

These days, democracy is considered the image of peace. But you could ask, what is the source of meanings beyond human-made value?

Ritual Hermeneutics Vs. Reason

Philosophy is not a theory but an activity

The term langiage-game is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or form of life

Question: Does Confucius’ view of education work in the k-12 environment?

The division of knowledge into subjects and grades is a human construction and the cause of many problems.

Question: 1. Given the importance of confusious in Chine, how did wrote memorization become so important? 2. Has the dialog become a ritual itself?

Ritual is not something superficial, it is the action of meaning. If you visit a village today, the design of the houses and community follows the ritual. I memorize in order to store so they become lenses to my life.

“Family, raising children, is more important that governing nations”

Flow (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi) Discussion: Led by Kevin Harris

Flow is a timeless state of consciousness where the skill of the participant is perfectly matched to the challenge at hand.

1. A challenging activity requiring skills: The challenge must match the capabilities of the person. Competition might generate this state, but if the goal simply becomes to beat the other player, flow might not be achieved.
2. The merging of action and awareness: People in flow report merging with the activity they are doing.
3. Clear Goals and Feedback: Trivial goals don’t matter, sitting on your couch and surviving is not interesting enough. In general, immediate feedback is best. What’s interesting is that people report going into a state of flow by doing creative acts or shopping. What is required is personalyl set goals and achiving them.
4. Concentrating on the task at hand: Memory of past events fades away, ability to plan is inhibited. Self <-> Attention <-> Enviroment. It is coming from an information processing view, describing where the brain is putting it’s attention.
5. Paradox of Control: It’s about exercising control in a difficult situation, demonstrating that you are in control. This means the activity has a doubtful outcome. It also requires the ability to change that outcome. There are also two kinds of danger: objective and subjective. Objective dangers are more random, Subjective dangers relate more to the participant. Gambling is an example of the paradox of control. They think they are in control, but actually are simply addicted.
6. The loss of self-consciousness: Not loosing yourself, but loosing perception of yourself.
7. The transformation of Time: Time elongates and stretches. Interviews with dancers show that a 1/4 second spin may feel like 30 seconds.
8. The Autotelic Experience: Anything can bring you to a state of flow as long as the choice to participate is voluntary.

Subjects turned Objects: Statistics as a vehicle for social constructions to become forces within educational design. A personal reaction to readings from AERA, Baker, Desrosieres and Popkewitz

I entered into the field of education at a particular time in it’s history. Institutions have been long established that package learning into title, diploma, and degree programs. These institutions are governed, implicitly and explicitly, by dozens of other institutions such as grant providers, civil governments and accreditation boards, each with their own agendas. Everyone is accountable to one or more parties in this system. I am accountable to a design budget.

My dilemma is really the same as the others’ in this system: What can I do with the resources I have to produce the best educational outcome? But what exactly is the “best outcome?” I’ve used many versions of “best” in the past. I want the “deepest understanding” or the “richest learning experience.” How about some “good grades” or “higher performance than other instructional methods?” One colleague of mine said it simply, “It is all about efficiency.” We want the largest return for our investment based on how we define return.

So let’s define our return in terms of the kind of student we want to produce. If we can define the outcome then we can design the treatment, right? If I’m not mistaken, this is the moment when numbers will begin to poke their little heads up. At first, we are able to use qualitative statement to describe this student. Here are a few:

“The student will be able to look at a list of metals and make an informed guess at which will best suit a particular engineering design challenge”

“The student will be able to navigate in a french speaking environment”

“The student will have a positive experience with the course material”

What happens next is that we start grouping and counting. How often did the student choose the right material? What kind of french environments? What percentage of students had how good of an experience? Two things just happened here according to Desrosieres and Popkewitz. First, we just created systems of equalities that allowed us to group individual things into categories. Second, we began to record abstractions of those categories by translating them into numbers, which have no meaning in of themselves.

If we are going to group things together, one way is to define the attributes of a group member and look for similarities that exist in in the individual cases. If enough attributes are present to a high enough degree, that particular item is considered part of the category. Thank you Descartes for giving us the tools of deconstruction.

This process has the side effect of creating an equality between members of the group. The fact that they have been combined makes them the same. By following this pattern, the wonders of sociology were created (Desrosieres 1994). We can measure things like poverty, unemployment, working class people, good teachers, bad students, etc.  Along the way we have actually fabricated types of people (Popkewitz 2009). We have constructed a notion of a thing that does not exist, an abstract definition of a combination of attributes to stand in for a human being.

Is there anything wrong with this? Morally, I’m not sure. However, it sure is helpful. Galton’s wood board with a falling steel ball converts a random series of coin flips into the famous normal curve abstraction. This abstraction then allows us to see things in a new way and find patterns were we didn’t see them before. Abstraction is the basis of logic. It is the tool in which we can make meaning out of new experiences, record music with marks on paper, create computers, make strategies on how to get out of a fight with you wife and many other wonderful things. Once we have something as complex as a student converted into something as simple as a catagory, we can count, average, find means and calculate predictions. Like the normal curve, these tools give us a new grids of intelligibility (Popkewitz 2009). On the other hand, abstractions are not mearly the subjects of our reason. Once they have been given a name they become objects themselves and push back on us.

For example, when governments write number based rules to establish wealth and taxes, these categories may actually change the way citizens make decisions and do things. I saw a clear example of this when wealthy houses in Nicaragua and India would leave a few bricks out of their building so the house would not be “complete” and therefore exempt from tax. Numbers and categories are also pushing back when students enroll in a particular university based on it’s rankings or a student is not allowed to graduate based on a standardized test score. The stories are countless and the space of many contested critical analysis. According to Heran in L’assi se statistique de la sociologie, as abstractions are linked to hard social facts such as institutions, laws and customs, they take on a substantial existence of their own.

So to come full circle, I believe that statistics become the vehicle for defining the best educational outcome due to the system of accountability and expectations of efficiency that surround the designer. In instructional design we often start by creating an abstract description of a desired outcome. We then design a treatment and asses whether it met the outcome, iterating along the way. The danger in this outcomes based approach is that it will always tend toward a success description in terms that can be numerically or categorically measured. The critical designer must now determine what assumptions are used to create the required categorical equalities. They must also determine how the definition of the outcomes may become actors themselves, changing the system by their very existence.

This last point is quite revenant to my current design investigations. Students will always be tempted to game the system, like the homeowners in Nicaragua, to use the systems of assessment to their own advantage. It may be that if we continue to represent their learning progress only in terms of categorical, statistical abstractions, the actual outcomes may be very different that those predicted, or even within the vision of our mathematics. Could it be that if educational designers are aware of this fact, they could create a design where “playing the game” will actually embody the desired learning experience? Either way, for better or worse, education research has placed much of its faith in numerical studies for its objective research. If such an educational design does ever exist, it had better prove its value numerically.

References

AERA. Standards for Reporting on Empirical Social Science Research in AERA Publications.  (2006) pp. 1-15

Baker. Risk, Insurance and the Social Construction of Responsibility. Embracing Risk: The changing culture of insurance and responsibility (2002) pp. 33-51

Desrosieres. (1994): How to Make Things Which Hold Together: Social Science, Statistics and the State. pp. 15

Popkewitz. (2009): Numbers in Grids of Intelligibility: Making Sense of How Educational Truth is Told. pp. 1-24

Heran, F. (1984): ‘ L’ assi se statistique de la sociologie’ in Economie e t Statistique, 168 (juillet-aout), 23-26

The voices of the crowd as an oracle of salvation: Participatory media though the eyes of Dewey’s view of Democracy and Popkewitz’s notion of Cosmopolitanism

Like the formative years of the printing press in Germany, the early World Wide Web was often a resource for enterprise. Both also have taken on the greater roles of becoming also an agent of epistemic revolution. Many of the first books to be printed en masse were titles that would guarantee readership as the first large web sites would generate large profits, but as the cost to make these materials in each media were reduced, their authorship became more distributed. This, however, is where the web page continues along a trajectory where the book never will travel, individual access to contribute to global discourse. The simple cost of producing material in an electronic media is near zero, providing a mechanism for writing to be as inexpensive as reading.

This fact may be a causative agent behind the contemporary trends within education to involve new medias in their pedagogy. It may also be that educators see media creation technologies creating the possibility to instantiate previously unobtainable pedagogies and theories. As educational technologists trumpet recent phenomena such as the success of Wikipedia as proof of educational constructivism, communities of practice as an example of group cognition and massively online multiplayer videogames as a window into Vygotsky’s scaffolding theories, much of the rest of the world also sees democratic participation in media as the path to their view of salvation. The interests of the educators are only part of a larger fascination with participatory media in general. Examples exist in all fields from art to politics.
I believe that Dewey’s writings on democracy and the notion of cosmopolitanism help explain the endearment our society has with participating. It may be that by examining the chain of philosophies have led us to this point in time that we can understand why think the way we think and these two notions have a vast history within themselves. Though a description of the cosmopolitism metonym may be in vain, let me begin there nonetheless.

Cosmopolitism is a pervasive social norm that is commonly traced back to ancient Greece. The Greek term itself, kosmopolitês, can be translated “citizen of the world,” and marks a radical change from the notion that a citizen was either part of the Greek State or the other notion, a member of the Hellenistic made of thinking. As a citizen of the world, there is an individual role for each person within the society made of humankind and the notion that such a thing exists in the first place.

In The Age of School Reform, Popkewitz investigates the makeup of the notion of cosmopolitism and where it intersects with education reform. One of these elements, according to Popkewitz, is that the modern notion of time (past, present and future) is combined with a belief in human agency (demonstrated in the protestant revolution) synthesizes to form a societal belief that we have the capacity to change our future for the better.

Another component of cosmopolitism is the enlightenment’s faith in science and reason as a path and tool for an improved society. Gone are the confusions brought by religious belief and mysticism. The cosmopolitan society uses the tools of statistics to improve poverty and technology to release liberty, an idea we see continued in Dewey’s essay, Christianity and Democracy.

 

Dewey begins his writing defining Christianity not as a dogma or as a religious cult, but as freedom itself. “Jesus had no special doctrine to impose, no special set of truths labeled religious,” he says, followed by the assertion that the purpose of the Christian religion is revelation, and that must result in something tangible, experienced and discovered by the believer about the Truth of the universe and freedom within. For Dewey, this means “democracy [itself] is a spiritual fact and not a mere piece of governmental machinery.”

Where Dewey’s understanding of democracy and Christianity’s intersection becomes the most pronounced is when he states that by removing restrictions, the truth that is available is given a chance to become apparent. It is by giving a mechanism for all people to speak that we will be able to receive revelation.

By noticing these notions of cosmopolitanism and the new religion of democracy, it is easy to see why the fascination the world has with Web 2.0 goes far beyond the love of shiny new gadgets and technology. These views are more deeply rooted in the assumption that human reasoning (which is demonstrated in the creation technology) when put within context of the world stage (like the internet) is actually a cult in and of itself with the end being the ability for the individual to curate and display truth in a way that will “save” the world. By this interpretation, access to and participation in the creation of media is the means by with the citizen is made cosmopolitan.

Do the open movements create a democratic space for curriculum?

Being at the Open Education 2008 conference and meeting folks like David Wiley will get you thinking that open source thinking and the creative commons are going to save the world. Teachers like Michael Apple will make you pick up challenge and try to do something yourself.

I wanted to synthesize critical education theory and open education.

• I love knowing that cell phones and blogs are providing an alternate communication mechanism for the oppressed to engage in authentic citizenship.
• I am hopeful that researchers and teachers will realize that ideas are not theirs to “own” and sharing them gives their work meaning.
• I am convinced that just because someone can afford MIT (or UW Madison) it doesn’t mean they are any better equipped to lead the world than someone who could not afford those degrees.

The problem is that even open access journals and open universities solve all the problems. They do however point us in a direction.

Take a look at the full paper, where I discuss everything from citizen journalism to economic systems. It is rough and young, but I hope some of these ideas will continue to take root in my career.

gagnon-open-education.pdf

ARIS Website is Live!

I just set up the new website for the ARIS project at www.arisgames.org

It is an exciting time for the project. Source code is available for anyone on the internet that wants to get involved and we have a bold plan for next semester.

Prototyping a Game in Under 7 Days

Gamasutra featured a fantastic article recently from a group of Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center. The Experimental Gameplay Project created 50 games by 4 grad students in 1 semester! One of the Hits was the World of Goo, which our team used last week to demo a great new design and was downloaded 100k times in the first few month of being released.

Here is the Article

• Enforce Short Development Cycles: Twice as much work does not mean twice the quality
• Prototype themes like ‘gravity’ or ’springs’ to constrain creativity and generate more
• Develop in Parallel: Only the Beginning and End of a design project benefit from a team
• Spend time gathering concept/inspiration art. It makes a big difference (but will not fix a bad design)
• Do things quick and simple – Cheat often
• Don’t over engineer and make things general and reusable, make them specific to see if they really work

Reflections on “La Escuela Fratney”

Usually I reserve a post for reflecting on an entire book, but the second chapter of “Democratic Schools” edited by Michael Apple and James Beane is worthy of it’s own contemplation.

La Escuela Fratney is a bilingual (english and spanish) K-4 school on Fratney St in Milwaukee,WI. The school was founded by the negotiations of both local politics and a grass roots community groups (like the NNF, Neighbors for New Fratney). Central to the theme of the school lies a deep commitment to fostering unity among a diverse intercultural neighborhood school by valuing the individual value of the students and parents while instituting collaborative governance that deeply involves the local families.

A number of specific items impressed me:

• Two part-time, later one full time staff, were hired for the express purpose of recruiting parents to get involved.
• Use the whole language learning method results in exceptionally high interest in reading and writing including the formation of a section of the library dedicated to student authored books.
• Agility and time given to school strategy and initiatives such as the no-TV week challenge (and resulting critical media literacy projects to understand the hidden messages in media) and the clever idea to start school 10 minutes early every day so once a week student can go home early and give teachers a half-day to strategize together.
• The dedication of the staff to mentor students into mature responsible individuals by taking the time to process things like discipline issues in class and through discussion.

I suggest to get the book even if just for this one chapter.