Hi guys,

Quote Originally Posted by selil View Post
There is training and there is education. To understand the difference do you want your teenage daughter to receive sex training or sex education?
Yes, I always keep that one in mind even though my daughter isn't a teenager any longer .

Quote Originally Posted by selil View Post
I hate to link farm but I've written a lot about this topic.

Some highlights

The Socratic compass: Giving students directions not answers
Guiding students to the questions that they can answer.
I always liked this one, Sam. Then again, I like Socrates, so it's not surprising.....

Quote Originally Posted by selil View Post
As marct alluded to a lot of what we know now as higher education was began by John Dewey (1907ish). His books are available free online and are guiding principles on how we teach and educate. Bloom a 1950s era educator is how most of our outcome based education programs began. There is also Gagne and a few others. If we really want to start talking about philosophical differences we will have open up the constructivist versus behaviorist approach to education. Basically constructivists believe that you can educate from principles to knowledge (grossly simplified), and behaviorist believe that factual iteration (memorization) is the way to knowledge.
[rant]
The constructivist - behaviourist debate, at least from what I have seen of it, is as chimerical as most of the other dualisms pervading our modern academic debates; Nature - Culture, Mind - Body, etc. Personally, I find most of these debates to be no more than an excuse for excessive logorrhea. They are situated within a cultural matrix that demands oppositional dualisms as a means to avoid examining what is really going on.
[/rant]

Now that I'm got that out .....

Most of the way we conceptualize the "debate" is predicated on an incorrect acceptance of mind-body dualism (check out Bateson's Angel's Fear). If we drop the dualism, as I think we should, then what we have is a variable membership function (actually, a fuzzy set membership value). Let me put this in the context of training vs education (another false dualism mind you ).

"Training", as most of us currently conceive it, is "physical" or, at least, primarily physical while "education" is generally perceived of as being "mental" or "intellectual". Really? If you look at most of the current neuro-psychological research on, say, learning music, one of the things you will find is that there are physical changes in the neural structures (specifically the creation of new neronal pathways and the myelinization of some of them). Education isn't separate from the physical, it just takes place in the neurons rather than in the muscles (which is the dominant sight for a lot of training).

One of the reasons why I think the constructivist - behavioiuralist debate is silly, is that they are both techniques for changing neuronal pathways. Furthermore, the way the debate is structured assumes (requires in fact) a standardized "student" which, to anyone who has taught, is somewhat laughable (i.e. there is a range of neuronal structuring amongst our students - we call this "learning styles"). Both stances may work, depending on the students.

One way to parse out what we are doing is to ask ourselves how much "freedom" do we wish our students to have in the exercise of their learned skills? If the answer is "not much", then we should aim at a more behaviouralist approach, and if it is "a lot" then at a more constructivist approach. And the initial decision, BTW, will depend on the area of knowledge, the "skill set" as it were.

Let me get back to this idea of "learning" for a minute. One of the things I realized quite early on, and it's one of the reasons I mentioned all that biographical data, was that learning takes place all the time, and that individual learning crosses all formal disciplinary boundaries based on internal analogs. It's the old "that reminds me of..." syndrome, and it operates because of the way our brains are organized. For example, I was trained in fencing when I was young, and I brought that with me when I was later trained in dancing and both of those feed into my singing which, in turn, feeds into my understandings of COIN.

When I wrote earlier that we can't control what people learn, this is the phenomenon I was referring to: association by analog. This very phenomenon is also critical in understanding how we construct our institutions, although that's probably the subject for another post .