by Judith V. Boettcher
CREN
In June, a group of neuroscientists in Canada announced that they may have found an explanation for the brilliance of Einstein's mathematical thinking. After studying a part of Einstein's brain that had been sitting in pieces in jars for more than 40 years, the team determined that a crucial region—the inferior parietal lobe-- was 15% wider than normal. This region is the area used in mathematical thinking and imagery of movement. The scientists also found that a groove that normally runs through the parietal area of the brain took an unusual course through Einstein's brain, providing more room for this lobe, resulting in more interconnections of brain cells.
This announcement caught me just at the time that I was thinking again about the cognitive processes that we use in building new concepts, and especially in building concepts dependent on alien or difficult information. These thoughts then provoked thinking about the difficulty of designing content resources to facilitate learning. (I have been struggling over the last few months with concepts — alien to me— such as digital certificates, and how they might work in authenticating machines, faculty, and students for accessing content resources across the web.)
The need for more research on learning is becoming increasingly urgent. The amount of information that we need to continually learn is staggering. To design learning resources that support ease, facility, and yes, joy, of learning, we must know more about how to structure knowledge. We must also know more about what types of interactions with the knowledge fit individuals. So, we have questions, such as, "What kinds of content resources are needed to support the growing of concepts? And as we want to do this on the web, "What kinds of content resources on the web can help us learn more effectively?
The processes underlying concept formation continue to be more or less a mystery today. Our understanding of what the brain/mind is doing as it learns is based on observable behaviors and what learners can remember or think they do. Many self-reports offer fascinating glimpses into the process. One of the news stories about Einstein's brain included his memory that he developed his insights about the theory of relativity conducting a thought experiment on "what it would be like to ride through space on a beam of light." Other self-reports describe having one's "trains of thought" interrupted and "gathering one's thoughts" together.
The current constructivist theory (or philosophy) of learning speaks in terms of students building concepts and constructing their knowledge base. This is an improvement over the blank slate model in which the faculty were expected to write on the blank slates of the minds of their students. Over the last 15 years, the constructivist model has had imagery creep, generating related concepts such as "scaffolding" learning which provides temporary supports for learners as they acquire concepts.
We may want to shift to a more animate imagery of the learning process, such as cultivation. Rather than thinking about building knowledge bases in our brains, we may want to shift to speaking of growing, nourishing and cultivating core concepts. How about thinking in terms of "seed concepts" that can be the core of the knowledge nodes within our brain/minds. Just as plants flourish in an environment with nourishing food and water, our learning brain/minds may develop richer, more dense and interconnected concepts when they are able to grow and develop within rich, stimulating, and supportive environments.
The Internet web itself is a good image to draw upon for an organic image-based theory of learning. The concepts that we must work to grow and form are the bulbs that will become our web sites, portals, and core nodes of a related set of concepts, our interconnected centers of knowledge.
Lev S. Vygotsky is a Russian psychologist best known for his work on the relationship of thought and language which he formulated in large part on his work in concept formation. But just what are concepts? We talk about them all the time in designing learning activities. An interesting way to think about concepts is that they are a good example of themselves. Briefly concepts are abstractions that have been "generalized from a series of discrete impressions." In other words, concepts are ways of chunking information and making ideas more efficient to manipulate. This brings us full circle, to the axiom that the more we know, the more we can know.
We get off track, I think, because we often think of concepts as singular entities such as words, but Vygotsky's work clearly differentiates words and concepts. Words are not the concepts, but merely signs or symbols of the concept. This explains several phenomena. How often have you experienced reading a description of a new technology discovery, and find that you are only reading "words", and must start the page, the paragraph, the whole article over again? How many times as you are explaining a cluster of new ideas to students do their eyes glaze over? A reviewer of Stephen Hawking's 1998 book, A Brief History of Time, said that he was quite mystified both by the book and his reaction to it. He said that he understood all the words individually, but that he didn't have a clue as to what they all meant together. A clear case of difficult and alien concepts! In such a case, we are and only dealing with the signs and symbols of a concept and not the concept itself. This example also suggests why learning all the vocabulary words in biology, theology or computer science is ineffective by itself. One ends up with just words, words, words! (Yet, Hawking's book sold nine million copies in forty languages worldwide, a testament to our optimism of our intelligence, I think!)
Vygotsky's work on the formation of concepts and conceptual groupings also illuminates some of the details of the "ah-ha" experience. As the words and the thoughts interact and shape, and transform each other, we often experience a flash of insight, and a set of formerly discrete isolated bits and pieces of information suddenly form a larger more complex thought. And suddenly, there is a ripple effect throughout the brain when "the new higher concepts in turn transform the meaning of the lower."
While this cognitive and learning theory is fertile ground, we have a good deal of our own cultivation to do as we ask the following questions: What are our brains/minds doing when we are forming and growing new concepts? How do our brains/minds work when we are thinking about solving problems? And how do we store what we know so that we can access it when we need or want it?
We have the beginnings of answers to some of these questions, but the need for more research on learning and concept formation and thinking is urgent. We are now all spending more time than ever, learning new stuff to keep up with the world. We also are not learning much of what we should, because it takes too long. We do know that time is an element in learning, but how much do we know about speeding up the learning process and increasing the efficiency of the thinking process?
Our students are growing brains/minds that need to serve them during many great leaps of technology and social science that lay ahead. How do we design and develop and integrate into a learning experience the knowledge gardens for our students? Comments, as always, are welcome. (jboettch@cren.net)