Technologies for Creative Thinking and Learning

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1. on 29 Jan 2008 at 11:04 pm 1.jessica_kline said …

   I have nothing but wonderful things to say about Professor Hashimoto. (Although its funny referring to
   him as “Professor Hashimoto” - he simply went by “Hash”). As a professor of English, he taught an
   expository writing class that not only taught me methods of effective writing, but also taught me to
   love writing. He inspired his class by uniting each student with the text of an accomplished writer:
   the guy to my left and William Carlos Williams, the girl to my right and Henry David Thoreau, and me
   and Joan Didion. I instantly loved and admired Joan Didion’s style – sentences of varied length,
   sentences filled with disclaimers and explanations, statements so bizarre and unexpected they were
   impossible to predict.

   The reading from How People Learn by J.D. Bransford, A.L. Brown, and R.R. Cocking describes the
   optimal environment for learning. Two components of such an environment include providing a
   learner-centered classroom and providing examples of mastery. Through uniting each of his students with a writer that inspired them, students were not only able to witness writing mastery but also receive a personalized learning experience.

2. on 30 Jan 2008 at 12:27 am 2.hsin_hsien_chiu said …

   Being an architecture student, learning from real context becomes an essential process of study. As design studio is the most representative and demanding course for us, one of the most excellent experience for me is having a real design project as our studio topic: the renovation of a traditional market. We need not only to experience physical site, but to interact and negotiate with local residents to be able to integrate their practical demand into design. Each line we draw on the paper reflects no more real than this. Context has been deeply rooted in our mind to lead us complete the entire project.
   As the content mentioned in the article “Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning”, design studio is a kind of cognitive apprenticeship, emphasizing on authentic activity and the integration of situated context, concept and culture. In terms of the influence of school culture, developing design in the studio together could provoke more creativity and inspiration. Also it allows more interaction and discussion on the same design issue. Students could share different perspective or information about the physical site and local culture. Learning process is amplified by taking avenge of school’s learning atmosphere in this way.

3. on 30 Jan 2008 at 12:30 am 3.maryanne_berry said …

   Maryanne Berry

   One of my best learning experiences occurred last semester when Professor Jabari Mahiri agreed to facilitate an exploration of Second Life (SL) by small group of graduate students in the School of Education. While I gave myself credit for “the having of wonderful ideas” in proposing the class to him, I was one of the least capable members of the class in terms of navigating the virtual world. (I had never played a video game.) At various points in our semester long exploration we apprenticed with different people. Sharon, a member of our class taught us to take/send photographs, manipulate objects and even shoot bow and arrows. She invited us on a tour of the virtual library at Santa Clara University where she works and where we were able to view digital stories that her writing students had created. Other mentors. though they did not have the university background were equally adept at demonstrating to us how buildings were constructed, how art, literature and music could be imported and viewed. I began to imagine how learning could be very different from what I had experienced as a young person.

   The exploration gave me the chance to examine concepts I have been studying in grad education classes. Apprenticeship as it is practiced in schools often designates the “more capable” peer, mentor or teacher by using very narrow criteria. My experience in SL suggested to me that the notion of apprenticeship needs to be more carefully theorized. Just who the “expert” was in SL was in a constant state of flux depending upon the changing demands of the activity. A virtual world might be just the place to develop a theory of situated cognition.

   Sadly, in the “real” world education is becoming less and less creative and more scripted. As Jonathan Kozol points out in his most recent work, Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America (2005) millions of student are being taught largely through “rote-and-drill approaches.” Describing struggling schools under “various forms of state review” he writes, “the very large sums of money that these schools have spent to purchase scripted programs, and to train their teachers in the ways that they must use them, also serve as a deterrent to a change in course, particularly at a time when many districts have been subject to the sharpest cutbacks in resources they have faced since World War II” (308). Under these conditions its easy to imagine the effects on learning Duckworth warns against when she writes, “If teachers feel that their class must do just what the book says and that their excellence as teachers depends on this, they cannot possibly accept the children’s divergence and creations” (8).

   Reflecting back on the documentary about the misconceptions students held with regard to the seasons and phases of the moon, the teacher was able to pay attention to “incomplete understandings, false beliefs” and with the help of physical models undo the thinking to which students clung. In the current system, many teachers have neither the resources, nor the opportunity that allow them to investigate how students think.

4. on 30 Jan 2008 at 12:35 am 4.jon_breitbart said …

   Bransford et al.’s discussion of a learner centered classroom, as well as the importance of building a sense of community and helping students gain a sense of ownership of their ideas (and learning), resonate especially well with a number of my fondest memories from my 5th grade classroom with Mrs. G-B. A couple examples:

   Instead of the usual vocabulary tests common in elementary school, Ms. G-B devised an activity in which she chose a variety of ten new words each week, defined them for the class, and then had the class as a whole write a story using the new words. We started at the beginning of the year and continued adding to the story with a new set of words each week. By the end of the year, the class had created a complete, coherent novel that incorporated the vocabulary words we had learned each week. This activity made a task which students often find boring or burdensome into a creative and collaborative endeavor.

   In another project, Ms. G-B assigned us to think of a subject or skill each of us wanted to learn more about. She then had us devise a plan (on our own) for how we were going to teach ourselves and then go ahead and execute the plan over the period of a couple weeks. At the end of the couple weeks, we reflected on the progress we had made and evaluated the parts of our plan that had worked well or whether some change sin the pan might have helped it be more successful. In this activity, by allowing us to individually take control of the learning process, Ms. G-B gave us a real sense of ownership, not only in our own ideas, but also in our own beliefs about how to best teach ourselves something we felt was important. And, again, the activity promoted a great deal of creativity and flexibility in the learning process. The evaluation stage also gave us the sense that assessment didn’t have to be limited to grades or what just what the teacher thought, but also about how well we thought we had done and gave our personal feelings and beliefs credibility.

   The values discussed in Bransford et al., as well as Duckworth’s
   emphasis on student freedom of exploration brought me back to Ms. G-B’s class several times. I think it is not by accident that this classroom is the one I remember the most clearly (and fondly) out of pretty much my whole elementary and secondary (not to mention higher) educational experience!

5. on 30 Jan 2008 at 3:00 am 5.aylin_selcukoglu said …

   Throughout the readings for this week, I kept trying to think of my the best learning experience that I’ve had in my life. That’s hard for me to pinpoint because so much of what I “know,” I don’t really remember how I learned specifically (I do have a bad memory as well). Since my background is in computer science, I especially tried to think back to when I first learned about what a program was or an algorithm or binary numbers, concepts that seemed very abstract to me at the time since they were taught that way. I felt a lot of the Brown et al. paper about situated cognition really described my initial education (especially at the high school level) in computer science topics; I felt like I “learned about” a lot of concepts but I didn’t necessarily “learn” them (5). I was able to pass an exam (and even then not so much) but not necessarily use the “conceptual tools in authentic practice” (5).

   Getting back to my best learning experience, I think it would have to be my weekly dance practices as part of the Merge Sort Dance Troop, a group of thirteen computer scientists who performed sorting algorithms for K-12 audiences as part of a project at my undergraduate university, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. During weekly practices we learned two choreographed dances that illustrated two different sorting algorithms: merge sort and quick sort. You could easily demonstrate this same idea without dancing, as I had “learned about” it previously, but by but actually learning a choreographed dance with each part of the algorithm broken down and associated with a specific set of dance moves really helped me “learn” the concept. I was participating in an “authentic activity” (though some computer scientists would beg to differ, they wouldn’t be caught dead dancing the merge sort, especially to Fatboy Slim’s Weapon of Choice) where we were sorting ourselves (by height) as individual elements.

   I feel a lot of computer science concepts were taught (to me) with the idea that they were “abstract” and “self-contained.” As I mentioned above, I did a lot of work with educating K-12 in computer science concepts while in undergrad and I feel like, at least at the K-12 level, that idea might be slowly changing (and definitely needs to).

   One teaching experience comes to mind where we specifically focused on drawing out and working with pre-existing ideas and understandings that students bring to the table like the Bransford et al. paper encourages. When teaching 7th and 8th grade girls about what a program is we explained that it was a “set of instructions.” We then had them write down instructions to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. We didn’t specify the number of steps or any other aspect of what the instructions should be like.

   Most girls wrote down only a few steps and didn’t include steps like “open the peanut butter jar” or “pick up the knife,” they just assume that those were implied. However, that level of specificity is very important for computer programs, you have to tell them every exact step and break it down. To illustrate this, we had many of the girls read us off their instructions and “Jane the Robot” enacted them, exactly as they were read, with bread, jam, peanut butter, and a knife…of course rather exaggeratedly, there was a lot of stabbing the peanut butter jar lid with a knife when no one specified to open the jar. As we went along, the girls refined their ideas, collaboratively, as they saw Jane struggle to make the sandwich.

   We helped create a condition where the thinking of the students was revealed, this idea that they knew how to write instructions to make a sandwich, something that seemed so easy, so simple. We then worked with their pre-existing notions of instructions and illustrated how, for computer programs, they need to be much more detailed, broken down, and specific.

   This false assumption that children are “empty vessels” seems to apply in other areas as well, like when software engineers often don’t consider the previous experiences and therefore expectations a user brings to the table when using a certain technology or interface. We are constantly experiencing and therefore never a blank slate.

6. on 30 Jan 2008 at 7:39 am 6.seungwan_hong said …

   After reading “The Having of Wonderful Ideas” by Duckworth, I have two main questions. One is how much Duckworth’s suggestion can be applied for art classes with reality. The other is what characteristics of new media have possibilities for the development of children’s creativity for three-dimensional expressions as my research issue.

   On the intellectual development in art classes, I agree with most of Duckworth’s opinions including rigid, somewhat useless standardization of children’s intellectual development stage and children’s self-problem finding, observing phenomenon, and creative solving through unexpected discoveries. However, I have different opinions with the author on creativity development in art classes.

   In my view, to increase creativity of children in art classes, some educational standards and guidelines are needed for teaching media and materials and contextual expressions. One of primary purposes of art classes is to increase creativity of children through artistic expression. Representational attempts through media and materials are directly related to creativity. For this, learning expressional media and materials is very essential. Ideally, self-understanding and discoveries about characteristics of such mediums and materials are recommendable, but such tries take a lot of time and cost and nobody guarantees educational effectiveness of such random attempts as like the failed experiments of Duckworth [1].

   In addition, many artistic inventions and discoveries are based on speculating contexts and aims, not just numerous serendipitous discoveries. To learn the relationship between contexts and artistic expressions, children also need basic guidelines to interpret the aim of art project in which they are interested. When I was in teaching assistant practice with Mr. wyse, an art director of the Northside elementary school at Michigan Arbor, Mr. wyse often mentioned contextual guidelines to reduce meaningless educational effectiveness in art classes. I also somewhat agree with his opinions.

   I want to point out that artistic creativity is based on social activities such as collaboration and discussion with friends, not just individual unexpected discoveries [2].
   Online based new media has potentiality to influence children’s creativity of arts through providing such social activities. Ideally, children can observe other friends’ works through photo uploading system or three-dimensional gaming environment. They also conveniently share their opinions through voice mail. These are effective “alertness” for creativity [3]. However, mediated quality of outputs through online media is still problematic. Current online media cannot sufficiently mediate important quality of outputs such as natural shadow, color diffusion, tactile sense of materials. Tangible interface technology is one of alternatives to solve the problems, but it also has a risk of overall application. Speculating the issue is meaningful to research more advanced media for creativity development of children.

   [1] In “An Evaluation study”, Duckworth, E., The Having of Wonderful Ideas, Teachers College Press, 1987, p.11
   [2] The author already described children’s patterns to get ideas through collaborative activities, Duckworth, E., The Having of Wonderful Ideas, Teachers College Press, 1987, p.11
   [3] Altertness(continuous stimulus) for intellectual development, Duckworth, E., The Having of Wonderful Ideas, Teachers College Press, 1987, p.12

7. on 30 Jan 2008 at 9:47 am 7.andy_carle said …

   Mrs. C, as she liked to be called, radically changed the way I thought about learning over the course of two years. She was my teacher for STRETCH (a general gifted education course) in sixth and seventh grades. Under Mrs. C’s guidance I transformed from a largely passive receiver of information to an active builder of knowledge. In the spirit of Bransford, Brown & Cocking, I became competent in the skills of inquiry through the many clever classroom activities of this class.

   The first of these activities was our Renaissance Month, held at the beginning of my sixth grade year. At the beginning of the month, Mrs. C explained that we were to learn enough about Renaissance times to host a small Renaissance Fair at the end of the month. She provided us with a wide variety of references on the subject and made herself available to provide basic guidelines. But beyond that, it was up to the 15 or so students in the class to determine what to do with her guidelines – quite a task for 11 year olds.

   Through this assignment, Mrs. C was able to create a learning environment very much in line with the recommendations of Chapter 6 of Bransford, Brown & Cocking. For that month (and beyond) our classroom was ultra learner-centered. We were each allowed to pursue the goals of the project in our own ways. Students worked individually on some aspects of the project while working in groups of various sizes on others. Visual learners investigated the artwork of the era while kinesthetic learners researched Renaissance combat and jousting. There was a role for everyone, and yet Mrs. C was able to closely monitor the progress and competency of each of her students, maintaining a solid baseline of information, understanding, and mastery through formative assessment.

   Most importantly, Mrs. C actively developed a community of learners (in the spirit of Lave and Wegner, 1991) through this assignment and others. The students in her classroom had no choice but to band together, or fall under the tidal wave of responsibility they had suddenly had thrust upon them. This resulted in an incredibly supportive environment in which much more peer instruction occurred than conventional education. Students kept each other on task while reinforcing each others learning in deep ways. I believe that this process, particularly actively monitoring the learning of my peers, is where I first developed the metacognitive skills that have gotten me where I am today.

8. on 30 Jan 2008 at 10:00 am 8.anirban_sen said …

   Upon reading the ‘Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning’ by Brown, Collins and Duguid, I was pleased to realize that a lot of the theories of learning that were mentioned in the article, I had already been exposed to. Throughout my elementary and secondary education, play and exposure to practical experience was an integral part of my learning process.

   My parents both being teachers, they took an active interest in my schooling. I remember learning how to count earlier than most other children of my age because my parents had a jar of seeds that they would sit with me and play. I learned to add and subtract with these seeds. I believe that some things are easier to learn than others in this manner.

   Language was taught to me through simple conversation. According to the situated cognition theory, I believe that it is harmful to the child’s development of linguistic ability to converse with the baby in “baby talk” as a lot of parents these days are used to doing. The fastest way to develop language skills in a child is to actually speak to them as one would an adult (perhaps using a somewhat smaller vocabulary, and then expanding it through conversation).

   I have numerous memorable learning experiences in my development. One of these was the Engineering Drafting class that I took for two years in high school. This was basically an extension of “shop” class. Whereas in junior high school, I had taken shop and learned the basics of working in a machine shop and wood shop, in high school, I learned to mentally cross-sectionalize a machine component and reproduce the schematics on a sheet of paper with exact specifications. In this class, we first started out learning simple geometry and how to bisect and trisect lines. As the class advanced, we were taught more advanced theories, all of which we put into practice on a regular basis in our weekly projects.

   Another great learning experience I had much later on in life was learning Kung Fu. I had previously studied eastern philosophy and meditation from my parents, but those ideas were always very abstract to me. My Sifu (teacher) taught me not only the simple movements and forms of the art, but also how to put the philosophy and meditation into practice. By the time I had completed my martial education, the context of being in a martial situation had melded very well with the abstract theory and idea of meditation and eastern philosophy. I had truly learned the meaning of meditation in motion.

   We think that the ideas of situated cognition are fairly new in our education system. I posit that these ideas have been used for thousands of years, especially in the east, and are only now being rediscovered in the west.

9. on 30 Jan 2008 at 6:54 pm 9.pierre_tchetgen said …

   I have few memorable early learning experiences as the classroom environments that I grew up in/around were not particularly learner-centered. Rote memorization, written tests, pop quizzes were the standard tools of evaluation. Many people often say that they first truly learned a subject when they had to teach it. Likewise, my best learning experience goes back to being a teacher. During the summer of 2006, I co-taught a summer media apprenticeship involving a group of 18 black and latino teenagers from various parts of Chicago. The seminar lasted 6 weeks and it was for me a transformative moment. After reading the chapter on How People Learn, below are some reasons I think this happened:

   1. First, we focused on questions and ideas originating primarily with the young people themselves. In the first week of the program, each apprentice completes a project worksheet outlining the preliminary purpose, description and team for their proposed project.

   2. Second, we focused our efforts to structure a learning environment that was essentially constructionist in the sense that it respected and encouraged individuals’ freedom to explore their natural interests with the support of a community of learners, both expert and novice. The blogs written by the youth left traces of interesting dynamics between apprentices and their mentors.

   The issue of learner-centered environments is critical in my view, and one that explains the lack of capacity in schools to support the development of students across the home and the community. However, this is an area where information and communications technologies have the potential to play a powerful role. By allowing students to organize knowledge and information according to their own interest, practice and use, tools like blogs, wikis and the like are making it easier for the learning center to be decentralized in/out of the classroom. By ordering and cross-linking my own questions and topics of inquiry, I am better able as a student to connect my present (prior) knowledge with the new information which I gain through new learning experiences. For this reason, the figure on the Knowledge of How People Learn strikes me as a good way to help assess the pertinence of a particular teaching mode or method, thus making the learning process inherently more varied and flexible both for teachers and learners.

10. on 30 Jan 2008 at 10:35 pm 10.kevin_lim said …

    My best learning experience came in my geometry class in high school. In my mind, I can still hear Mr. Musallam say “you don’teh memoRIZE. You underSTAAAND.” We had zero multiple choice tests.

    Every day, several of us would have to go to the board to do proofs of geometric theorems. We would have to write out each and every step (wow was my handwriting bad!), and at each point, we’d be subject to questioning by our peers. O! the sheer terror when you’d see the hand of your classmate raised. We were trained vigorously to *ask* the right questions. Instead of focusing purely on the correctness of each individual step, we were constantly tested in our ability to talk logically across each bridge. “Why did you use the Side-Angle-Side triangle congruence theorem there? What made you think to do that?” Mr. Musallam would be more pleased with good questions and good answers than simple back-of-the-textbook right answers. “How People Learn” talks about gaining tools, specifically the ability to conceive of and frame intelligent questions. Being pressed on this matter was a big deal in class. Bransford et al mention the example of whether the understanding of the artery system would necessarily allow a student to answer a design question about artificial arteries. They say that understanding doesn’t guarantee right answers, but that it doesn’t focus on right answers, but it does support thinking about alternatives, and being able to discuss. This is precisely the philosophy Musallam brought to each class. A wrong step here or there wasn’t a big deal, but being unable to perform discourse was unacceptable.

    During proofs, we were allowed to use the textbook at the board if we needed it (kind of like the Prime Minister of Britain referring to his notebook during a Parliament questioning). So we were also taught that it wasn’t a matter of memorizing, but of understanding, and being able to reference our text for details. In “How People Learn,” the reference to Herbert Simon was particularly appropriate: “the meaning of ‘knowing’ has shifted from being able to remember and repeat information to being able to find and use it.”

11. on 31 Jan 2008 at 3:36 am 11.sally_maki said …

    One of the best learning experiences I’ve ever had was when I was participating in a program during my undergraduate education called ETHOS. ETHOS was a program for teaching engineers about problems of sustainability, especially in developing countries. We were exposed to age-old problems that are sometimes neglected in our current curriculum (because they are not issues for us here in the US, at least not as directly), and taught to re-think solutions to them that can be “appropriate” to their location and culture. For example, here we cook our food with stoves, electric or gas. In many developing countries they still use three-stone fires, which cause deforestation and a lot of health problems. The solution to this can’t just be for people in these areas to use electric stoves. We need to think of designs that use fuel that is available to them, material that is available to build the stoves, work with their pots and food type, and solve the aforementioned problems.
    Not only did we learn about these problems and creative and inspiring solutions, but we got to travel to another country and get immersed in a learning environment. We got to work with stuff hands-on, really learn about a culture in order to understand how it affects design, and be immersed in a new setting.
    Several concepts from the assigned readings may explain why this was such a good learning experience for me.
    1. Learning the knowledge was tied to the experience of actually doing something. A fundamental part of ETHOS is the internship where we get to experience what we learn. Even outside of the internship hands-on activities or interactive games were used. I think the learning-through-activity is one of the strongest parts of ETHOS.
    2. We build on pre-existing knowledge of engineering and what problems we thought we important. We often started with these and they were challenged, moving us in a new direction. Or we started with this and applied it to a conceptual framework or greater understanding of the world, progressing our pre-existing knowledge.
    3. Connecting what we learned with a conceptual framework. Often in engineering we learn different technical concepts independent of each other and independent of their relationship to real problems. I know this sounds kind of contradictory of engineering, but in highly technical classes it is very true. In ETHOS we learned to the real world, why we were learning it, and why different concepts applied to here or there. This made it easier to see connections and patterns and helped us come up with creative ideas in new situations.
    4. It is harder to relate this to the “Having of wonderful ideas” reading. The leaders of the group definitely encouraged creativity though and understanding. They would give us resources from which we often got those “aha” moments. I think this was one of the most rewarding things for them.
    I would have to add that the excitement of making the world a better place was a great motivator to learning, leading to passionate engagement, not just for the sake of learning.

12. on 31 Jan 2008 at 7:27 am 12.jonathan_brack said …

    One of the most engaging educational experiences I have ever had was in high school. My world history teacher – Mr. English (no joke) took us on a field trip from Sacramento to San Francisco. In our class we were studying Ancient Rome and Greece – of which architecture of a particular points focused on. Our field trip to San Francisco was for us to drive into, and walk the streets of San Francisco with close observation of the cities different architectural styles and influences - particularly where/how we can see ancient Greco-Roman architecture in the modern city-scape of San Francisco. Our Language Arts class was incorporated into the trip as we were asked to choose two different buildings and to write a brief description. Later we used these notes to write a compare and contrast essay .

    If we think about the Brown, et, al (1989) piece about situated cognition the educational value of the field trip I describe above becomes apparent. Though the original subject of study (Ancient Greco-Roman architecture) was only experienced within the confines of a textbook. Taking the trip to San Francisco allowed us to physically see, feel, touch – i.e. contextualize the information we were learning. Though of course it was not situated in ancient Rome or Greece, it was situated in how each of us as students we able to see, feel and touch the experience of closely observing architecture for its design. Further, to tie in an language arts assignment (the compare/contrast essay) certainly involve metacogntion on the part of the students. To be interdisciplinary by design allow me to think about these two school “subjects” were related and for that matter how I thought about them and use them to craft a written essay. I think that this is part of what How People Learn was about – that teaching and learning should allow students to think about their own thinking.

13. on 06 Feb 2008 at 8:52 am 13.seungwan_hong said …

    On Conceptual dimension and new media applications:
    After reading Social creativity: Turning Barriers into opportunities for collaborative design

    Without doubts, creativity is based on social activities. Please, remember your art class, you discussed with your friends about your or their picture, or you observed other friends’ well made sculptures. Fischer’s article mentions such creativity through social collaboration through technological aids. On conceptual dimension chapter in his article, I add my opinion on that.

    Firstly, I support more “Community of Interest(COI)” model than “Community of Practice(COP)” model for increasing student’s creativity. Creativity is based on improvisational moments through discussion and collaboration, as social activities. It includes exploratory studies and unexpected discoveries, not just making art-products or efficient product making process what COP model usually do. Especially, in art class, students can share their common knowledge about mediums, ideas about topics, and expressional technique through seeing and talking each other. Technological application might consider such fundamental behaviors.

    Secondly, for COI, Fisher just mentioned “making all voices heard” in technological solution. I want to more specify his ideas according to technological applications. On drawing or painting projects, I think three functions are needed: an online-based image viewer to display student’s artworks, and chatting and voice-chatting for evaluating, and attaching memos for recording the evaluating. Current web-pages or MSN is some what useful for drawing and painting collaborative projects. On sculptures or three-dimensional artworks, online three-dimensional viewer/place seems appropriate with chatting and attaching memos. The spatial structure of Second Life will be useful for sculpture-art work classes. Displaying and evaluating 3D sculptures in virtual place are possible to give unexpected chances for creativity with students. Like the examples, technological application might reflect the characteristics of artworks in collaboration.

14. on 06 Feb 2008 at 8:58 am 14.seungwan_hong said …

    I moved my above opinions to Week3.

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