John Bransford
I’m listening to a talk by John Bransford, which is quite thought-provoking. I think this posting will involve a set of links to follow up on later.
He began with a plug for his Science of Learning center, known as LIFE (learning in informal and formal environments). He began with a time-line graphic arguing that people spend at most 18.5% of their waking hours in formal educational centers (assuming they go to college). He also showed a cute video by Father Guido Sarducci on the 5 minute university, which would only teach what students remember from their college years—you can watch it here. (Later he argues that this argument ignores the data on relearning, which suggests that there’s more than 5-minutes’ worth of learning in college).
He has a cute “Pink Panther” example (Peter Sellers version) about the problems that schemas can lead to when conditions change (in this case, dismounting from parallel bars where the dismount leads you to fall down a set of stairs.
He discussed some fairly standard insight problems, like this one: “Two men played games of checkers. Each won 5 games. Explain.” Also discussed the issue of “failures of success”—people continuing strategies that used to work despite changed conditions.
Relatedly, he discussed the issue of “premature automaticity” and the idea that it leads to ultimately poor performance.
These are interesting concepts, and ones that I’ve thought about in the context of selecting and training graduate students. I’ve seen a number of examples, begining with my own grad student days, of people who showed up with a great deal of experience and expertise and very little educability. I wish I knew how to measure that, although I think there are often clues in letters and statements about the extent to which people are open to new experiences vs. seeing education as an opportunity to validate what they already believe and provide them with credentials.
He also discussed a virtual private island the group had bought in the Linden Lab Second Life virtual world, called Terra Vita
Bransford is enormously bright and productive. I do worry about part of the rhetoric underlying his arguments. You always need to worry about who gets to take credit for the unexplained variance. That is, if everything you can’t predict from what people are taught in school or from performance on tests is attributed to informal learning or other factors, you’re writing a check you probably can’t cash. That is, there will be some aspects of learning that can be attributed to schooling, some that can be attributed to informal experiences, but doubtless also a very large idiosyncratic amount of learning (and failure to learn) that results from how different individuals choose to spend that time (e.g., writing a weblog posting instead of listening more carefully to the talk).