Ashok Patel (apatel.aqua@btinternet.com)
Sun, 2 Aug 1998 03:57:48 +0100
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From: "Ashok Patel" <apatel.aqua@btinternet.com> Subject: RE: [ifets] Formal Discussion Date: Sun, 2 Aug 1998 03:57:48 +0100
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---------------------------------------------------------
As a brief introduction to myself, I am a cost accountant who
was involved in designing and implementing management
information systems, got hooked on to spreadsheet and macro
based programming and then moved onto database programming
to designing ITS or Intelligent Tutoring Tools as I prefer to call them.
Coming to the formal discussion:
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There are a number of points which I would like to raise:
1. For a lot of children, the Cartoon Network Television channel has
become a compulsive viewing. The fact that there are repetition
of the cartoon films does not seem to cause boredom and I have
seen quite a few children who speak out the dialogues spoken by
the cartoon characters as they watch i.e. the dialogues are
memorised by the children who are having difficulty remembering
their sevens and eights tables! The same children would spend
some time with the Microsoft Encarta but you wouldn't find them
systematically working through the multimedia encyclopedia to
learn about new things.
The same thing is found in almost every office where a Windows
PC is used. Instead of pursuing knowledge for better use of
software like Word, Excel, Powerpoint etc. a lot of people are
seen spending hours on playing solitaire!
Looking at this behaviour which is menifested among both the
adults and children, can we say that the very act of 'consciously
learning' causes additional stress ? And therefore everyone has a
threshold beyond which they cannot carry out the learning
activity. Yet we can easily learn film dialogues and card playing
skills because we are not consciously trying to learn these and
therefore can enjoy engaging in these activities.
2. Technological advancement is gathering speed and as we age
and get set in our habits, it becomes more and more difficult to
keep up-to-date, especially where the use of technology is
directly involved. Therefore, whatever knowledge we may transfer
to the student, is increasingly likely to be out of date.
3. When we look at the Assessment practices generally followed,
we find that the test questions may cover, say, 40% to 60% of
the syallabus. Even these questions may provide an option to,
say, pick 4 out of 6 questions. The pass marks may be an
aggregate of, say, 50%. Thus it appears that the assessment
practice seem to suggest a much greater emphasis on the
meta-learning skills, implying that a student who can answer
one question from a certain part of the syllabus satisfactorily,
has already demonstrated the ability to do so for any other
part of the syllabus!
4. Recently, while I was standing near the Pyramid at Giza in
Egypt, I thought that the Pyramids were filled with distance
learning material, the distance in a temporal sense covering
50 centuries. The things found in the Pyramids were not
interactive but enabled people to learn a lot through the
mechanism of self-explanations. Is this knowledge instruction,
knowledge construction or discovery learning ?
Thank you all,
Ashok Patel
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CAL Research & Software Engineering Centre,
Bosworth House, De Montfort University,
Leicester LE1 9BH, U.K. Phone/Fax +44 (116) 2577193
email apatel@dmu.ac.uk http://www.dmu.ac.uk/~apatel
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
"It is a profoundly erroneous truism ... that we should cultivate
the habit of thinking what we are doing. The precise opposite
is the case. Civilisation advances by extending the number
of important operations which we can perform without thinking
about them." - Alfred North Whitehead
"Civilisation advances through cognitive skills"
- A. Patel's corollary
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-ifets@mail2.gmd.de [mailto:owner-ifets@mail2.gmd.de]On
> Behalf Of Vladimir Fomichov
> Sent: 01 August 1998 1:50
> To: ifets@gmd.de
> Subject: [ifets] Discussion Initiation: V.Fomichov, O.Fomichova
>
>
> Forum website: http://ifets.gmd.de/
> Email address for sending message to the list ifets@gmd.de
> Forum's contact person ifets-info@gmd.de
> ---------------------------------------------------------
>
> Gretings to the IFETS members !
>
> We are starting the Discussion "The Necessity and an Outline of an
> Integral Approach to Designing Intelligent Tutoring Systems of a New
> generation"
> ("Towards Increasing the Effectiveness of Knowledge Transfer on the
> Basis of Ideas of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science".
>
> We are interested in the problem of knowledge transfer to people.
>
> We mean here not only knowledge of special disciplines but also
> knowledge about life experience: how to comnicate with people, how to
> be successful in life. Because we suppose that one of the most
> important things is how to transfer knowledge from one generation to
> the other, on one hand, and from adults to a child, on the other.
>
> The problem is so complicated that we need to use all theoretical
> ideas and all achievements of educational technology (including
> intelligent tutoring systems and distant education) in order to solve
> it succesfully.
>
> We consider teaching as a particular kind of knowledge transfer from
> one intelligent system to another. It is important to be sure that the
> learner (especially, a child) is acquiring just WHAT you are
> transferring. And we suppose that it is possible to avoid a reat
> number of well-known problems using the main ideas of Artificial
> Inteligence theory and Cognitive Science.
>
> The future greatly depends on transfering knowledge from generation to
> generation. We believe that proceeding nowadays from a system,
> interdisciplinary approach to this problem, we make it possible to be
> sure in thefuture.
>
> To our opiion, intelligent tutoring systems may become good assistants
> of the teacher in the classroom and at home. But for this, we ned to
> make a step forwards and to enhance their teaching skill and to
> develop the ability to co-operate with the teacher in the classroom.
>
> We hope that our discussion will be successful and will help to
> construct such systems.
>
> With best regards,
> Sincerely,
>
> Prof. Vladimir A. Fomichov (Fomitchev)
> Dr. Olga S. Fomichova (Fomitcheva)
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
> Dear forum members
> The details of first formal discussion are as follows.
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Title:
> The Necessity and an Outline of an Integral Approach to Designing
> Intelligent Tutoring Systems of a New Generation
>
> Subtitle:
> Towards Increasing Effectiveness of Knowledge Transfer on the
> Basis of Ideas and Methods of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive
> Science
>
> (http://ifets.gmd.de/discuss.html)
>
> Duration:
> Discussion: 1 - 9 August 98
> Summing up: 10 - 12 August 98
>
> Moderators:
> 1. Prof. Dr. Vladimir A. Fomichov (Fomitchev)
> 2. Dr. Olga S. Fomichova (Fomitcheva)
> Moscow, Russia
> (More details about moderators are at the end of message)
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