Subject: Re: Starting the discussion
From: Clark Quinn (cquinn@knowledgeplanet.com)
Date: Wed 15 Mar 2000 - 01:42:37 MET
Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2000 16:42:37 -0800 From: Clark Quinn <cquinn@knowledgeplanet.com> Subject: Re: Starting the discussion
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I'm having trouble with an almost peripheral component, but one that seems indicative. Perhaps clarification of this will assist my understanding....
>DIRECTION 2. We can use abstraction to refine some (or all) of the four
>generic OPERATING MODES. I claim that these modes (which, to unify our
>terminology, I propose to name domain-presentation, domain-assessment,
>demonstration, and exercising) are generic, because they are defined solely
>on the learner's main goal for using the system (either to build his
>learning, or to assess his learning), and on the underlying type of
>knowledge (either DK or PSK). That direction may imply to deal with
>abstraction levels in the system-student interactions as well.
I confess that while I (think) I understand the distinction between DK and PSK, and between learning and assessment, I'm not sure how this maps to the four modes. Am I correct in assuming that domain presentation is a presentation of concepts, and domain assessment is a formal test of knowledge acquisition? And that demonstration is presenting application of knowledge to problems, and exercises act as the opportunity to practice applying knowledge to problems? Because if this is a fair inference, I see some problems.
I'd first state that you could do worse than look at the work of people like Gagne' and Merrill, who've worked hard at identifying finer granularity on your dimensions than you have here. They have rich matrixes of goals of activity by learner, and of types of knowledge, and I'd want to know why you want to move to a more sparse representation.
I'd also argue that a learning goal really ought to be the ability to do something different, so that we're interested in exercises as the end goals, and we don't have knowledge acquisition independent of application to domain. That is, I don't see the value in acquiring 'inert knowledge' that isn't packaged with it's applicability and consequently it's use in problem-solving. That is, when is a learner really interested in a distinction between building or assessing in a domain, or even in assessing, but just in acquiring useful knowledge.
Finally, I'll suggest that elements such as conceptual presentations and demonstrations (I call them examples) are part of a cycle (as in Collins, Brown, & Newman's Cognitive Apprenticeship or Laurillard's reflective model) of learning, and therefore attempting to narrow down a learner to one mode is like saying that going to a restaurant is ordering OR eating OR paying...
So while I do support (roughly) the components you want, I'm not sure that this approach to abstraction buys us as much as a semantically clear description of each component as a process of learning.
Note that I very much do support abstraction as a way to get a handle on this difficult problem, but I'm having a problem with this particular approach. -- Clark
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