Subject: personal accounts - sort of
From: Anthony (dnardi@math.ucla.edu)
Date: Tue 09 May 2000 - 02:02:52 MEST
Date: Mon, 08 May 2000 17:02:52 -0700 From: Anthony <dnardi@math.ucla.edu> Subject: personal accounts - sort of
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Hi everyone! I have finally gotten around to accepting Leslie's invitation;
I also just finished attempting to scarf down 4 days worth of discussion.
Thank God for the person who thought of condensing a whole day into 1 pill.
Since I am more than a philosophical talking head, I'd like to introduce
myself: I am an asst. adj. professor at UCLA. I teach computer programming
and such to liberal arts students, most of whom (75%+) are Asian or Asian
American. My Ph.D. is in "Systems Science" from State Uni. of New York at
Binghamton, and I have a MS in East Asian Languages and Cultures
(Japanese), and a BS in Aerospace engineering. I publish mainly in
psychology as it pertains to learning styles, career counseling,
organizational development, multiple intelligence, etc although I consider
my field to be cognitive science with interest in artificial intelligence
(AI.) I also write fiction (contemporary and sci-fi), surfing and do rock
guitar in my spare time, such as it is.
I recall Leslie dropping a hint to mention personal stories, so I'd like to
respond this way.
First, some readers may wonder where my BA in East Asian Languages and
Culture is. Unlike engineering or "hard science", I found it very easy to
simply walk in off the street (albeit already speaking Japanese) and do
graduate level work. I have been told that most liberal arts is like this;
here is a contrast with engineering, physics, etc (however each of you
wishes to classify, there are usually distinct schools and majors.) I DON'T
know what a liberal arts professor's response to this would be - I haven't
asked anyone. I recall reading somewhere a belief that this is the way
liberal arts should be. What to make of this?
I teach a class that has quite a bit of experimental social-psychology in
it. The frame for the class is usually either AI or one of those freshman
honors courses where we professors can get away with almost anything (This
fall I'm teaching: "Systems Thinking: Exploring Order and Chaos in Everyday
Life.") I find the exp. social-psychology teaches a lot of systems
concepts (dynamics, networks, group vs. individual level behaviors, chaos
and complexity, boundaries, emergence, etc.) For example, my favorite
activity is randomly grouping the students into 6 to 8 person groups and
saying, "at the end of the quarter (8-10 weeks away) your group is to give
a presentation as a group, you will receive 1 grade as a group, and the
topic of that presentation will be your process as a group in preparing to
give that presentation as a group." I facilitate minimally (and usually to
merely act as a mirror or external agitator. I give cross-discipline
support materials on group behavior, dynamical systems, and computer
programming. (They can play with a program that simulates a dynamic system
like predator-prey, and the software allows them to
create/test/modify/explore with their own systems.) Together, by the end of
the academic quarter, the majority of students go away with my desired
outcome for them, which is that 'aha' experience as the threads connect.
I have read and heard the responses of many students who freely informed me
even after the course grades were given that the class was a life-changing
experience. While I agree for the most part that extra-curricular
activities and social relationships end up defining student's inner lives
more than academics, I also strongly believe that a good course can
transform a student's thinking by opening up him or her to new ways of
perceiving and understanding systems - to emphasize observation over
judgment, to look and try to describe (using verbs) processes instead of
using adjectives to describe static objects, to notice patterns in space
and time, to go to a meta-position (a part of and a part from the system at
the same time.) While I use computers A LOT to handle courses, and while I
believe that we might benefit from using computers more to handle those
things which do not benefit from interaction (in all senses) with other
people, I also think there is something very important to be said in not
using computers or distance learning or such things. I believe that good
teaching can make a difference.
I've also found that when I ask students in this systems class to discuss
(in a report) often-called "softer" topics, like family life, or school
life, or cultural-life, they respond with a level that would not have been
obtained if they had just walked in off the street. So I believe that a set
of models is important, and models about modeling, in liberal arts; and
with these building blocks, later courses could demand a genuine level of
rigor. This by the way is different from something like critical studies as
it is usually practiced, or the way even hard science is usually taught. I
teach from the math dynamics point of view and a group dynamics point of
view, to draw conclusions from real experiences, not drawing conclusions
from someone else's analysis or someone else's analysis of a real
experience (what I guess we're doing here on this list-serve.) There IS a
place for meta-analysis, but if I can pick up and pretend to speak the
language of a discipline in 5 minutes and get away with it, then perhaps
things can be improved. Similarly, engineering and hard science classes
often fall into a similar trap, of constant number crunching and applying
equations without the slightest notion of how these apply in the world,
where they came from, and so on.
Since I tend to have good rapport with students, I hear complaints about
programming classes, science classes and stuff being too much work and
boring. I myself, having done my under-grad in engineering, found a tacit
discouragement of having social awareness. Intelligent people don't party!
Hah! I also hear students complain about arbitrary grading by professors
in liberal arts. If your paper doesn't agree with what the feminist-theory
professor had to say about event X in the news you mention in your paper,
then you get graded down. Whether this is just student belly-aching and
inability to apply a theory, or if they reflect genuine complains about
academia, I believe the culture of a department/school/university can also
affect students' experiences, not just the teacher.
On a largely different note, a lot has been done in the past 3 years in
terms of cybernetic devices in non-disabled humans and animals. For
example, electrodes connected a cat's vision brain cells to a computer, so
that what the cat saw on a TV monitor appeared on a computer monitor (via
the cat's brain.) Or the professor in England who is now in round two of
an experiment, where there is interactive (back and forth) feedback between
his arm motor nerve cells and a computer via an electrode implanted in his
arm. His wife is also being connected with her own cyber-interface, and she
is to travel to the other side of the world, the two of them linked with
feedback to each other and the computer in real life by Internet streaming
data. (In selecting a 2nd person, the wife, who is not a technical person,
wanted to be the 2nd person because she did not want someone else to be
connected to her husband!) They are wondering if the husband and wife will
be able to feel each other's arm movements, or be able to learn to feel
(via feedback of the other person announcing he or she is waving the arm.)
And will input from the computer register in the person's brain since it is
connected to a motor pathway?!
All this is still a far cry for actually adding additional modules to the
brain (new ways of thinking.) I am continually amazed by the vast diversity
in people's cognitive processes. Even in learning guitar for example, there
are many ways to engage the brain for learning, with most only working well
for some people. How would we design a new cognitive process that doesn't
exist and is unimagined? How it might actually happen is likely akin to the
usual process for chicken-and-egg problems, which is the emergent process I
see students doing when given the bizarre assignment to give a presentation
on the process of preparing to give a presentation. Maybe.
Oh, and I personally found that a study of grammar increased my thinking
skills tremendously; so much is embedded in language about how a mind
represents the world, and I'm not talking about the political stuff!
Anyway, my hand hurts now and I have to edit some manuscript pages before
going to a writer's group meeting thingy tonight. I don't know how much I
can contribute here, or want to, as most of you :-) sound quite intelligent
and well-informed so I would just be saying stuff many of you already
understand. I do enjoy reading (or skimming in some cases.) Hope my
personal anecdotes were mildly interesting; I apologize for the length. I
figure, get the whole thing over with at once!
Cheers everyone! And thanks Leslie!
- Dario Anthony Nardi
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