I am on Twitter.

Stay current on the important developments with my work thru my Twitter feed, with updates about once per week.

@RogerSchank on Twitter

The Future of Decision Making: How Revolutionary Software can Improve the Ability to Decide

A book I co-authored on decision making software, on which I consult, has just been published. Here is the book overview:

"We now possess the capability to make great business decisions in even the most difficult or ambiguous of situations with the use of today’s advanced software capability. The authors, who are experts in cognitive science, software, and practical decision-making, explain the new science of decision-making and offer examples and advice that will enable readers put it to use in their organizations."

The Future of Decion Making is available on Amazon.com

"The entire world has learned [algebra] for no reason!"

I recently gave a talk at The World Bank titled "How to Think (Education Reconsidered)" where I discussed many of the problems that exist in high school and college, why they exist, and what we can do to fix them. Video of the talk, complete with the slides, is available.

Visit The World Bank's EduRadicals site to watch my talk

The following cognitive skills are developed gradually over time. This is the stuff that we need to learn how to do in order to function well in the world. . The more proficient you are at these skills, the smarter you appear and the more you can learn:

Conceptual Processes

1. Prediction: Making a prediction about the outcome of actions
2. Modeling: Building a conscious model of a process
3. Experimentation: Finding out for oneself what works and what doesn’t
4. Evaluation: Improving our ability to determine the value of something on many different dimensions

Analytic Processes

5. Diagnosis: Making a diagnosis of a complex situation by identifying relevant factors and seeking causal explanations
6. Planning: Learning to plan and do needs analysis as well as acquiring a conscious and subconscious understanding of what goals are satisfied by what plans
7. Causation: Detecting what has caused a sequence of events to occur by relying upon a case base of previous knowledge of similar situations
8. Judgment: Making an objective judgment

Social Processes

9. Influence: Understanding how others respond to your requests and recognizing consciously and unconsciously how to improve the process
10. Teamwork: Learning how to achieve goals by using a team, consciously allocating roles, managing inputs from others, coordinating actors, and handling conflicts; managing operations using a model of processes and handling real time issues
11. Negotiation: Making a deal; negotiation/contracts; resolving goal conflicts
12. Describing: Creating conscious descriptions of situations to explain them to others in writing and orally

One’s intelligence is typically judged by others in relation to one’s proficiency at five of these cognitive skills:

• Prediction
• Diagnosis
• Causation
• Describing
• Planning

Schools only deal with some of these skills and rarely attack them directly, instead choosing to focus on subjects rather than thinking ability. It is not impossible to learn how to do these things while studying school subjects, but it is much more difficult because teaching almost never emphasizes them. These skills in no way depend on any particular subject and can and should be learned without reference to subject matter knowledge. People have different interests as far as subjects go, but everyone has a deep need to become proficient at these skills in any area they pursue. The fact that school has been organized around subjects is one reason why the students produced by that system are not capable of thinking very clearly.

Watch a lecture I gave at La Salle University in Barcelona
Cognitive Processes that Underlie Learning.

Milo, my grandson, will enter first grade in September 2011. I find this news so frightening I hardly know where to start.

It is time for me to start building an alternative. We will construct an online First Grade curriculum. It will be an Alternative Learning Place (ALP), housed wherever we can find the space. The ALP day will focus around projects and activities and will, of course, all be learning by doing.

Visit either of my blogs, Papa Talks or Education Outrage, for more information including what activities that will make up the curricula and where the ALPs will be established.

Visit the Alternative Learning Place website
for the latest news.

New online MBA Program available! Roger Schank and BES La Salle have partnered to develop a virtual Story-Centered Curriculum MBA Program. The curriculum is more practical than traditional MBA programs, and is geared toward students who:

• Work in family businesses
• Wish to become entrepreneurs
• Plan to work in a large corporation

All courses are structured as stories in which students play a leading role, solving problems much like those they will face in the real world of business. This time we will be able to do things that were not possible decades ago.

Engines for Education is proud to announce the formation of the world’s first alternative online, learn-by-doing, high school. This is a four-year high school where only one curriculum is followed each year. Students will be admitted into this curriculum in September, 2010. They will matriculate at schools that have agreed to offer this curriculum.

Learn more about the Alternative High School.

From today's Chronicle of Higher Education, just in time, we have the Obama administration deciding that:

"Corporate donors encouraged by the Obama administration will spend at least $260-million over the next four years to help improve student achievement in mathematics and science through specially designed television programs and video games."

Sounds like a plan: get the voters who can't think to be able to think by teaching math and science to them. It's just that they didn't take enough algebra.

Read Education Outrage, Roger Schank’s blog about the nation's education system.

If a person doesn’t get smarter as a result of experience he is called dumb. My new goal is not to build intelligent machines but rather to build an intelligently organized and indexed knowledge base that is easiliy accessible and gets smarter over time.

Go to Corporate Memory

Cave Men did not point and click. People were not built to find information. Enterprises today are in need of channeling the right information to the right person at the right time.

Go to Intelligent Enterprise Software

All training has to involve real experiences. Companies say they want to train their employees better, but they always leave out the end of the sentence that tells you what they are really thinking (without spending too much money).

Find out more about Roger’s work in training.

Companies say they want to innovate better. What they mean is that they want to hire innovation experts who will help bring out the innovator in everyone, so they can feel good about themselves. If they wanted to innovate they would hire those unruly and annoying people who actually have something unusual to say.

Go to the Innovation page to find out more.