EDUCATION IN THE NEWS

I recently gave a speech at the International Education Encounter in Mexico City, organized by Telefonica of Spain, where I talked about how school systems can be improved by having teachers be mentors instead of lecturers. Here is an excerpt from that talk.

If Plato were alive today and had a computer he might have come up with something like XTOL. Luckily we're here. But we're also a little like Plato, in that we've been coming up with ideas before the world was ready to hear them. Ten years ago we built an online learn by doing program at Carnegie Mellon University. Here's a video that describes that program:

Back then the idea of onlne learning made people nervous. But now the world is ready, and so are we. XTOL has re-thought and re-built these online learn by doing curricula, taking advantage of ten years of advances in computer science, and ten years of the world getting comfortable with using computers to learn. We are now ready to offer real learn by doing education to everyone, taught by the people who invented it in the first place. Except Plato. Unfortunately he wasn't available.

Teaching Minds: How Cognitive Science Can Save Our Schools

My new book, "Teaching Minds" is now available on Amazon, and from Google Books as an eBook.

"From grade school to graduate school, from the poorest public institutions to the most affluent private ones, our educational system is failing students. In his provocative new book, cognitive scientist and bestselling author Roger Schank argues that class size, lack of parental involvement, and other commonly-cited factors have nothing to do with why students are not learning. The culprit is a system of subject-based instruction and the solution is cognitive-based learning. This groundbreaking book defines what it would mean to teach thinking. The time is now for schools to start teaching minds!"

Teaching Minds is available on Amazon.com

and Google Books as an eBook.

Socratic Arts announces the formation of a new company called XTOL (Experiential Teaching On Line.)

XTOL will build on line masters degree programs that will be offered by well known universities. The programs will prepare students for real, existing jobs through a team based, learn by doing approach that will develop real world skills. The programs will be designed by real world practitioners, not theoreticians.

Read more about XTOL,
Socratic Arts' experience building Masters programs, and
the degrees currently being considered for development.

An annual 'Top Ten' list of Movers and Shakers in coporate eLearning has been published and...

For the second consecutive year I have been chosen as one of the top ten movers and shakers in corporate eLearning in the world.

See the full 2011 list

Here is a speech I gave in Madrid, Spain in late 2010 to the Tripartite Foundation discussing the opportunities that on line education offers the countries and schools that want to enter and dominate the global education market.

I have been named one of the world's top ten movers and shakers in e-Learning. The nomination was in part due to my collaboration with La Salle's Business Engineering School to build a learning-by-doing virtual MBA program.

See the full list at The Open Press.

The Reminding Machine is not just an idea. We now have a very good demo that we have built for a major drug company. We have collected about 2000 expert stories on video and have built two demos around them. One is an updated ASK system that allows a user to navigate from story to story by how the stories connect conceptually (rather than by key words say.) (We originally built ASK systems at ILS at Northwestern in the 90’s.)

The second is the Reminding Machine itself. This allows a user to find a story either by saying what you are working on in a well defined process, or by simply allowing the machine to find stories relevant to your work because it “knows” what you are working on. Each story reminds the system of new stories and one can navigate through stories that have the same principles behind them even though they may be from a different context in the company’s processes. It does this by use of proverbs as (as outlined in Dynamic Memory and Explanation Patterns.)

This demo of the next generation of Knowledge Management systems, managing video stories and not documents can be seen by contacting Socratic Arts. As the videos are proprietary to the drug company, we can only show the system and not the videos themselves.

The Open University of Andorra and La Salle Business Engineering School in Barcelona, Spain announces and Experiential MBA program, offered online.

The MBA program is meant to prepare students to start their own businesses, work in innovative business environments, or work in their own family small businesses. The program gives students business experience rather than business theory. The program will be delivered around the world to students in any country.

Learn more about the MBA program and the experiences that are a part of it.

Visit La Salle BES's website.

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. Or view the Alternative Learning Place Brochure (PDF) for more information on our Engineering curriculum for 5-6 year olds.

Visit the Alternative Learning Place website
for the latest news.

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.