Dogfooding learning
January 21, 2009 – 10:01 pmAll right. I’ve got my feet under me once more, enough to express the things I’ve been thinking about but didn’t have words for; the words and phrasings aren’t right yet, and the ideas are also not particularly fully-formed, but it’s enough to start, and watch them form from here.
Begin the torrent.
Walter showed me Minsky’s essay on Education and Psychology this morning.
“A new class of 6-year-old children will soon begin to share similar ways to think and behave. Then, next year, when they are 7 years old, most of those pupils will still remain in that group—and thus will tend to perpetuate those same patterns of activity. The next year, they will be 8-year-olds, but will continue to share many attitudes, values, and cognitive strategies. So as those children proceed through their K-12 grades, large portions of their ways to think will remain much like those of 6-year-olds!”
To learn new ways of thinking, keep seeking out and learning from groups of people who think in ways you are unable to. This means you’re in a constant state of being a non-native speaker, of having to struggle to understand things others take for granted. It means it’s constantly uncomfortable.
Sugar emphasizes reflection, collaboration, and exploration as things that help us learn how to learn. Reflection comes more naturally to me, an introvert by nature; the other two are tough for me. Incredibly tough. Going unfamiliar places, trying unfamiliar things, talking with people I don’t know… I might look stupid. I might waste somebody’s time. I might mess up. And the litany of excuses goes on, giving me reasons to be shy.
I think it is important that we ourselves model the kind of learning that we want the children we’re helping to have. It is important to dogfood not just our hardware and our code, but our learning – our behavior, our processes, the way we work with each other, the way we move forward.
Do we want them to create? We must create, not just pontificate. Do we want them to share, even if they’re hesitant that what they have is not quite fully formed? We’ve got to post our own drafts, our own half-baked thoughts, our own questions. Do we want them to be unafraid of conflict while remaining respectful of those that they may vehemently disagree with? To admire, acknowledge, and appreciate all disciplines, not just our own? To reach out and bring in newcomers, teach others, bring forth leaders from the communities that they belong to?
I think that if I’m hoping to help some kids somewhere grow up to be great dreamers and doers, I’ve got to keep on trying to grow into one myself. It’s not something that you ever know, or something you can ever stop; learning how to be a learner is something that we all have got to keep on studying.
Now I will proceed to learn by making things – I’m sitting here in Donna Benjamin’s Inkscape tutorial, and there’s an idea stuck in my mind I need to get out…
3 Responses to “Dogfooding learning”
“So as those children proceed through their K-12 grades, large portions of their ways to think will remain much like those of 6-year-olds!” — This is grossly misleading. Ask your mother if your ways of thinking and learning was the same throughout your K-12 grades. I think she will tell you that they were not.
I have two children around your age and I assure you that it was not true for them, or their classmates as I worked with them as a volunteer throughout their K-8 grades. 5 and 6 year olds engage in magical thinking. They are very literal and learn best through concrete activities. They want to touch, smell, hear and taste their world. Individuals in the group show very different strengths and weaknesses — what Howard Gardner expressed as “multiple intelligences”. These are expressed in the ways of learning. Their interpersonal behavior is very different from older kids, which has a huge effect on collaboration strategies and the ability for classroom activites to be structured in groups. Their ability to concentrate is shorter than older children. As children grow their ability to consider abstract ideas grows as well.
One example: I taught basic algebra to my kids’ classes, for different groups in 6-8 grade. It was very noticeable that these kids reached a developmental level allowing them to actually understand the meaning of the methods that are taught for manipulating abstract expressions and solving equations. This developmental hurdle translated into the ability to master “word problems”.
This is apparent in reading and writing as well. Analyzing texts, grasping the subtlties of metaphor, grow and change as kids get older and develop.
The mental and behavioral changes that a child undergoes as he or she grows to adulthood as astonishing and far more interesting to watch and try to understand than any software project I have ever worked on.
By Carol Lerche on Jan 22, 2009
Mel, I strongly encourage you to interact more w/ working primary and secondary schools teachers. The lack of their input has made the XO and sugar less effective than they could be.
There are lots of interesting theories out there but practical experience trumps theory in the social sciences (and the physical :))
By Bryan Berry on Jan 22, 2009