An Example of a "Learning Process" Journal (using the 2 colored box format)

Book: Natural-Born Cyborgs by Andy Clark

Source: Oxford University Press 2003

Yellow highlighted passages: Chap. 2 Technologies to Bond With

• "Los Alamos' best restaurant turns out to be Japanese, an irony I decide not to pursue." [p. 36]
• "In the case of such opaque technologies [e.g. PC computers], we distinguish sharply and continuously between the user and the tool. ... By contrast, once a technology is transparent, the conscious agent literally sees through the tool and directly confronts the real problem at hand. ... Sports equipment and musical instruments often fall into the same broad category" [p. 37-38]
• "Often, such integration and ease of use require training and practice". [p. 38]
• "... the average user who simply wants a cheap, reliable, and easy-to-use tool. The technological product then comes under cultural-evolutionary pressure to increase its fitness by better conforming to the physical and cognitive strengths and weaknesses of biological bodies and brains." [p. 39]
• "wristwatches ... came the possibility of something new and different - 'time discipline'. ... the crucial factor is the constant and easy availability of the time, should we desire to know it. Therefore, a prime characteristic of transparent technologies is their poise for easy use and deployment as and when required." [p. 40-41]
• "Certainly, the technology must change in order to become increasingly easy to use, access, and purchase; but this is only half the story because at the same time, elements of culture, education, and society must change also. ... people had to learn to value time discipline." [p. 43]
• "For our sense of self, of what we know and of who and what we are, is surprisingly plastic and reflects not some rigid preset biological boundary so much as our ongoing experience of thinking, reasoning, and acting within whatever potent web of technology and cognitive scaffolding we happen currently to inhabit." [p. 45]
• "... Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) in which familiar physical objects , instruments, surfaces, and spaces are used to mediate our exchanges with digital information systems." [p. 51]
• "... the goal of Augmented Reality is to add digital information to the everyday scene ... [e.g. GPS systems]". [p. 53]
• "If we are indeed becoming complex biotechnological hybrids, a major challenge for the future will be to train young minds to think well about a world in which the physical and the informational/digital are densely and continuously interwoven." [p. 53]
• "For certain purposes we want tools that we can step back from and think about." [p. 56]
• "the important ... potential of information appliances that, in use, actively work to learn about and better fit the user." [p. 57]
• "the biological brain is constantly striving to streamline, chunk, compile, and automate, and it does so by attending to repeated patterns of activity and use." [p. 57]

I still recall using the term invisible in a similar sense in the early '80's.

The principle of practice is one that is exemplified in these web pages. By making daily entries I continue to practice using Dreamweaver so that at least for basic tasks it is now more automatic than using a word processor.

How should we incorporate technology into the educational system? [e.g. calculators, word processors, driver training, robotics]

Yellow highlighted passages: Chap. 3 Plastic Brains, Hybrid Minds

• "Your own body is a phantom, one that your brain has temporarily constructed purely for convenience." [V. S. Ramachandran and S. Blakeslee]
• "... our brains depend on perceived correlations ... to continuously construct a model of - and hence a sense of - our bodily bounds and locations." [p. 61]
• "It is not that all knowledge is currently conscious ... but you do experience yourself as in command of a rich and detailed database." [p. 69]
• "But the small thread that I want to pull on here concerns the role of spoken language itself as a kind of triggering cognitive technology." [p. 69-70]
• "The simple act of labeling allows the biological brain to tiptoe into cognitive waters invisible, and hence impassable, to the languageless mind." [p. 71-72]
• "The cultural tool of public language gives us not just labels but whole, structured, recursive systems for the encoding, objectification, and communication of thoughts and ideas. ... It is not yet clear just how all this works.[p. 72]
• "... there is strong evidence that human mathematical abilities likewise seem to depend, in at least one crucial aspect, upon our experiences with the stable sound bites corresponding to individual number words. [Dehaene]" [p. 72]
• "... current PCs ... first generation VCRs ... require the biological brain to performa role for which it is inherently unsuited: recalling, and executing long, essentially arbitrary lists of instructions." [p. 74]
• "... brains ... are good at pattern matching and at simple associations. ... Our brains are also good at perceptual processing, at using sensory input to control bodily movements, at reasoning about location and movement in space" [p. 75]
• "...why ... should we not treat the human artist, armed with her trusty sketch pad, as a unified, extended cognitive system ... We must never underestimate the extent to which our own abilities as artists, poets, mathematicians, and the like can be informed by our use of external props and media." [p. 77]
• "... we discern two distinct, but deeply interanimated, ways in which biological cognition leans on cultural and environmental structures. One way involves a developmental loop, in which exposure to external symbols adds something to the brain's own inner toolkit. The other involves a persisting loop, in which ongoing neural activity becomes geared to the presence of specific tools and media." [p. 78]
• "... text [in the time of the early Greeks] began to be used to record half-finished arguments and as a means of soliciting new evidence for and against emerging ideas. Ideas could then be refined, completed, or rejected by the work of many hands separated in space and time." [p. 79]
• "Just as I might use pen and paper to freeze my own half-baked thoughts, turning them into stable objects for further thought and reflection, so we (as a society) learned to use the written word to power a process of collective thinking and critical reason. The tools of text (and to some extent speech) thus allows us, at multiple scales, to create new stable objects for critical activity." [p. 81]
• "... the environments in which our brains grow and develop may actually help structure the brain in quite deep and profound ways." [p. 84]
• "We should not underestimate the capacity of human brains in general - young human brains in particular - to simultaneously alter and grow so they can better exploit the problem-solving opportunities our technologies provide. ... Such developmentally open brains are not just opportunistic, but explosively opportunistic." [p. 86]
• "The goal of early education (and perhaps of all education) should not be seen as simply that of training brains whose basic potential is already determined. Rather, the goal is to provide rich environments in which to grow better brains." [p. 86]

Based on the comment about mathematics, I have purchased the Dehaene book.

The comments on page 77 support the use of 'manipulatives' in mathematics education!

The quote on page 81 pertains directly to these Learning web pages. Since they are on the web, they could, in principle, be seen and used by others to build on and generate new insights and ideas. Similarly a class could engage in a form of cooperative "group think", not to form one stable idea, but to explore the variety of possible ideas.

What might happen with a group of adolescents and an active Mathematica environment?

Technology Index