Reminding and E-Learning
All learning depends on knowledge. It is odd therefore that people who write about e-learning rarely worry about the knowledge bases that must underlie any serious e-learning system. Schools have always had libraries and textbooks, not that they are used all that much. But the idea that there should be a knowledge base available to be consulted to help one better understand something is a key educational idea.
Yet, while e-learning systems might refer a learner to more reading, the very idea of e-learning is that it is self contained. Strange, since real knowing is never self contained. There is always someone somewhere who knows more.
What is needed is access to those someones. In the olden days, when people worked in offices where everyone who was employed by a company also worked, one could shout down the hall if one needed some information or step into the office of an old guy and seek some advice. In a sense, the available knowledge base in a company has gotten less accessible because of the way we now work. Sure, there are company databases and knowledge management systems, but where is the older, wiser colleague when you need one. Maybe you know his email address, maybe you don't.
The modern solution to this issue might be to try to collect the knowledge that we believe to be the important things that humans (in your company, in your field, or in the world) as a collective group know. That, in fact, is what encyclopedias usually are. A group of experts are collected and they write what they deem to be the important stuff
Encyclopedias are meant to be reference works so that inquiring minds can find out what is true by consulting them. Thus, they are certainly not a collection of what humans know, but rather a collection of what some humans think everyone should be able to find out about if they are interested in doing so.
What would it mean to create an electronic encyclopedia of practical wisdom? We might try to collect the knowledge that all human beings share, but that would also be an odd undertaking. What we think we know is the daily stuff of our lives and the stuff we share is often trivial like the location of a highway or the name of a President.
Consider the cave man. Cave men needed to know the roles they played in their society. They needed to know how to perform the actions associated with those roles. They needed to have the concept of a goal and they needed to be able to figure out a course of action that might achieve that goal.
Of course, in reality, there probably was not all that much "figuring out" going on. Our ancestors have thought out most roles and associated actions, as well as the goals and associated plans to achieve them. The real issue is the transmission of known goal-plan and role-task information. This information is often transmitted through proverbs, words of wisdom, and general advice about what to do when.
But what is this kind of stuff really about? Why transmit proverbs, or tell stories of heroes and solutions to complex problems?
Underlying this constant telling about what to do when that dominates information that has been handed down through the centuries is a very simple idea: all people have goals, they create plans (or, more accurately, copy plans) to achieve those goals, and there is much wisdom about the complications that arise while trying to get what you want.
The mental apparatus used by the cave man and thus inherited by modern man would have to be all about roles, tasks, goals, and plans. Just in time storytelling would also have a big role to play in explaining how to do things under complex circumstances. Modern man is equipped to do this kind of mental functioning as well. Nothing has changed.
But how does he do this? How do people find the information they need when they need it? One thing is clear. However they do this, they do this the way they have always done it. Of course, you can try and consult the Internet instead of the wisest person in your village. The question is not whom you consult but what you are trying to find out.
Before there was text, humans had to have the ability to find information, either from within their own minds or from the minds of others. That they could do this there is no doubt, because, of course, we can still do it. We find ideas without knowing how we do it and we ask questions and get answers from others. We have minds that readily find knowledge, we can structure queries to others so that they can readily find knowledge in their own minds, and we do this without a clue as to how this process actually works—how the mind is organized or how we propose queries to the mind that takes advantage of the organization of that knowledge.
In the modern era, it is possible to take advantage of the computer to do what man has never been able to do before, and that is to create a true collection of what people know, organized in the way that makes it as easy to find as it is to ask a question of an expert.
I asked this question 30 years ago: How do we get reminded?
It was an important question then for thinking about how the mind works and it is an important question now for thinking about how real knowledge management should work. To make the computer really useful for work and for learning we must think about building a reminding machine.
A reminding machine would have in it thousands of stories from experts in various areas of life telling about important aspects of their lives that have lessons about life in them, the kind of stories you tell to colleagues or to students. Typically we would expect these stories to revolve around goal conflicts, plans, and counter plans and unexpected outcomes. They might be stories about love, child rearing, engineering, plan behavior, discovery, investment, or management. What they would have in common would be lessons that follow from them about what to do if something like this happened again.
A reminding machine must have its stories to be reminded of and they must be indexed by the themes they elaborate. Getting to the right story, especially to ones that do not obviously apply because they were put in by a biologist and you are worried about ships, is not impossible. It does require understanding vocabulary in its deepest sense, the real meaning of words and ideas and using those elements in the indices, of course.
About the Author
Roger C. Schank is one of the world's leading researchers in AI, learning theory, cognitive science, and the building of virtual learning environments. He is President and CEO of Socratic Arts, a company whose goal is to design and implement low-cost story-based learning by doing curricula in schools, universities, and corporations.
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