Nope, not talking about myself, or my former cars (or former girlfriends)...

I'm currently reading Kevin Kelly's very wonderful (non-fiction) 'Out of Control', which is highly recommended. It's an extended meditation on the convergence between mechanical and biological systems, well researched and intriguingly presented, with lots of tales of cranks who are pushing the agenda forward in different ways.

I'm also thinking about the whole idea that the research I do, in school classrooms, needs metaphors and approaches from biology and biotech, not from mechanics and physical science. Kids just *aren't* sufficiently predictable for 'scientific' rational models to be of any use at all in thinking and talking about what they do and how they learn.

Each individual is incredibly complex already, and far from rational. Add in the complex web of relationships that ties every person in the room to every other person (including the researcher), and the best models are going to come from things like swarms...

Your contributions, insights and arguments are fervently sought!

Bravus

I have been lead to these ideas as well.
I am a completely self-taught programmer and have never worked on anything with another programmer, so I have no idea how the industry normally interacts with clients.
With one client I have found that he is constantly saying can we do this can we do that, which has led to their internal site being mostly different from the templates.
I cannot see this from anything other than an organic viewpoint.
I mention this because it seems to be a natural antithesis to your situation. My case looks like a piece of technology (a database intranet web-site) but actually is the meme of what I can do (which I don't know till I'm asked) and the clients 'I have these problems on the shop floor' folder. Thus biologically we have watched this single meme grow (evolve?) into an ever more potent application, and we are gardeners tending it, like a prized Bonzai. Your case however has many separate memes (each student...) so the biological implication here is that you are in the realms of dynamic equilibra from interactive ecological systems.
As a physicist I was trained to make the theory fit the data, if it didn't (no experimental muppetry having been confirmed) the theory or opinion gets binned. Scientific principle says look at the situation, decide what the relevant factors are and their interactions, work out how to quantify and measure them and design your hypothesis with an experiment to prove it.
In your situation each pupil has a large range of feelings that may be triggered either spontaneously or as a reaction to changes in the feelings of the class around them. Even if you quantify all these feelings and interactions (properties and methods) the resulting equations would only be solvable by reiterative analysis and would make predicting the weather accurately for 3 months look like number-crunching 101.
May I suggest not looking at the individual pupils but looking at the types of interactions going on (attention to teacher, whispering with mate non-disruptively, whispering with mate on dare-you-to-notice level, out-right you-ain't-got-the-guts level &c.). Maybe this will give you enough data from which to hypothesize about the underlying group feelings. I think I'm saying regard the pupils as an agar dish and the feelings which swirl and wash about the classroom as organisms within an ecology (within the timescale of the lesson as a seasonal environment?).
Too way out?

I thought Ethology was a source already of methods and buzzwords for sociology and anthropology. Of course, being in hard science all those buzzwords are a bit undefined, but they seem to work as a groundwork.

Primate ethology is so full of private agendas and politics that you can seldom trust a single source of information, but I suppose reliability is not your problem, but building a vocabulary.

I would loan as many words from ONE science as I could, find out where I have holes, and quickly define terms, to present "a priori" to the readers. Many terms have different connotations in different specialties, so often it is better to circunscribe yourself and then develop a new vocabulary. Or you will be criticized (or applauded) not for what you say, but what the readers think that you say.

I feel this may be a little hard to read, but in a way, that is the point.

José

Oddly enough, just last night I picked up a cheap little toy robot spider at Radio Shack, thinking it would amuse our cats. I was thinking about the documentary based on Fast, Cheap..., and supposed that surely the toy industry had developed something at least on a par with the tiny robots featured there. Nope. It's hard to overstate how enormously lame this thing is, though it does periodically come to life unexpectedly and frighten the cats, which is mildly amusing.

But in trying to find out if there were ANY more interesting applications for the thing, I came across this relevant link from a robot hobbyist on the emerging field of robot ethics.

Sony robot dog

Yeah, I'm not sure about the approach taken with the Aibo and the later robot dogs from Sony, or with the android project that Honda is putting tens of millions into. ASIMO
I suspect it's what Kelly describes as the 'big brain at the centre' approach that tries to map the world, rather than an approach that uses sensors and feedback systems, and a minimum of processing - the fast, cheap and out of control approach.

I think the kinds of suggestions for educational research that are offered above have a lot of potential, and draw on very interesting fields, but in a way I hope research in education is moving beyond the adaptation of ideas and approaches from other fields - rather than just picking them better (and ethology is without doubt a better *fit* for education than either psychology (behaviourist, cognitivist or any other brand) or physics), I want to try to develop genuinely educational models.

I'm actually toying with the idea of 'the death of theory': rather than a science, that attempts to create explanations, maybe our approach in education needs to be a technology, that finds ways that work well in a particular context?

Edit: That is, a rich, complex, adaptive technology modeled on biotech and on deep ecology (oops, there I go drawing on models again!), rather than a simplistic, 'teacher-proof', panacea-type approach.

[This message was edited by Bravus on October 07, 2003 at 11:17 AM.]

quote:

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Originally posted by Dog Soldier:
http://www.us.aibo.com/

http://www.sonystyle.com/intershoproot/eCS/Store/en/imagesProducts/250x250/ERS7.jpg

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Did I mention I spent $15 on on the stupid spider robot last night? It was marked down from $30 (Canadian) but it was still overpriced.

I see you can get a refurbished Aibo for US$699. I have a feeling that the level of disappointment in AI achievement would be roughly proportional to cost.

quote:

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Originally posted by Bravus:
Yeah, I'm not sure about the approach taken with the Aibo and the later robot dogs from Sony, or with the android project that Honda is putting tens of millions into. http://world.honda.com/ASIMO/

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How about the "Asimette"? I figure it's just a matter of time before the robot makers get together with these people to create the ultimate nerd accessory.

If some losers are willing to pay $6,000 for a Segway, think what they'd pay for something like that.

whenever i meet someone who is a teacher, i feel a need to recommend to them this book: Accelerated Learning by Colin Rose ...

not many jobs as important as urs, bravus ... good on ya ...

ummm, crap ...

i just re-read ur original post ...

so ur not actually a teacher, is that correct ?... rather, u observe the teaching enviornment(s), presumably conducting research of some nature ?...

and what form, exactly, does ur observing take ?... do u physically sit in on classes ?... i imagine that might be rather disruptive ...

i am - officialy! - intringued ...

however, it sounds awesome, plz do elaborate!...

...you'll love this

Wow! And it's only $90.00?? Who wouldn't want such a cute, Pink peripheral?

Wow I bet MOM has one right by his computer.

G'day hir0

Well, I'm a teacher in the sense that I taught high school physics, chemistry, math and science for about 7 years. (And I'll definitely be checking out the Rose book.)

Now I (try to) teach new and old teachers how to teach, and conduct educational research. In my current project (well, one - the other is about distance teaching via videoconference), I got my grad students to sit at the back of classrooms with a video camera (they're pretty small and unobtrusive these days (vid cameras, not grad students)) and record about 2 weeks each of Grade 11 physics lessons, in the classrooms of 15 or so top teachers in this city.

Now I'm transcribing and coding the video, looking for the commonalities and differences in good physics explanations. That is, given differences of student ability, context and teacher personal style, can I identify features of what counts as a good explanation that are common, that I can then teach to my students, and share with others?

But that's just my current practical project. This thread comes more out of something I'm thinking about theoretically.

I'm presenting a paper in a couple of weeks at a 'complexity science and educational research' conference that is entitled 'The Death of Theory....' It's one of those (I don't know whether other people do this) where I proposed the paper with a paragraph because I had what I thought was a good idea, and now I have to read up on a whole new literature and try to write a coherent paper! So yes, I admit it, I'm pretty much using the good denizens of the board to help do my homework. But I hope the discussion is fun and interesting for you.

The contention is pretty simple: classrooms are incredibly complex environments, and do not come under the necessary conditions of predictability for 'scientific' measurement and new prescriptions for practice. Instead of lamenting this, maybe we should embrace it, and conduct some other kind of research.

I suspect this would be purely practitioner research: not us academics flying in, gathering data and flying out, but the teachers who do the teaching using trial and error, knowledge, skill, experience and empathy to try to understand how to teach better in that class, for those students.

Our role as academics would then be (a) to do the same in our own teaching - to turn the tools on ourselves (which we do far too rarely) and (b) to act as reporters, sharing and communicating the teachers' 'results' in rich ways for other teachers (because teachers largely don't have either the time or skills (or desire) to write about what they do).

The model is much more like what currently happens in IT: there are innovators who are practitioners, and there are tech reporters who communicate the results, and an interested audience. There are academics in that field too, but they're pretty much irrelevant to its direction, which IMO is how it should be.

Hope that's clarified what I'm thinking about, and where I'm coming from. I've been influenced quite a lot by a 1989 paper by Jack Whitehead on creating 'living educational theory', but I'm not sure he goes far enough: theory is its abstract form isn't serving us at all well, IMO.

ahhh, ok, makes more sense now ... see, i was picturing a room full of 3rd graders ... video camera in there would set them all off id imagine ...

in any case, thx for the clarification ... ur research definately sounds worthwhile, good luck with it ...