There is an interesting part of articles on Salon right now
about artificial intelligence (Called
Artificial Stupidity). It's about the Loebner prize offered to anyone
who can design a system to pass the Turing test. It describes
how serious AI people originally were excited, but became
disenchanted with the idea of mimetics and the serious
personality conflicts over the particular award. The key
conflict is that its turning out that the most successful
approaches to passing the Turing test involve using tricks,
rather than seriously trying to model intelligence. The person
who's been most successful at the contests is an insane, drug-using
person named Wallace who denies the existence of conciousness
and has been working on a stateless chatterbot that simply looks
at what you say and draws from a gigantic set of stock statements
to reply with. He claims that that is the best model of
human intelligence. An interesting read.
John Lombardi, in contrasting research with teaching, says
Research seeks the unknown, pursues knowledge at the boundaries of our current understanding. Teaching provides the known and delivers the state of current knowledge. Research, by virtue of the expertise required for reaching beyond what we know, tends to focus narrowly and deeply. Teaching, by virtue of delivering what we already know focuses more broadly and generally.
This draws from a traditional view of education, which sees teaching primarily as a transmissive activity: an act of transmitting a body of knowledge to passive recipients, who internalize it. An alternative view of education is that teaching is modeling the pursuit of knowledge and engaging jointly with students upon that pursuit. Whereas in research, we aim to construct models about the natural world, in teaching, we must construct models of our students. Students do not come as blank slates to be written upon: they bring robust ideas about how the world works. The best teachers do not simply lecture to the air, but work to understand how their students think about the world in order to design effective instruction, including experiences and problems that will help students discover that their current models about the world need to be revised. Perhaps as important as disciplinary knowledge, students need modelling and practice to develop the social knowledge necessary to work effectively in a discipline, including an understanding of acceptable rhetorical models, valid vehicles of communication, and the underlying social structure. Without these things, most students may increase their declarative knowledge about a subject, but they will gain little understanding or personal transformation from the experience.
Lombardi also says
Academics know that teaching is a handicraft activity in which someone who knows something the students need to know, tells them about it. Good teaching delivers both informational content (names, dates, facts, formula) and methodological process (critical thinking, analytical techniques, information validation and verification, evaluative techniques).
I think different people think of teaching differently as art, craft, profession, and science. Some people see teaching as an art: the best teaching being done by idosyncratic geniuses who have a gift of inspiring people. Almost everyone has met a truly great teacher. As Lombardi suggests, many people think of teaching as a craft, like weaving or making pots. There are a lot of different ways to do it and you learn by apprenticing yourself to different masters to acquire the skills from their tradition. Increasingly, teaching is treated as a profession, especially at the pre-university levels, meaning that there are an accepted body of principles that are applied to teaching and practioners are expected to learn these principles and apply them. Finally, there are researchers in education who believe that teaching can be studied scientifically and that generalizable principles can be developed that can guide the selection of pedagogical techniques. Some believe that learning should be considered as only a black-box: apply treatments and measure using "instruments" (e.g. tests). Others believe the science is still at a naturalistic stage, much like Linneaus and Darwin approached biology in the 18th and 19th centuries. Seeing teaching only as a craft rejects a lot of the richness of the tradition and where it is going.
Buzz isn't the only one to see the potential of blogs as
learning journals. Harvard has given Dave Winer a fellowship to get
them set up and blogging I probably should run a workshop for our department about blogging. I don't think many of our faculty or students are ready, but they probably ought to start hearing about blogging.