Comments on: Education http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/?p=3221 examining transformative technology Wed, 03 Apr 2013 18:23:47 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.4 By: Susan http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/?p=3221#comment-859651 Susan Sun, 02 Aug 2009 16:22:28 +0000 http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/?p=3221#comment-859651 The famous American philosopher and educator, John Dewey, wrote: "It (the technique of Mr. Alexander - known today as the Alexander Technique) bears the same relation to education that education itself bears to all other human activity." My own experience with Alexander lessons certainly bears this out. You can learn more about the Dewey-Alexander onnection at http://alexandertechnique.com/articles/dewey and about the Alexander Technique itself at http://alexandertechnique.com The famous American philosopher and educator, John Dewey, wrote:
“It (the technique of Mr. Alexander – known today as the Alexander Technique) bears the same relation to education that education itself bears to all other human activity.” My own experience with Alexander lessons certainly bears this out.

You can learn more about the Dewey-Alexander onnection at http://alexandertechnique.com/articles/dewey and about the Alexander Technique itself at http://alexandertechnique.com

]]> By: Al Neunzoller http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/?p=3221#comment-859633 Al Neunzoller Thu, 30 Jul 2009 11:00:35 +0000 http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/?p=3221#comment-859633 Very interesting and inspiring post. The 1bps bandwidth of long-term memory is an idea that I have always disagreed with. Consider that the average human child needs an average of 12 hours sleep per day until 5 years of age. We know that new information is not absorbed during sleep, so this means that even if a child were to learn for a full 12 hours per day, only 5.2 kilobytes of information would be absorbed. This is equal to 9.5 megabytes for 5 whole years, assuming that conditions were favorable and that the child starts learning immediately after birth. According to our experience with AI, the idea that the entire range of social skills, language (an average vocabulary of over 2500 words!) and relationships between concepts that a 5 year old has learned could be translated into just 9.5 megabytes is nothing short of insane. The key is that the child has many things to help it learn - much of the subcortical circuitry is devoted just to this task - and can absorb information by many channels simultaneously. The typical family setting (mother, father, optional siblings, each interacting with each other and the child in ways similar across different families and cultures) is, as it turns out, the optimal learning environment for a young child. Indeed, we have evolved for this purpose. However, soon after childhood, this system loses steam, simply because at 13 or 14 humans are 'fully-grown' as far as living in the natural world is concerned. Indeed, in many cultures it is not uncommon for a 10-year-old girl to start living independently and start raising a family. Our modern culture, however, has evolved needs that require highly specialized knowledge that we simply don't know how to teach effectively, resulting in (sometimes) decades-long education systems. Evolution has simply not had enough time to evolve optimal learning environments for this kind of knowledge. Yet the earlier learning mechanisms are still there. I think that by in-depth study of neural systems we could engineer teaching systems that could teach at far higher rates than many would think possible, while at the same time putting little pressure on the learning individual. In the future, an advanced thermodynamics course might be as simple and carefree as childhood. Very interesting and inspiring post.
The 1bps bandwidth of long-term memory is an idea that I have always disagreed with. Consider that the average human child needs an average of 12 hours sleep per day until 5 years of age. We know that new information is not absorbed during sleep, so this means that even if a child were to learn for a full 12 hours per day, only 5.2 kilobytes of information would be absorbed. This is equal to 9.5 megabytes for 5 whole years, assuming that conditions were favorable and that the child starts learning immediately after birth. According to our experience with AI, the idea that the entire range of social skills, language (an average vocabulary of over 2500 words!) and relationships between concepts that a 5 year old has learned could be translated into just 9.5 megabytes is nothing short of insane.

The key is that the child has many things to help it learn – much of the subcortical circuitry is devoted just to this task – and can absorb information by many channels simultaneously. The typical family setting (mother, father, optional siblings, each interacting with each other and the child in ways similar across different families and cultures) is, as it turns out, the optimal learning environment for a young child. Indeed, we have evolved for this purpose. However, soon after childhood, this system loses steam, simply because at 13 or 14 humans are ‘fully-grown’ as far as living in the natural world is concerned. Indeed, in many cultures it is not uncommon for a 10-year-old girl to start living independently and start raising a family. Our modern culture, however, has evolved needs that require highly specialized knowledge that we simply don’t know how to teach effectively, resulting in (sometimes) decades-long education systems. Evolution has simply not had enough time to evolve optimal learning environments for this kind of knowledge. Yet the earlier learning mechanisms are still there.

I think that by in-depth study of neural systems we could engineer teaching systems that could teach at far higher rates than many would think possible, while at the same time putting little pressure on the learning individual. In the future, an advanced thermodynamics course might be as simple and carefree as childhood.

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