Dear Iain, Chuck, Glenn, John, mid-60s Buick lovers,
After I wrote that, I thought about you had a hunch that you are a PhD and, believe me, I'm impressed. Science and math education are extremely important for our future. Congratulations on achieving that level of education and, if you are using that education to teach our youth, thanks for sharing your knowledge with them!
Well, I did get some lecturer assignments and was very enthusiastically received by the students I taught. However, the competition for professor positions is deadly and I had unwittingly made a lot of enemies for the paradoxical reason that I had started out trying to use their theories.
The most widely accepted theory of learning comes out of a discipline called Cognitive Science. It assumes that the brain functions something like a computer and human learning is something like the way a computer functions. I wasn't too sure I believed this, but thought it could be the basis for a very interesting software tool which I called an "Educational Apprentice." The idea was to have a software tool that would accomplish small tasks for a student while carefully demonstrating every step the tool took to accomplish this task. If you don't know how to do something very well, and you watch a machine solve the problem for you, it stands to reason you'll adopt the tool's procedure. After all, you want the problem solved - right?
So I developed my tool and decided automate a subtle feature of the FORTRAN programming language that was frequently misunderstood. Alas, when I did my pilot trials with 3 students - none of them learned anything from my Educational Apprentice! After 8 years of work, I had to start from scratch and come up with an entirely new topic for my PhD.
At the time, there was an alternative learning theory called "Communities of Practice." However, it really didn't have any theoretical framework, it simply observed that people can learn better in communities. Since my bachelor's degree was a double major in Philosophy and Physics, it occurred to me that perhaps the role of communities in learning could be understood through some of the existential principles developed in Martin Heidegger's work
Being and Time. I ended up exploring these ideas in the realm of scuba diving classes because I could see that very intense communities would form and disintegrate over the period of the class.
Obviously this is very heady stuff and it didn't sit well with all those established Cognitive Science professors. Worse still, there were bickering among the supporters of the Community of Practice theory. That was enough for Cognitive Science camp to basically dismember the Community of Practice supporters. Out of luck, I had to go back to software engineering.
Unfortunately, this is a common occurrence in academia and it means that the status quo is always favored and innovative ideas are frequently rejected before they have any chance to demonstrate their merits. I think we all pay a very heavy price for the complacency of higher education. Effectively, they spend their time replicating themselves instead of making a serious effort to understand the world.
Such are the conditions that prevail.
Oh well, . . . Edouard
