Society of Mind

Learning how to learn

In our previous student-led discussion, we discussed how explaining the various aspects of consciousness could help us improve and control our mental lives. Next Wednesday (13 Mar), Prof. Mike Hawley will speak about how explaining the various aspects of learning can help us in the same way. Topics include: the scientific efforts to understand learning and retention, the technology we are developing to learn better, and how fact-rich websites have changed the way we manage our knowledge.

In preparation, we have collected a number of questions and resources for you to consider:

• What's the difference between Knowing and Learning?
  • Is knowing what's left after you finish learning?
  • How does knowledge affect or bias learning? What are some examples of this phenomenon?
  • How many different ways are there to learn (e.g. by mistake, by analogy, by rote), and how many different categories of things can we learn? (e.g. learning to play a new card game, learning to ride a bike, learning to control your impulses, learning to stop at a stop sign, learning the name of a new acquaintance.)
• How fast can you learn something? What limits how fast you can learn?
  • Why does college take four years instead of four weeks?
  • Will there ever be a pill, or an implant, to allow you to speak and think in French, play a piano concerto, or cook like a master Chinese chef?
  • What are the patterns of some notable prodigies, savants? (Specific examples, please).
  • What accounts for the vast differences in our abilities to learn — is the difference in brain chemistry, in education, in nutrition, in random chance? How is it possible that, for example, a nine year old prodigy can sight-read virtuoso piano pieces? Would you be impressed if a nine year old computer performed the same task?
    
    (Compare with Chapter 7.10 of SOM)
• Do forgetting and mis-remembering serve useful roles?
• Consider e-books, educational software, MOOC's, and learning-augmentation tools. What do these developments suggest for the future of institutions (like schools) that have been organized to nurture learners?
  Examples: Udacity, Coursera, edX, brainrush.com...
  
  What is the most effective way to improve education? For example, should we focus on developing new software, new platforms like online education, new ways of organizing classrooms, new experiments in neuroscience or psychology?
  
  (Compare with Prof. Minsky's essays on education [1 2 3 4 5 ] )
• Project some trends in machine learning and intelligent media: if we have tools like WATSON and NEST today, what will the state of the art be like ten years from now?
• How will individual careers and societies be affected in the post-information age economy, and what will you do personally to prepare for it? Think ambitiously and selfishly about this: Humanity is now co-evolving amidst increasingly intelligent and hyperconnected media. What is your 25 year plan?
  
  How do information-rich websites like Google and Wikipedia change the way we're expected to handle knowledge? Do they shorten our attention spans or raise the intellectual standard from fact-collection to deep understanding? Do they encourage us to learn less, or enable us to learn more? What are the ideals that a knowledge-based society should embody?