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The Brain is the Network, not the Computer Date: Sat, 2 Nov 1996 In Learning, the Brain is the Network, not the Computer Teachers are in the dark about recent expansions in what is know about how the brain works, and how people learn. It is one thing to say "I drive to school every day and don't need to know how my car works" and quite another to work with students' minds every day, guided by instinct, trial-and-error, and prior experience, instead of an understanding of the processes involved. So said Dr. David Sousa during his keynote address at our in-service day here at Princeton Regional Schools. He stated that we in education are about to cross a threshold that medicine crossed 70 years ago. At that time, Dr. Fleming discovered that some of his bacteria specimens had spoiled, but rather than throwing away the ruined material, examined the processes at work. In doing so, he discovered antibiotics, moving medicine from an art form to the combination of science and art that the practice of healing properly embodies. Since that time, regardless of their specialties, most physicians work from a common set of research data. Recent developments in brain research poise our profession at the edges of a similar transformation, letting us advance from tradition, folk-wisdom and superstition to a blending of science and art. There are specific implications for how we manage time, how we sequence and present information, how we provide opportunities for students to express and synthesize what they are learning which are directly supported by brain research, and largely absent in how we conduct our schools. Dr. Sousa has books and videotapes available which illustrate examples of practices which derive from this research. David Sousa repeatedly stated, "it's not how many neurons you have, it's how many connections you can grow" that determines your capacity to learn. Readers who have followed the development of the ideas of Howard Gardner, Daniel Golman and Barry Kort will not be surprised to hear that the emotions play a key role in setting a conducive environment, which invites "sense and meaning" as companions for information as it enters the brain, a determining factor for whether connections are grown and learning is retained. In trying to describe how the brain develops, he was troubled by an imperfect metaphor that involved computers. He said the initial capacity of the brain is fixed, like the hard drive of a computer, but that a person couldn't access the potentially stored material until they "learned" how to get to this data, by using a mouse or screen. The trouble is computers don't learn. However, networks do. Just as our teaching strategies are limited by our understanding of the brain, we are constrained by our vision of computers and technology, by the blending of emotional, visual and other modalities of intelligence that existing and emerging networking technologies present to us. Focusing upon the "hardware" and "software" without understanding how the network learns about itself, and grows new capacities daily is understandable, since such a low percentage of the population has experienced the Internet. Many are more likely to place "learning to change my oil" above "learning about routers and bridges" on their personal priority list. What makes the Internet function at all is its inherent ability to learn about itself. The computers called "routers" have no other function than to learn about new destinations the Internet has made available, and ways to get there. The "sense and meaning" has to be invented by the people commanding this potential, a daunting task to be sure, but similar to the electric sense of discovery we witness in young children. We have been looking for too long at technology as "computers". At first, the focus on mainframes, with centralized control, led to the creation of the "drill and kill" model. The next advance, the "personal computer" put the power of a mainframe on each desktop, where today any machine capable of playing a video game has more power than the system that sent the Apollo spacecrafts to the moon. Learning, when it happened, was still one user at a time. Far too many of my students who describe themselves as "computer savvy" are more likely to know how to master levels of computer games than to be able to converse about the meaning of what is coming across their screens. The advent of the Internet brings us closer to the brain model, by opening the possibility for a massively distributed learning system, one in which the networks connected learn about each other, while the people using them do the same. The more we learn about the brain, the more we are presented with a model for harnessing these incredible potentials. Dr. Sousa's enthusiastic presentation hit many peaks, one of which was frustration on the growing gap between what is known about the brain and the rate at which this information is reaching educators. Obviously, the Internet ought to be able to play a role in solving this situation! There is a physiological parallel here, as well. It seems that the astonishing rate of new connections formed in a child of 12 to 30 months results from the brain examining itself, looking for places where active learning is happening, and focusing its growth powers there. What is not widely known is that this time of "self scanning" happens again at the age of 52-60. Your brain will do a similar survey, shutting off those dormant places in order to stimulate growth in those areas which continue to be vibrant, through learning. It is not difficult to imagine a similar renaissance in our profession, whether we are taking baby steps onto the Internet, or are working our way towards middle age. Those of us who have discovered we're hopelessly addicted to lifelong learning have a great reward ahead, and can only feel sadness for those already on the way to being shut down. |
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© 2006 Online Internet Institute. |