Recent Posts by Richard Clark

Topic: Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware / Dreyfus model?

Having just read the book, the focus on Dreyfus seems like its weakest point. His work (1), like so many popular items in education, comes down to applied common sense. It describes the apparent stages in a process without providing much insight in how those stages evolve. (I also stopped to read as much of Dreyfus’ published material I could get my hands on.)

I’d like to suggest a few things to fill in the gaps. The first is chapters 3 and 4 of Roger Schank’s “Virtual Learning” where he explains the roles failure plays in learning. (This will strengthen the explanation of a novice learner’s desire of rules and context - to minimize failure - and also lays out strategies for moving into self-directed learning and mastery.) The next is “On Intelligence” by Jeff Hawkins— a stunning examination of learning all the way down to the neural level. (Pay special attention to its explanation of trial and error, pattern matching, and how the hippocampus moderates learning.)

Etienne Wenger (in Communities of Practice), like Dreyfus, points to having many varied experiences as a road to mastery. But Wenger, like Schank, also refers to the need to construct and share explanations as key to learning effectively from those experiences.

There’s an interesting bit of educational research showing the key difference between someone who is proficient and someone is an expert is they both have about the same amount of knowledge but the expert has developed many “shortcut” connections between the pieces. These enable the seemingly magical “intuitive” leaps. (Unfortunately, I can’t recall the citation. I’ll have to ask a couple of colleagues.)

On a personal note, the best learning skill I’ve developed is also my best debugging skill—being able to recognize when what I’m seeing isn’t matching what I’ve expected and being willing to question/research the underlying belief. Technically, it’s a “metacognitive” skill, and there’s quite a bit of literature on metacognition and learning.

OK, hopefully I haven’t been too much of a nuisance and have supplied something useful. I’ve been teaching, learning, and designing instructional experiences for over 20 years and would be happy to help however I can. (I’m also a long-time reader of the pragprog books and an active software developer building simulations, decision support systems, instructional tools, etc.)

...Richard

(1) Note that Dreyfus doesn’t call his original work a “model”, but a “treatment of the phenomenology of skill acquisition” (see “A Phenomenology of Skill Acquisition as the basis for a Merleau-Pontian Non-representationalist Cognitive Science” available on Dreyfus’ web page.)