This is an appeal for getting everyone's creative juices flowing and mixing
with solid experimental data gathering. I've just returned from Porto
Alegre, Brasil, where I attended a Unesco/NGO meeting on their Education
for All activities followed by the World Forum on Education. Despite the
recent development of a Unesco Institute for Educational Statistics and
years of research on learning and schools and children and adults,
decision-making is rarely being driven by research. And, education for all
is a joke while lousy useless education continues to proliferate. The U.S.
National Research Council published a massive compilation of about 1000
research studies, "How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience and School"
edited by John D. Bransford, et al, 2000, but if it was assigned reading in
teacher-training programmes, most students would switch fields.
I recently wore a Holter Monitor for 24 hours while it recorded from 6 EKG
leads. It was small, lightweight, easily manageable. When I returned it to
the hospital, the nurse removed a casette, placed it in a computer and told
me that the data would be fully analysed for the heart specialist in a few
minutes.
So, while listening to boring prsentations in Porto Alegre, I began to dream
of possibilities for very sophisticated monitoring of individual lives with
a focus on their ongoing learning processes ..... a combination of a TV eye,
hanging from one's neck, an audio pickup and output, with ongoing software
processing so that it could ask questions and record answers, one or more
EEG leads, possibly from frontal cortex or focussed on the amygdala, a skin
resistance lead .... etc, etc. All of this would be controlled by
dedicated software of great complexity and power. And, perhaps, all this
would only be possible as the speed and capability of chips and memory kept
rising.
Central to my dream was a feeling that this could also be advantageous for
the acceptance of a PCT view of human functioning. Because of a number of
competing summer-time events, I was wavering about attending this year's PCT
conference. However, if some of our group feel I'm possibly on to
something, I'll do my damndest to join you.
David Wolsk
Victoria Canada 250 478 9795