[From Chris Cherpas (960222.1042 PT)]
A big part of my work is engineering an on-line ontology upon which
the content of an on-line educational processes is based. There are,
of course, other "ontology engineering" projects around currently
(e.g., CYC, Ontolingua, etc.) which provide some ideas. But I've
been looking at the PCT hierarchy as presented in Robertson &
Powers (1990) as the basis for creating the abstract-level
categories on which to build this system. Again, the goal is to
re-architect a computer-based curriculum system for K-12 kids.
PCT seems to provide a terminology -- a set of ontological commitments
-- for talking about the world, packaged with an epistemology
("for free"), but I can't tell how useful it will be in setting up the
primitives for my representation of school knowledge yet.
Meanwhile, I'm thinking about how to design on-line exercises
in the spirit of the PCT demos, as opposed to just the usual
question-and-answer paradigm. Also, as I mentioned in a recent
post, I want to teach kids epistemology starting in kindergarten
(what does it mean to know? how do I know? how can I represent
knowledge?) and would like to start with learning about perceptions
and how we control them via actions (aka PCT). The actual instruction
cannot be a lot of lecture -- it should be learned by doing
(by constructing if you're a constructivist, by experiencing
the consequences of doing if you're an EABer, etc.).
Any comments, concerns, ideas? By the way, the first content area
I want this "philosophy for kids" foundation to serve is the area
of mathematics, specifically, the areas of probability, data
analysis/statistics, and measurement.
Best regards,
cc