Dear Dr. Heylighen
I came across your PCP project via the WWW Open Text search engine. I am
preparing a Master's (potentially doctoral) thesis on the structure of
scientific knowledge as presented via the Web and it's implication for
teaching and learning. I have here a brief description of my thoughts and
would greatly appreciate any feedback on likely fruitful sources. The
domain of knowledge I wish to explore resides mostly in the implications for
teachers and learners rather than designers of cybernetic learning systems.
Most of my reading has been based in Science Education, Journal of Research
in Science Teaching etc. The coursework I've done has been primairly
centred around constructivist and metacognitive perspectives in learning.
I have spent a great deal of time exploring concept mapping and semantic
mapping in my classrooms as vehicles for encouraging greater thought and
understanding in my students. This has led me to look at both metacognitive
and epistemological perspectives in science learning. My initial palns are
to try to characterize the nature fo the links and nodes of the bodies of
knowledge on the Net which are likely or commonly used as instructional
vehicles for learning secondary science. I believe that if those nodes
exist primarily at the "has property" level, then at the epistemological
level, knowledge would clearly be being represented differently than isf the
nodes were connected at a larger level, for example pointing to which theory
was most closley relevant or over-arching. For a specific example, in
teaching biological evolution, it would be interesting to see whether links
are primarily focussed on more examples of biological evolution or focussed
at addressing world-views such as "are these examples indicative of or a
function of a random or ordered universe?"
The implications I would suggest are that students learning science via
cybernetic learning structures will be very much subject to the structuring
of the knowledge -- which itslef represents a sort of content and context.
Teachers and students in the cybernetic world then need to know more and
more about metacognitive and epistemological aspects of knowledge and not
merely the content. Maybe in this light, the context is collectively the
links, the nature of the links, and the nodes?
Thanks in advance for any aand all advice. I will be subscribing to the
PRNCYB-L list to lurk and learn.
Sincerely
Jon P. McGoey
University of Western Ontario
London, Ontario, Canada