Dear Dr. Joslyn
I would be interested in learning from your PRNCYB listserv. Here are some
snippets from some letters I have sent out to researchers as I write my
thesis. I hope it is enough for your purposes - if not, please let me know.
I know some listservs request bios for introductions, and I'd be glad to cut
and paste one if need be.
Jon
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Name: Jon P. McGoey
Email address: jmcgoey@quark.physics.uwo.ca
URL of home page:
Postal address: 917 William St. London, Ontario, CANADA
Phone: (519) 660 3532
Affiliations:
How did you hear about PCP? Open Text search engine
Please take at least one page to describe your work
and how it might relate to PCP:
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?
Sincerely
Jon P. McGoey
University of Western Ontario
London, Ontario, Canada