New Kind of Memory for AI

AI researchers have typically tried to get around the issues posed by by Montezuma’s Revenge and Pitfall! by instructing reinforcement-learning algorithms to explore randomly at times, while adding rewards for exploration—what’s known as “intrinsic motivation.” But the Uber researchers believe this fails to capture an important aspect of human curiosity. “We hypothesize that a major weakness of current intrinsic motivation algorithms is detachment,” they write. “Wherein the a...

 Insights on Being Well-Read

What is the true point of a bookish life? Note I write “point,” not “goal.” The bookish life can have no goal: It is all means and no end. The point, I should say, is not to become immensely knowledgeable or clever, and certainly not to become learned. Montaigne, who more than five centuries ago established the modern essay, grasped the point when he wrote, “I may be a man of fairly wide reading, but I retain nothing.” Retention of everything one reads, along with being mentally i...

 The Progressive Effects of Education

Homo sapiens, “knowing man,” is the species that uses information to resist the rot of entropy and the burdens of evolution. Humans everywhere acquire knowledge about their landscape, its flora and fauna, the tools and weapons that can subdue them, and the networks and norms that entangle them with kin, allies, and enemies. They accumulate and share that knowledge with the use of language, gesture, and face-to-face tutelage. [...] The mind-altering effects of education extend to every s...

 There is No "Pokemon Gap"

While educators debated whether children learn to read best through drill-and-practice phonics or "whole language" instruction, Nintendo was, quite informally, teaching a generation of children how to read. Pokemon also taught children how to analyze and classify more than 700 different types of creatures through trading cards that were dense with specialized, technical, cross-referenced text. Gee would later call Pokemon "perhaps the best literacy curriculum ever conceived." He offered the o...

 Wargaming Allows a Safe Space to Learn and Experiment

Such is the power of wargames: They create a virtual world players can experience, learn from, and integrate into their tactical and strategic decision making. Let's repeat what we said at the outset. If you had the opportunity to probe the future, make strategic choices, and view the consequences of those choices in a risk-free environment before making expensive and irrevocable decisions. wouldn't you take advantage of it?

 Wonder and Awe as a Habit of Mind

When students approach me with amazement in their new knowledge, I can hear the awe in their voices for all there is to learn about the world and I ask myself, “How can we inspire such excitement every day? How can we identify the best vehicles to facilitate student learning by fostering wonder and awe in our classrooms? Some of the true experts in fostering a habit of responding with wonderment and awe are early childhood and primary grade teachers. Teachers of our youngest learners fill ...

 Border Crossings into Science Culture

Learning to communicate in and with a culture of science is a much broader undertaking than mastering a body of discrete conceptual or procedural knowledge. One observer, for example, describes the process of science education as one in which learners must engage in "border crossings" from their own everyday world culture into the subculture of science.^ The subculture of science is in part distinct from other cultural activities and in part a reflection of the cultural backgrounds of scienti...

 Socrates on How Written Word Will Destroy Memory

or this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; th...

 Emergent Curriculum

Whereas teachers and school boards typically decide in advance what knowledge children should receive based on their age, emergent curriculum is the technique of letting topics for study arise out of student interests and actions. Curriculum becomes what actually happens, rather than what was planned to happen. After all, children design their own “curriculum” all the time, simply by playing in, exploring, and studying the world. In schools inspired by the Italian Reggio-Emilia approach, ...