po - A virtual thinking tower can replace schools.

Add a Comment

Comment by Phil Bachmann on March 20, 2010 at 7:12am

Re:

In this virtual tower you can think about real life scenarios without the need to gather all the information you need to start thinking (this is the service of the tower).

Maybe. My best guess so far is that the primary service provided by the thinking tower should be to provide short-term gratification for good thinking.

There is instant gratification if:
- You win a piece in chess.
- You kill all the monsters in a video game.
- You kick a goal in soccer.
- You ace someone in tennis.

How might the thinking tower provide reward for good thinking?

I've got a few ideas - the gratification is not instant, but it occurs within a few hours.

Comment by Phil Bachmann on March 19, 2010 at 8:47am

Ron,

Because of my rush to talk about my learning website, my explanation of the platform was anything but clear.

Key to understanding it is that I have targetted this platform at Niters (people Not Interested in Technology). Niters who want to develop software have, in the past, had two choices:

1. Hire a computer expert who will ask questions, create a prototype, ask for feedback, and then create the website. This is very expensive and the computer expert is in the driver's seat.

2. Use some website-generation program (eg. Ning, the platform on which the de Bono Society is built). The trouble with these is that produce websites which are not very customisable, or that are quite customisable but take a long time to learn (too many options) - and then don't quite deliver what the Niter intended.

Now the platform that I have created takes the Niter input and uses some of it verbatim, and sends some of it to a computer programmer who has to translate it into a working component.

I have three websites (in private beta) already using this platform, and they are working well. Your Thinking Tower could be a fourth.

I hope you find this interesting Ron, even though few people will. Too many people who have wanted to create computer software have not understood the importance of remaining ignorant of technology.

Once people start to understand computers they join the league of experts, who of course hate the idea that the development process should should be run by someone not interested in technology:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23998/is-there-a-place-in-software-development-for-niters

Comment by Phil Bachmann on March 18, 2010 at 11:18am

Ron,

Looking at this idea again I'm bound to say that I missed a lot of the value of your idea in my eagerness to talk about mine.

For example, The following phrase:

In this virtual tower you can think about real life scenarios without the need to gather all the information you need to start thinking (this is the service of the tower).

Feel free to comment further on this, I will ponder it anyway.

Comment by Phil Bachmann on March 8, 2010 at 6:18am

Hi Martin,

Thanks for your comments, I didn't notice them until today.

I've done as you suggested and looked at Squeak and SugarLabs.

I could write pages on what I think of them but won't bore you with details. Both these are non-profit groups and the people involved are only going to volunteer their time to do FUN stuff, which for software engineers means producing a labyrinth of techno-babble, a gamut of toys and an operating system they hope will displace Microsoft Windows.

Comment by Martin Buoncristiani on March 5, 2010 at 4:40am

I want to comment on Phil Bachman’s post in this thread; it was the first response and his idea reappeared in sequel. Phil is working on a computer program to augment schoolwork with “practice”. Rote learning is a good technique for some subjects but, as Phil points out does not address the learning of concepts. I’m sure the world could use a good program for practice.

I’m know there are many such programs which do not work well. I had the opportunity to examine one closely when my wife took over as principal in an elementary school in the US. There was a program for arithmetic practice in place called “Cortez” and it was was not successful. It was as expensive as it was ineffectual and was gone in short order.

The thrust of my comment is to point out two areas where computers are used in education as thinking tools. The first one was developed by Alan Kay. It is a programming language for children called Squeak. It is a full blown open source, object oriented programming language. It is used in some (but not many) universities to teach programming but it is intended for children. It use allows student directed learning or perhaps better curiosity directed learning. You can download Squeak from http://www.squeak.org/ . It is worth a look, Phil.

The second idea in One Laptop Per Child (OLPC). A fully functional, inexpensive computer for children made available to poor children. It is the brain child of Nicholas Negroponte. The operating system is called Sugar http://www.sugarlabs.org/

From that web page:
“The award-winning Sugar Learning Platform promotes collaborative learning through Sugar Activities that encourage critical thinking, the heart of a quality education. Designed from the ground up especially for children, Sugar offers an alternative to traditional “office-desktop” software.”

It may be that these two learning platforms which are well established may be useful to you.

Comment by Martin Buoncristiani on March 5, 2010 at 1:54am

I think that there is some truth to Ron Rigatoni’s assertion of exclusiveness in deBono’s circle of ideas about thinking. The dBT are widely available free or at nominal cost but they seem always to appear as a closed unit and are not mixed with other ideas about thinking. They are not “open source” in the sense that freely developing computer software is open to incorporate the ideas of others.
There are other sets of other ideas about thinking and the teaching of thinking that should be included in a comprehensive approach to developing a thinking culture – a short list might include:
1) Ideas from recent brain research on how best to teach. “How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition” published by the National Academies Press http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=9853 There is related work by the group Learning in Formal and Informal Environments (LIFE).
http://www.life-slc.org/
2) The behavioral dispositions supporting successful thinking are embodied in the “Habits of Mind {“Learning and Leading with Habits of Mind”, Art Costa and Bena Kallick, published by ASCD (2009)} http://www.instituteforhabitsofmind.com/content/learning-and-leading-habits-mind

3) Some discussion of bringing a human element into thinking – tolerance, empathy, compassion, fairness and so forth.


While there is merit in Rigatoni’s idea of some sort of school independent virtual tower of thinking, schools should not be allowed to abdicate their responsibility to teach thinking. In fact, they should do it in an integrated way so that thinking skills transcend disciplines and in fact, extend beyond the classroom to the playground, to the home, ... to the poolroom, Internet or wherever students hang out. Schools should develop a thought filled culture.

Furthermore, there is a lot of research supporting teaching thinking within the disciplines rather than in content free courses.
• Student motivation to learn thinking skills is higher when they see a “need to know”;
• Integrating instruction of thinking skills with discipline content improves both learning of the thinking skill and learning the content.
This research is reviewed in B.Beyer, “Improving Student Thinking”, Allyn and Bacon (1997). (a bit dated but still relevant).

Comment by Phil Bachmann on March 2, 2010 at 6:11am

Now with regard to thinking, de Bono has already made the tools. I need to figure out where I can add value...

So for example there is the CAF:

If you study CoRT one of the regular ways you will probably read/hear about the CAF and then be prompted to do an exercise:

"You and your family are going on holiday, do a CAF on this."

By contrast my site might have a subject called "Wisdom" and as part of being wise there might be a sub-heading called "separating the wheat from the chaff". Someone clicking on this sub-heading will arrive, without further prompting, to a page where there is a single question:

"What are the top things to consider when going on a family holiday?"

As with the comma page there is no immediate assistance given, and confident users can just write what they think. If advice is requested, I run into trouble: most of the best advice I could give in this situation would be use de Bono techniques: concept triangle, random word, OPV etc.

My intention is to either leave users to their own devices for the time being, or to give them a very brief description of relevant tools with a link to an authorised de Bono site (eg. CortThinking.com) for more information. Also linking directly to Amazon for book purchases is a possibility.

It's interesting to compare a CAF with what I am proposing. CoRT seems concerned with developing thinking ability, whereas I am concerned with defining outcomes which are generally regarded as useful. How people get there is not my business.

After a user completes their "top holiday things to consider", they go to another screen where they see other peoples' answers to the same question. They can include other peoples' points in their answer to form a new answer.

Again, statistics will be kept at every point. Through these statistics we get to see who can come up with answers to important questions without prompting, who is humble enough to appreciate other peoples' answers when they see them, who writes answers that other people like so much that they want to see them included in their own answers, how many more answers are arrived at with the introduction of a random word etc.

Ron, with regard to your questions, I may make the beta available to de Bono Society members who contact me privately, but I will not be promoting my site here as this site is about Edward de Bono not me.

Of course I am very happy to Six Hats with you over this, but bear in mind that Will Devine and others have done a lot of work already and I have no wish to duplicate their efforts. It may be that Edward de Bono has agreements in regard to the electronic distribution of his work that precludes the possibility of my including any reference to his work in my project.

Comment by Phil Bachmann on March 2, 2010 at 5:47am

Ron,

Thank you for your clarifications.

You can buy CoRT material from de Bono Thinking Systems and online at CoRT Thinking. While this material is excellent, I agree with you that there is potential for online thinking games.

Let me make my own clarifications:

- I am not attempting to cover the entire curriculum in the way Scoyo is doing, only useful material eg. Getting a kid to work out the correct change at a shop is useful, calculating the area of a triangle is not.
- I am making an extensible platform, I guess you could call it Web 2.0.
- Your emphasis seems to be on ubquity (works on every mobile phone etc) whereas mine is on ensuring world's best practice in user interface. Broad and easy deployment is not forgotten, but it is secondary to the first aim.
- I do not envisage third parties being able to add lessons without my involvement. As you say, quality assurance is a problem, but then so is the potential for people to duplicate other material or introduce irrelevant content.
- Of course I am not an expert at everything, so there is a need work with and reward people who are. This is a vexing issue for a number of reasons: (a) I need critical mass before experts would want to talk to me. (b) Online users are notoriously shy with their wallets so how to ensure that there is enough money for the experts?
- I do not like the idea that the thinking platform should be free. In the first place, there would be no incentive for me to build and improve this thing, and secondly there would be no money for content providers to help me design new material.
- I think the de Bono's books, trainers and Thinking Palace are all individually valuable and what I am working on is no substitute for them. But I take your point that you were doing a po and exaggerating in saying that an online thinking game is all you need.

Let me get to the specifics of what I'm doing: There are only three simple exercises offered by my platform at the moment, none of which involve thinking:
1. Drawing a circle: The computer gives you points for how well you trace a circle with your mouse or pen.
2. Basic multiplication: The computer prompts you with random numbers to multiply.
3. Punctuation: Encourages you to put commas in the right spot.

Now let's take item 3 as an example to show how what I'm doing is different:

Currently you can search Google (english version) for 'english grammar punctuation exercises' and you get about one million pages.
I have examined about twenty of the top sites and they seem to offer:
1. A set of 5 to 15 rules that usually involve memorising grammatical terms.
2. A few exercises prompted by instructions like "click here, type there, click there".

By contrast, my platform simply presents a sentence and tells the user to punctuate it using mouse/pen/finger strokes. The website recognises when they have added a full stop to the end of the sentence and takes that as an indication of completion. If correct, the next sentence appears, otherwise the user is asked to reconsider. Hints are available so the user is never stuck, but the user is never given advice unless he asks for it. Statistics are kept on every aspect of the interaction to help everyone understand where improvement is required.

The net result should be that you don't feel you are fighting technology when you do the exercises: just sweep your hand over the sentence, apply the commas, and move on.

So that tells you some more about the platform: simple, intuitive, instructive on demand.

Comment by Ron Rigatoni on March 1, 2010 at 7:15pm

Okay while eating a donut I thought: Would like somebody to do a PMI or Six Thinking Hats session with me about my po? And I realized that in deed some training information is given in the forum. But it definitely has to be organized to make it better accessible.

Comment by Ron Rigatoni on March 1, 2010 at 6:13pm

@Phil
I like to hear from your learning platform. Maybe you can share a link of an early beta with us? Have you thought of making it a Web 2.0 platform where others can add their exercises, too? Scoyo is lacking this feature and they really spend a huge amount of money to cover all German school classes (by the way they have started to do this for other countries, too). If you would make it easy for interested teachers to add their exercises to your platform it would grow much faster and there would be enough for students to practice 24/7. :) Of course quality assurance will soon get a problem, but hey - here's The de Bono Society. Oh, and I think statistics are very motivating as long as they look like in Super Mario Bros.

• ‹ Previous
• 1
• 2
• Next ›
• Page