- #public
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talking about #Minerva-curriculum
- source: https://www.uctv.tv/shows/30113
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Flipped classroom is taking the lecture before class and the whole marketing class. We go one step further. We do the lecture and the homework at home. And the class is really to apply these cognitive skills. #[[**Fully Active Learning**]]
- βHow is "applying these cognitive skills" different from "homework"?
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Chunking - a long distance runner was able to remember very long sequences of random digits because he was connecting them to race times of races that he had run.
- So in a way, for each sequence of 345 digits, he replaces that with a symbolic link to a pre existing piece of knowledge.
- I’m really curious about how that maps to learning about other things. So especially this interaction between [[Note taking]] and your memory. There’s also the concept of memory palaces and spatial organization, both physical and digital.
- How do your cognitive structures develop in parallel with your notes by taking notes, and are then activated when you review notes. Progressive summarization.
- The simple concept that I know that I will take these notes into Roam, that they will be available to me, and that I will want to interlink them with other things and that I will use Roam to discover new connections in the future, actually, I think makes me make more connections actively than I would otherwise.
- βOne critique that could be raised against this presentation is that it’s a extremely focused on lab studies of very, very short term learning. And so it’s not clear at all to what extent this transfers to the kind of very complex and long term learning that happens in a university course.
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The first year they were just finding material that was convenient to teach the HCs. Students found it too disruptive to jump around. Hired Josh Fost, who had a program to search through all the course catalogs of the world and find all the questions (question marks) and map out the big questions. Used that, with the criteria: relevant to three countries, and be really hard
- why do people commit crime etc.
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There are two places in the brain. One is logic. One is emotional, emotional center lights up very strongly if it’s about pushing, but it’s all integrated. And the logical thinking can overrule the emotional thinking.
- βIs this the same as System 1/2?
- When you’re asked "There are five people and a fat man and a train coming. Should you push the fat man in front of the train?" If it’s about pushing, most people say no, if it’s about pressing a button from a distance, most people say yes.
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Teaching practical wisdom.
- It’s not pre-professional, it’s not vocational, it’s broad.
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They did a survey of the literature, meta analysis, and interviews with employers β came up with four skills
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two personal
- creative thinking
- critical thinking
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two interpersonal
- effective communication
- effective interaction
- But these are hard to teach
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Example: critical thinking has many components, for examples these two are require completely different and non-overlapping skills. So we have to break this down into components
- Analyzing the claim that "Teaching critical thinking is impossible". (Logics, definitions, sources)
- Analyzing whether you should go to Minerva or to Stanford. (Cost benefit analysis etc)
- Fully Active Learning Matrix. So the principles are on the columns and the rows are what everyone else is doing (not paying attention)
- Learning is the front end, it’s getting it into your brain, acquisition. Retention is the ability to keep it in your brain and get it out when you need it.
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We use technology to teach the classes and they’re recorded. And people are scored on rubrics in terms of how well they do. And this is giving them very quick and specific feedback. So this is deliberate practice.
- βKaterine Bielaczyc, and her [[deliberate practice of Knowledge Building]]
- βIdea of practicing to do certain atomic skills, rather than putting them into extremely complex situations right away right away. Literature on expertise.
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Grading system goes from one to five. And five means that you can apply it in creative ways what we call far transfer.
- βCurrently we expect far transfer and we will not give a five for it - five is really extraordinary? Need to understand better #minerva-grading
- Talk time justification: female students are called on less even by female faculty #minerva-research.
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This is a really good expose session on the Minerva curriculum and way of teaching. Questions:
- βHas there ever been a real critique of the Minerva curriculum approach? Whether it’s based on the book or on this podcast, or anything else, not interested in stuff around the Minerva business model, which is a very different topic, but this core approach. #minerva-critique
- βListening to this, I feel like I would be interested in doing the first year curriculum. I probably have a lot of these, but not all by far. I wish there was some kind of Khan Academy-like adaptive learning approach for I could go in and quickly assess myself and see what I’m lacking. And then get the resources they need to learn those things.
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16 Principles
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Deep processing
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He did a comparison where he puts people in pairs, and shows a bunch of words on the board.
- The people on the left had to judge which if the if the first letter was taller, or the second letter was taller
- The other person had to judge whether it was a living or nonliving thing like tree or stone
- Then they had had to see how many words they could remember and they put the slide back on, and they counted and then they talked to the person next to them. And he asked them to the person on the left to the right, get the most correct and, of course, most people on the left with a living or nonliving they got the most correct.
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Chunking
- Shows a list of letters - who can remember more than 9? Did you recognize the logic? Apparently the organizing pattern was three letter acronyms of famous organizations.
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Generation effect or Testing effect
- Recalling something from memory, for example, hearing a definition and having to produce the word, strength and memory. So this is kind of like Spaced Repetition.
- He demonstrates it by having the audience turn to the person next to them and try to come up with the definitions for the three core principles and what they were and then taking them off the screen and pointing at someone and having them repeat what the principle was. Apparently he has written a book about this
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Final thoughts
- I should really read up on pretty much everything that Stephen Kosslyn has written since it is generally relevant to Minerva. And it also was him that set up most of our initial curriculum.
- He has written two books about the design of slides. And I’m not sure which of those principles apply to the slides that we use in our classroom.
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It would have been really interesting to have some kind of document that showed kind of a decision record about our initial hypotheses, our initial designs, and how it’s evolved and what we’ve learned. Of course, some of it was technical limitations. Some of it is pure UX, but a lot of it could really tell us story about the growth of this university, even though it’s driven mostly by an anecdotal data and not really hard to science in terms of empirically looking at the data
- βGet an update after four years, what have we learned, what have we changed? What turned out to work really well?