Chaos Program

Can an article – written by a professional journalist for a national news magazine – credibly claim that there’s a creativity crisis in America? Isn’t the act of writing the article itself creative? Doesn’t that mean something?

Well, no.

By way of Slashdot (here) I found a Newsweek article (here) that made the highly controversial claim that American children (6th grade and under) are less creative than previous generations and advocated project-based learning in the classroom as the “scientific” solution.

I really wish that people who write about science would try learning a little first.Really I do.

Let’s start with the setup: A longitudinal study by E. Paul Torrance (Wikipedia bio; obit; Books by Torrance on amazon) in which young children were tested for creativity, then followed for decades and their creative achievements recorded. The conclusion was that it was a good test, that people who scored high in creativity while very young, often went on to be highly creative adults. Longitudinal studies (Wikipedia definition here), by the way, are hard to do well but can lead to very rich data sets that can be useful for far more than originally intended.

So far we’re in “duh!” territory. The big take-away is that psychologists were thrilled and amazed to find out they could measure creativity. They may also have been wrong but we’ll get to that. Psychologists were also interested to find out that creativity and intelligence did not necessarily go together. Again, “Duh.” Anyone who’s ever seen an interview with Ozzy Osbourne (or any of a hundred others I could name – sorry Ozzy. You’re still great!) could have told you that. Of course, they are not mutually exclusive either. Frank Zappa proved that!
read more »

I read a few articles this week about the 60th anniversary of the George Orwell novel 1984 (including this interesting one at National Review Online) and one thing that struck me is that very few literary works get reviewed 60 years after their publication. Even fewer good ones get reviewed/taught/discussed 60 years later. Everybody knows at least a little about 1984, even those of us who have not yet read it (In school, I was in the class that was assigned Animal Farm instead. Interesting book. Hated the pigs).

But this is not a review of 1984. That would be silly since I just admitted I haven’t read it! But it seems I should. Traditionally, reading has been seen as a way of passing on culture – not the kind of culture that causes people to donate money to the opera or spend time at museums but the kind that shapes the way people think. That’s why an old fashioned Classical Education valued Socrates and Thomas Aquinas among others. Agree with them or not, these were smart people and excellent teachers.

Well, that’s the official story, anyway.
read more »

Every time the power goes out, I have to re-install the driver for my wife’s printer. Every time, including (once again) today. I live in the country, beyond the suburbs into cow country, where it seems sometimes that the power goes out every time there’s a high wind. It doesn’t stay out for very long. Usually no more than ten minutes or so. That’s still enough to make me reinstall the driver. Oh! And VMWare player, which I use on my own computer. I figure that’s a bug that was probably fixed in a newer version but the last time I tried to upgrade, it completely hosed my network connections. After about 4 hours of fighting with it, I downgraded again. It works.

There’s actually a point to this other than just complaining about computers. I make my living (such as it is) with the things. Complaining about them is just part of the job. The bigger point is that, believe it or not, the computer age is still very young and there’s a lot we don’t fully understand about how to make software operate to our satisfaction. Things that should be easy aren’t always and benefits we think we should see sometimes don’t materialize.

Which brings me to the subject of a very interesting recent report (actually a thesis) summarizing studies of how students use software intended to help them learn to do arithmetic word problems. For a short article about the paper, see here. For  the paper itself, go here. Three studies are considered. The purpose was to learn about how students interact with educational software when there has been a breakdown situation. That is, when they get the wrong answer, what do they do?
read more »