Education Bookcast

How do casinos turn slot machines into irresistible escape pods? A look at hidden alcoves, maze-like layouts, soothing sounds, near misses, and rapid-fire play reveals the design behind the machine zone. The discussion connects gambling’s dark, absorbing pull to smartphones and other addictive digital technology, especially for children.

This recording serves as an appendix to the episode on James Paul Gee's book What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. In his book, he provides 36 principles of learning that he proposes in his book on the basis of the psychological effectiveness of computer games. In my opinion, 36 principles is far too many; ideally, I would have five or fewer. I thought that a principle was supposed to be a distillation, and so a proliferation of them seems counterproductive and rather ironic. But I still wanted to go through his principles to be fair to him and his book. What's striking is how he is occasionally absolutely correct in his assertions, yet at other times completely off the mark. He is another example of somebody who is apparently academically respected within the field of education, and yet says things which are completely unreal and make little if any sense to those who know the basics. Enjoy the episode.

What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy is a book that I read early in my education research quest. At the time, I thought that it had interesting points to make, but I was unclear on quite how to react to it. After several more years of reading and research, it's clear to me that this book is deeply flawed. First of all, the author redefines "literacy" in a very strange way. He takes any form of semiotic system to count as a "type" of literacy. So, for example, if you know how to use a smartphone, then you are "literate" in the layout, symbols, and conventions of smartphone user interface. This is obviously not the kind of literacy that most people are interested on or concerned about, and it is less valuable than "conventional" literacy, partly because of barrier to entry (learning to read is relatively hard, learning to use a phone is relatively easy) and partly because of utility. Secondly, he coins a lot of new terminology for no apparent reason. During the recording I've had to translate some of his terms into more ordinary language, including the usual technical terms rather than his special ones. His terminology only serves to obscure his message and make it seem as if there is more content here than there really is. Finally, and most importantly, his central point is misguided. He essentially says that learning a subject is mostly about socially getting on in that world - knowing how to get on with other artists, mathematicians, surgeons, or whatever other skill "community", depending on the domain. However, this completely overlooks the glaring difference in difficulty between getting to know social conventions and attitudes of a subculture and learning the requisite knowledge and skills in order to be useful and productive in that domain, let alone to actually understand what is being said by other practitioners. The former takes a matter of weeks or months of acculturation, and the latter years or even decades of dedication. If we focus on the social context of knowledge rather than the knowledge itself, to coin a phrase, it would be like making beautiful light fittings for a house that you haven't built - pointless in the absence of the larger task that is left undone. Enjoy the episode. *** RELATED EPISODES Cognitive science (general): 19. Seven Myths about Education by Daisy Christodoulou; 52. How We Learn by Benedict Carey; 79. What Learning Is; 80. The Chimp Paradox by Steve Peters; 81a. The Myth of Learning Styles; 81b. on the Expertise Reversal Effect; 82. Memorable Teaching by Pepps McCrea; 85. Why Don't Students Like School? by Dan Willingham; 86. Learning as information compression Cognitive science (literacy-related): 41. What Reading Does for the Mind by Keith Stanovich and Annie Cunningham; 91. Vocabulary Development by Steven Stahl; 93. Closing the Vocabulary Gap by Alex Quigley; 95. The Reading Mind by Dan Willingham Expertise: 20. Genius Explained by Michael Howe; 22. The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle; 24. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell; 49. The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin; 97. The Polymath by Waqas Ahmed; 98. Range by David Epstein Games and play (including computer games): 34. Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal; 35. Minds on Fire by Mark Carnes; 36. Fun, Play, and Games; 37. A Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster Other fads / critical reviews: 42. Do Schools Kill Creativity by Sir Ken Robinson; 53. Brain-based Learning by Eric Jensen; 59, 60 on Brain Training; 62. Brainstorming makes you less creative; 65. Beyond the Hole in the Wall (on Sugata Mitra); 71. Visible Learning by John Hattie; 81. on Learning Styles; 87. Experiential Learning; 88. The Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching

A skeptical tour of psychology’s limits, from Western-undergraduate sampling bias to famous findings that fail to replicate. The conversation contrasts psychology with anthropology and economics, wanders into mice at play and theories of learning, and looks ahead to topics like intelligence, IQ, pedagogy, and transferring knowledge.

This episode starts with some unfinished business from episode 100. Then I review the topics and themes that have arisen over the history of the podcast.

I started the podcast on the 1st of January 2016 with an episode introducing myself. In this episode, I reintroduce myself, my reasons for starting the podcast, and what I hope to achieve. I also talk about the broad strokes of the development of the podcast and of my own thinking over the last 5 years.

Chinese culture has the concept of the "four great inventions" (四大發明) - inventions from ancient China that are points of pride in Chinese history, and symbolic of Chinese technical and scientific sophistication. The inventions in question are the compass, gunpowder, the printing press, and paper. One could say that there is one "invention" that is conspicuously absent. During the Sui dynasty (581-618 AD), the emperor was concerned that the aristocracy held too much power, in particular by occupying all of the positions in the government bureaucracy. In a shrewd political move, the emperor decided to start holding examinations, open to all males regardless of class, to recruit for positions in the civil service. At first regarded with contempt by the aristocrats, they were eventually won over, and after some decades started sending their own boys to be educated in order to pass the government exams. The Chinese civil service examination system (科舉) was born. The system persisted in China for over a millenium, with the final exams held at the start of the 20th century, just prior to the fall of the Qing Dynasty and the end of imperial China. However, the system was to have a lasting influence outside of the country. In the 19th century, the British East India Company, inspired by the Chinese system, set up its own examinations to make employment decisions. Before long, written examinations were taken up by Oxford and Cambridge universities, and from there spread to the rest of Europe and the world. So China's fifth great invention was the written examination, and its societal influence can still be felt around the world. Ichisada Miyazaki was a Japanese historian of China. In his book, he goes through the nature of the system in great detail - what examinations had to be taken where and how; how boys prepared for them; the arms race between cheaters and government anti-cheating and anti-corruption measures; what the societal implications were; and how it shaped Chinese culture. It is clear that the importance of the system for Chinese history is profound, and many argue that it still exists in modified form in the Chinese university entrance examination, the Gaokao (高考), and in the furious educational competition that still exists within China. China's Examination Hell gives us an important perspective on why China is the way it is today. Enjoy the episode.

Range is a book that I saw in a bookshop and called out to me like little else can. Subtitled "Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialised World", I felt as though it were written for me personally. It seems as though the way to "get ahead" is to specialise early and specialise hard, drilling deeply into a single topic until you become a world expert. Get your 10,000 hours of deliberate practice in before the competition gets there first. And yet I find myself always moving from topic to topic, weaving a wider web of apparently unrelated experience and knowledge. This very podcast is a testament to that. Could I be wasting my time? David Epstein says no. As the author of the bestselling book The Sports Gene, he is no stranger to criticising the prevailing view, based originally on the work of K. Anders Ericsson (and subsequently reinterpreted, or distorted, by journalist Malcolm Gladwell), about the primacy of deliberate practice within a single domain. In Range, he shows that there is another, more common path to deep expertise that is not as well known - that of Roger Federer, among others. As children, they try out multiple sports (or musical instruments) in order to build up a more general sense of athleticism (musicality). After many years, they tend to gravitate to one sport (instrument) more than others, and really put their heart into practice because they made their own choice when they were ready. At that point, they catch up with the early specialisers with a new laser focus on their target field. Sport and music aren't the only fields that seem to reward an early "sampling period". The author discusses scientists and inventors, who often make breakthroughs precisely because they use knowledge from a domain outside of that in which they are working. Their advantage is from what they know that other scientists (inventors) don't - and that could be something from a completely different field of science (technology), or even from history, economics, literature, or art. Overall, Epstein's book is so rich and eclectic in findings concerning the value of breadth of knowledge and skills that it is hard to summarise in a blurb like this. In the audio, I do the best I can to organise his key points into a kind of theory with big take-home ideas, but it's just not possible to fit everything in. Whether you've read the book already or not, I hope my attempt to consolidate his writing into some key points will help you understand the thrust of the work. Enjoy the episode.

Churchill, Newton, Copernicus, and other celebrated figures turn out to have had far more varied lives than their famous labels suggest. This discussion ranges across polymaths in ancient Greece, the Islamic world, China, and beyond, then explores how specialization rose and why biography, education, creativity, and even personality complicate the picture.

People often talk about how to work better, but it is rare to hear discussion of how to rest better. Take the famous so-called "10,000 hour rule". This is adapted (with some distortion) from the work of K. Anders Ericsson, the late great psychologist of expertise. The nature and volume of practice among top performers in various fields, as described in his work, is widely cited. But the same research contains details of how high performers rest differently. And yet nobody seems to have taken notice. In Rest, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang argues that work and rest are not adversaries, but partners. Looking closely at the lives of many great writers, mathematicians, scientists, politicians, and businesspeople, he reveals that although their lives revolved around their work, their days did not. They would have ample leisure every day; they would rarely do more than four hours' work per day; and they often seem to take more naps than other people. Scientific research on this topic seems thin on the ground. Pang shares what little he found, including a study of physicists in the 1950s showing that those who worked around 15-20 hours per week published more research articles than those who worked 40 or more hours a week. Another startling finding is that scientific Nobel laureates are 20 times as likely to have a hobby of dancing or acting than the scientific population at large, and 9 times more likely to be involved in the visual arts. Overall, this is a book to make you rethink the commonly assumed view of rest as passive recovery that takes away time from work, rather than an active process that changes the nature and quality of work itself. Enjoy the episode.