On Jul 29, 2009, at 1:36 AM, Terence Love wrote:

> Hi Jeremy,
>
> Nice technique. As Chuck says, it helps students be aware of how  
> they think.
>
> Wondering whether this is enough, and even whether it is deeply  
> unhelpful if
> a bigger picture is taken...

Well... teaching them language and how to write is clearly deeply  
unhelpful if a bigger picture of creativity is taken, as there is  
nothing quite as profoundly creative, or so most people claim, as  
children before they are literate....  Heh, the goal of the exercise  
is meager awareness and consideration... there is no real tie to  
creativity here.  I use images because most students have been trained  
for many many years to deal with texts at a very high level, but very  
few have been given similar toolboxes for images

>
>
> If we are not careful, as educators we will continue to propagate an
> erroneous meme that has deep and potentially adverse implications  
> for the
> foundations of research and practice about how we educate  
> individuals to
> create a better world.

Here... I tend to disagree.  and I disagree on the basis of your prior  
argument that i snipped.   There is no erroneous meme, as there is no  
necessary control for what students do with an experience of their own  
mind.  My exercise is in part to demonstrate to the students that they  
are doing things in their mind, but most importantly the idea is to  
show that peoples' minds work differently.  That's a key realization  
that I find many people never have... they tend to think... I am in  
situation x, experiencing things my way, feeling things my way, but  
all people think/reason the same, etc.  The ideology of universal  
reason is quite pervasive.  Once they start seeing the plurality of  
mental experiences in others, i think they can more easily see the  
pluralities in themselves.  It isn't a major worldchanging event or  
anything.  It is just one exercise and it likely hasn't affected the  
students any more than the affect of reading society of the spectacle  
or watching 'can dialectics break bricks'.  I don't think we need to  
be particularly careful to not propogate erroneous memes, primarily  
because i don't really think memes exist beyond entertainment systems,  
but that's a different argument.  I do think lexemes exist and  
phonemes and genes..... etc.

as for educating individuals to create a better world....   I mean...  
that's what so many of the worlds great horrible leaders were doing  
right?   trying to create a better world.   So i'm not all that  
enthused by that system of justification.  I'm much more pragmatic...   
I'd rather a livable world as better worlds all seem to eventually end  
up with the death of hundreds of thousands or millions.

>
> An underlying problems is that most of us educators have been  
> indoctrinated
> with the illusion that 'our thought is """ourself"""' and that 'our  
> thinking
> is our decisionmaking process'. This means it can feel deeply  
> uncomfortable
> to suggest that thinking and reflection on thinking is false and  
> unhelpful.

yes, individuation and modernism... it is great.  plenty of researcher  
out there for people who don't want to accept this position.  I tend  
to look toward the field of research demarcated by the term  
'distributed cognition'.

>
> Is this best seen as an either-or (reflection on thinking  or not),  
> or a
> sequence of learning ( no reflection -> reflection -> going beyond the
> illusion that thought is self...)? Which is better for educating  
> design
> students? Which is best as a basis for future design research into  
> improving
> how people create designs?

why is there any need for there to be any one best mode for them to  
learn?   we have curriculums, that's great, but in the end, some of  
the greatest designers never went to design school and as far as i can  
tell into the future many never will and will still become great  
designers.  I think there may be a set of skills that aid designers,  
but there is likely also quite a bit of fruit to be plucked from the  
tree of knowledge that people may not immediately recognize as  
immediately important for 'design' which in the end, may change the  
field forever. So i'd suggest that this argument about bests is  
usually pretty limiting and likely to be avoided.    I might posit  
that there are some better ways of doing things, cross-cultural  
immersion and experience for instance... tends to be something that i  
think would be highly valued in almost any field, design included.   
Similarly, if you accept the concept of literacy instead of mastery,  
then basic literacy across a wide array of skills is generally  
helpful, but past that... ehh, i'm not sure there is going to be any  
necessary relations.

>
> Best wishes,
> Terry
>
> ===
> Jeremy wrote:
> It is a a bit of thought that i took from dewey's how we think.  he
> posited that very few people have ever sat back and tried to
> experience and then articulate the experience of their own thought.
> My exercise in this is generally to help people understand how their
> minds work in relation to imagery and narrative.  I show them an image
> that they don't know, but it heavily embedded in myth or cultural
> reference.   I show them that and ask them to try to identify it.  To
> use their knowledge of their culture, or whatever they have
> available.  I ask them to identify the object as well as they can.
> Then after that, i ask them to write about what they did mentally
> while they were trying to figure out what the thing in the image was.
> I ask them to remember and phenomenologically experience  that mental
> process and write it out.  after all that i ask them to share that
> experience.  it is important that no one shares it before it is
> written, or they will all write the same thing, which is usually just
> what the first person says.
>
> from this i've gathered that i generally have 3 types of thinkers more
> or less, so far... and this is not research, this is just gathered
> from student exercises.
>
> there are textualists/narrativists, which are looking for reference
> and story
> there are conceptualists/analysts which are trying to understand
> composition, relationships, and meaning, usually not using narratives,
> but using conceptual analysis, such as logic, math, philosophy
> there are imagery people, who think in images and attempt to match the
> image, this is most interesting, because there are two sections
> here.... one again is compositionalist, but the other.... describes a
> process of matching or shuffling, which i'm fascinated by.  one
> student described it as flipping through his families picture books
> and looking for matches, another one described it as watching movies
> in her mind.
>
>
> so... those are the modes of thinking that students have reported when
> they are presented with an image that they could probably recognize if
> they knew the right story.
>
> the idea is to get them to think about the way that they think, as
> dewey suggests we do, to push their phenomenological awareness of
> their own minds.