In a prior post I showed that Bloom’s taxonomy, an ok tool for scaffolding student learning, was fundamentally limited to the legalistic-performance shift occurring in society when the taxonomy was developed. I then presented a follow up taxonomy for the performance-communitarian shift that identified important learning ideas that Bloom’s taxonomy doesn’t address, and helps to match our current societal memetic shift. The next step is the community-systemic shift that is already happening in societal niches, areas … » More …

I’m teaching a junior level engineering course and the question was raised as to what units we should be using. Here’s my units rant:
I guarantee you will solve your problems faster, with fewer mistakes if you use base SI as your units system. It’s the only completely self-consistent unit system. Here are the steps:
1) Whatever units your problem is setup as, convert everything immediately to base SI: kg, N, s, K, Pa, m
2) Solve the problem in base SI, check for unit issues with a program like EES
3) Convert the solution back to whatever units you and … » More …

One of my good friends was talking to me about his new class the other day. He was lamenting the amount of work it is responding to homework questions of his 60+ students posted to a discussion forum. I asked him whether the students help each other out in the forum, and he said no, they wait for him to answer. To which I responded, “Don’t feed the bears!”

Having discussion forums for student questions is a great approach for engineering education, one that Chelsea clued me into when I first started teaching. The reason … » More …

In a prior post I defined spiral memes (SD) as the taxonomy of epistemological character development levels identified in human history by psychologist Clare Graves. After reading Beck and Cowan’s book on SD, I started connecting other facets of society to the SD taxonomy. One of the most compelling examples I’ve come up with is the dominant information transfer mode of an SD level. The theory being that a distinctly different societal meme/phase should flow information differently the phases that came prior or after. Here’s a quick figure showing what I’m alluding to:

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In parts 1 and 2 of this series post we identified a key problem with Bloom’s taxonomy as applied to children and engineering. We then placed the problem into the broader memetic framework of spiral memes to establish limits on Bloom’s and initiated a path towards new needs for societal and educational growth. Here in part 3 we’ll present a new set of taxonomys and examples to guide future learning paradigms.

While the flipped classroom is a welcomed performance/communitarian meme shift approach to learning, it often … » More …

So why is transfer learning (Bloom’s synthesis) so hard? It’s because of memetic imbalance. But what does that mean?

Let’s take a quick aside to provide some context:

Richard Dawkins coined the word meme in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene to describe the propagation of ideas and information through society similar to the genetics of Darwinian evolution. Stated simply, advantageous individual traits will propagate into the collective, whether they be genetic or memetic. Dawkin’s memetic philosophy paralleled the epistemological character levels defined by psychologist Clare Graves which formed the foundation for spiral memes. Graves’ looked back at human history to identify distinct societal … » More …

Meet my 20 month old son and his pet snake:

He pulled the belt out of a pair of pants, threw it onto the floor, made a “ssssss” sound, pointed at the belt, said “snake”, and backed away slowly. As far as Chelsea and I know, it was the first time he played with one of our belts, and the first time he (or either of us) called something a snake in the house. I imagine that he transferred this from … » More …