[iDC] Social Digital Media

[Paul Prueitt]

idc forum,

The post from Duke University Professor Cathy Davidson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathy_Davidson

stirred me to introduce again to the idc forum a proposal to the  
American President, regarding a means to end the crisis in American  
education.  I have followed this forum for what seems a long time,  
and enjoyed the many threads - all conducted in a scholarly fashion.


There is neurological thesis apparent from web accounts of Cathy  
Davidson's forthcoming book:

    "Now you see it, how the brain science of attention will  
transform the way we live, work, and learn."

I look forward to finding a copy of the book when it comes out.

***

The neuroscience on selective attention has been an area of my  
research since my 1988 PhD in Pure and Applied Mathematics,

    "Mathematical Models of Learning in Biological Systems (Univ of  
Texas at Arlington)"

I have been blessed to know leading minds in this field, including  
Karl Pribram whom I own a great debt to for his book

     "Brain and Perception", (1991)   and his friendship.

 From what I have seen of Professor Davidson's work, there is an  
excellent  thesis that starts a path to the conjecture I make about  
why there is a crisis in American education, in the first place,  and  
to a proposal to President Obama, or to the next President, on how to  
end this crisis.

At core, I imagine that this crisis is self inflicted and thus can be  
concluded.  Clearly ending the crisis in educaiton will not be easy.   
I look to natural science as the only means that might overcome what  
is clearly a state of deep confusion.

A new science will depart from classical science so as to explain now  
unexplained observations from physics, chemistry, biology, social  
science. economics, and in general systems theory.   The Bell's  
inequality is perhaps most famous:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell's_theorem   but this is the tip of  
the ice berg, really.

Work like Professor Davidson's on selective attention is filling in  
the gap between where we are today and where we will be soon (I hope).

I respectfully introduce my work with the following pdfs, some short  
and some long.

A summary (4 pages is given here)

http://www.educationworlds.com/pdf/proposal.pdf

the full proposal is to be in a book form (450 pages)

http://www.secondschool.net/bridge.pdf   (for which I am looking for  
a publisher)

A shorter (10 page focus on the science on which the conjecture is  
based) is here:

http://www.liftingpedagogy.com/pdf/DigitalSocialMedia.pdf

this also is looking for a place to be published. There are 51  
scholarly references in this short paper "Social Digital Media".

The conjecture is that under stimulation, poor stimulation and  
manipulation, for other purposes,  by the media and entertainment  
industries have cause a biologically encoded "Acquired Learning  
Disability". specific to mathematics and science.

Of course, this condition is spreading to all academic disciplines.  
It affects all of us and all of our children.  It is memetic in  
nature as well as rooted in the various neuro-systems habituation  
mechanisms.  Imagine of self (autopoiesis) is involved.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopoiesis

Social digital media will either reinforce this ALD condition or be  
used to end the crisis in education.  It will do both for a while,  
and then a winner will be selected - given the dynamics of  
competitive cooperative networks.  This has been my warning to  
myself, that the selection process might very well select a "dumbing  
down of humanity" as a new challenge to democratic governance.

The neuroscience points to selective attention as a frontal lobe  
mediated shift between phase coherent states in brain activity.

Levine, D. & Prueitt, P.S. (1989.) Modeling Some Effects of Frontal  
Lobe Damage - Novelty and Preservation, Neural Networks, 2, 103-116.
Levine D; Parks, R.; & Prueitt, P. S. (1993.) Methodological and  
Theoretical Issues in Neural Network Models of Frontal Cognitive  
Functions. International Journal of Neuroscience 72 209-233.
Prueitt, Paul S. (1996a) Optimality and Options in the Context of  
Behavioral Choice, in D. S. Levine & W. R. Elsberry, Eds. Optimality  
in Biological and Artificial Networks?, Erlbaum, 1996.

Conclusions?

The entering freshman students no long have the ability to focus on  
arithmetic due to the habituation of a failure to understand.  This  
failure is not the fault, in any way, of the individual child.  The  
system is causing this condition.

The strategy to overcome ALD syndrome is discussed at:

http://www.liftingpedagogy.com/pdf/theLiftingPedagogy.pdf

and a proposal to create 3D simulation worlds with avatars as a means  
to reshape image of self is the basis for the 100 M dollar proposal  
to the President.

I would appreciate comment.  I look for some collaboration at either  
my sim in Second Life or my new Open Sim platform being developed as  
a simulated virtual classroom for the college teaching of mathematics.

http://www.educationworlds.com/pdf/immersiveClassroom.pdf

psp at secondschool.net
Paul Stephen Prueitt, PhD (mathematics, computing theory, neuroscience)






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