User:Roadrunner~enwikiversity/Educational philosophy

Confucius
The basic foundation for my education philosophy is the Great Learning which has been attributed to Confucius. The Great Learning does a number of things. First it places at its core the personal investigation of things. This establishes the principle that the universe can be understood, and the foundation of learning is the moral cultivation of the individual. The second thing that the Great Learning does is to put an emphasis on taking the action of the individual and creating increasingly large communities from this, and this explains some of my interests in physics, education, law, and finance.

Dai Zhen
I am highly influenced by Dai Zhen and the Evidential school of Chinese philosophy which puts emphasis on empirical knowledge and detail.

Lev Vygotsky
My educational philosophy is highly influenced by the ideas of Lev Vygotsky who describes education as a process of internalizing external social knowledge. This is why I think that Wikiversity is so important because it creates the social community which is the essential part of learning.

Part of my thinking involves taking the ideas of Vygotsky and applying them to my memories of learning physics at MIT, and teaching at the University of Phoenix. One important insight that I've gotten is that professors don't teach physics at MIT. What happens is that professors create a social structure by which students teach each other physics. The actual learning doesn't take place in the lecture hall, but in dorm lounge at 2:00 a.m. over highly caffenated products, and it's trying to replicate that environment, which is what you need to teach physics. The interesting thing about having taught at UoP is that UoP shows that it can be done online.

The other insight is that physics is not a set of facts, but a language and a culture. If you understand the language and the culture, you can reconstruct the facts. The other point is that to master a language, you need to be able to not only listen and understand the language, but also be able to speak and write the language.

These insights explain why I think that physics is badly taught. If you accept the premise that education happens not from books, but from social structures, you quickly see that the social structures that teach science are teaching the wrong things. Science as taught in most environments is taught in a way that effectively teaches an authoritarian culture of memorization which is actually completely different from the actual culture of real physics. This has a whole bunch of negative social consequences, and I see Wikiversity as a chance to teach science correctly.

Anders Ericsson
Another one of my influences is Anders Ericsson, who has written a number of books on expert learning and performance. The most important thing that Ericsson has done is to demystify the learning of experts, and explain how experts accquire their skills.

Question duality
One mental trick that I've found useful is to question duality. Among the dualities that I have questioned are science/humanities, Chinese/Western, distance learning/face to face learning, online/bricks-and-mortar, traditional/modern.