LINKS: Roger Schank
The sustainers of this website admire the work of Roger Schank. We showed some of his writings to teenagers and many of them responded favorably. "Whoa, who is this dude!? I like this!"
Here are links to Dr. Schank's writings.
Make School Meaningful-And Fun! (Solutions) - help and encourage students to learn what they want to learn
In 1989 when I started the Institute for the Learning Sciences (ILS), our mission was primarily to fix the mess that training had become. Our first sponsor was Andersen Consulting (now Accenture). Their problem was simple enough. Their training was delivered primarily through what they called FGBs. (You figure out what the F stood for, the GB part was Green Books.) These training manuals told you everything you needed to know in order to work at Andersen. Readings were followed by multiple choice tests and other exercises. Other companies soon asked ILS for help and we saw the same problems every time:
Their training was deadly dull
Their training was perfunctory (you just took it so a box could be checked that you had completed it)
No new skills were learned or practiced
The learning methodology was reading
At ILS we able to build simulations, using Goal Based Scenarios, that allowed trainees to practice the skills they were trying to learn, within a fictional scenario that was engaging.
We were doing fine, more and more companies were signing up, and then something terrible happened: The WEB.
The web made it possible for training departments to spend much less money and yet appear as if they were doing something new and modern. Eventually training on the Web got to be called e-learning, but what was meant by e-learning was the FGBs plus cute pictures and animations. READ MORE
Excepts from hs book MAKE SCHOOL MEANINGFUL AND FUN
As long as we prevent children from making choices, we won't find out about their real goals.
