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Epistemology using Systems Concepts
Posted by Richard Turnock on 10/8/2008
In Reply To:Epistemology using Systems Concepts Posted by Richard Turnock on 10/2/2008
Forwarding a comment sent directly to me, that others might be interested in reading.
Richard
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From: Wade Schuette [mailto:wade.schuette@gmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, October 02, 2008 5:26 PM
To: richardturnock@comcast.net; karizmendi@gmail.com
Subject: Epistemology, Pedagogy, and behavior modification
Hi, Richard, and Kathy. (my account at Johns Hopkins expired and I'm on my other one so I can't reply through the server till tomorrow or so.)
Fascinating question though, - the behavior change OF THE TEACHERs and how to proceed with it.
A few comments. I only taught one year in K-12, so my knowledge of that world is quite limited. I've spent my grown life in university settings (Cornell 64-89, University of Michigan since then.) I was a lecturer for a while at the Business School at Cornell, and my daughter is applying for the Education program at Eastern Michigan. I just graduated, oldest in that class, with my Master of Public Health degree from Johns Hopkins, and the behavior change of large numbers of people to do things they would not normally do is a large focus of the curriculum in Public Health. (80% of the health care costs in the US is due to optional, discretionary behavior-related problems)
So, again, Hi!
My sense is that the majority of teachers are so busy complying with discipline and regulations and teaching to mandatory tests that they would be happy with "anything that worked" without needing to know how or why it works, unless it is in violation of the school board policy guidelines.
Ecological models of behavior change get at the fact that everyone of us is in a nested set of social contexts, each with a set of norms and some method of restoring equilibrium when disturbed. That's the model, but the implication is clearly that if you take an individual and, say, get them to stop smoking, and then let them go back into the social setting they just came out of, they will quickly revert to their old behavior, from social interactions.
The National Academy of Sciences Institutes of Medicine, in Crossing the Quality Chasm, suggests that to change the behavior of doctors (MD's), you really need to change a whole group or team at a time, or the activity is a waste of time. The Institute for Healthcare Improvement uses a model, based on Ed Wagner's work, called "collaboratives" that involve getting people interested in another paradigm shift behavior (quality improvement in hospitals), to meet face to face and stay in very intense contact between meetings, where the peer group is very thin locally (1 or 2 people per institution) but has a virtual presence on a larger scale.
I am in the process of exploring the use of virtual reality worlds, in my case "Second Life", to overcome these problems. The advantage of a virtual world is:
(a) much of what is acquired in virtual reality carries over back into real life
(b) there are never fewer than 40,000 people on-line at any one time, so something could be arranged at any time or any time zone, with some planning, and even a few people, world-wide, can form a critical mass.
(c) total social immersion experiences are, I believe, far more powerful than book learning or lectures for transmission of behaviors and norms and expectations.
(d) virtual reality can be made engaging and fun.
(e) Travel costs and time to the training site are way less than in real life.
There are two other advantages of a virtual world such as Second Life. One is that people can, if they desire, remain completely anonymous. The hair, height, clothes, race, sex, and even species of one's "avatar" can be changed in a few seconds, as desired. The realized anonymity is liberating from the social expectations one attached to the usual self, or that one's colleagues attach to the old self. For people in general, and for MD's and Managers in particular, "face" is a huge issue, and they absolutely hate to be put in a position where their staff or peers might see them fumbling or being awkward -- so anonymity can be a huge help.
The other huge advantage is difficult to understand unless you've experienced it. After some time, you become emotionally attached to your "avatar" and identify with him/her/it. Despite the obvious inability to be injured, you flee from "bees" and avoid drop-offs. And, the behavior of your avatar can be, if you agree, temporarily taken over - it can be made to do pretty much anything that has been scripted for it to do, like a player piano, but more so.
Humans have a strong attitude -> behavior -> attitude feedback loop, and most of us are familiar with changing attitudes (often with knowledge) and as a result impacting behaviors.
It's equally true, I think, but far less familiar, that changed behaviors engender changed attitudes. If you find yourself, for whatever reason, doing something consistently, your brain is amazingly good at rationalizing why this makes perfect sense, and why you should be doing it. "Man is a rationalizing animal, not a rational animal" (someone).
So, in virtual reality, you can design an immersion world in which everyone around you is behaving a certain way, and you look down and notice that even "you" are behaving that way, and there is a remarkably strong force to adjust your beliefs, perceptions, attitudes, rationalizations, etc. to adjust to the new world. These beliefs carry back to real life.
I guess I am saying that the relevant epistemology is one of social contagion, requiring a dominant number of perceived peers to already be heading some way, for a new person to be able to adopt a new behavior. Once a critical mass of peers engage in it, it becomes self sustaining and restores equilibrium if disturbed.
Wade
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