MIT Alberta?

Late last week, the Minister of Enterprise and Advanced Education for the Government of Alberta announced the members of a panel whose task is organizing a new “Institute for applied research and commercialization”, an institute that the government believes will be crucial for diversifying the Albertan economy.  The panel consists of 10 international experts, all of whom are experienced in similar agencies across the globe as well as with the Albertan context, according to a story in the Edmonton Journal.  The panel is chaired by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Dr. Daniel Roos, who is their Japan Steel Industry Professor of Engineering Systems and Civil and Environmental Engineering.  According to the Edmonton Journal, for the past 18 months Dr. Roos has been involved with the University of Alberta on a related issue, and has written a report.  Thus the committee is, according to the Minister, expected to hit the ground running and will deliver a set of recommendations about how to proceed with the new institute in a matter of weeks.

Dr. Roos’ experience with “similar agencies across the globe” comes from his being director of the MIT Portugal Program.  According to its website, MIT Portugal “is an international collaboration seeking to demonstrate that an investment in science, technology and higher education can have a positive, lasting impact on the economy by addressing key societal issues through quality education and research in the emerging field of engineering systems.”  It is probably much too early to do so – the organizing panel hasn’t even met – but I thought that I would take a while browsing through the MIT Portugal website to see a glimmer of what might be on the horizon here in Alberta.

MIT Portugal, focused exclusively on engineering, involves four entities: the government of Portugal, seven Portuguese universities and 14 Portuguese research centers, industry, and MIT.  MIT Portugal targets four areas that are viewed as keys to economic development and societal impact: sustainable energy systems, transportation systems, bio-engineering systems and advanced manufacturing.  It began in October 2006; “government funding to MIT and partner Portuguese institutions supports this unique collaboration.”  I have been unable to find on the MIT Portugal website any mention of how much government funding is involved, how much industry funding is involved, and the like.  There are a number of attractive publications about its research activities.

MIT Portugal only offers three kinds of graduate degrees:  PhDs, Master’s, and Executive Master’s.  It is not involved in undergraduate training.  It views as one of its key accomplishments is “developing highly skilled human resources in the scientific and technological community in Portugal.”  On more than one page of its website one can find numbers related to how many graduate students have been trained since MIT Portugal’s creation. Financial numbers, however, are not easily found on the website.  Dollar values related to MIT Portugal’s expenditures, or to the economic impact of its research, or to industry contributions to its programs, do not appear to be publicly available.  Perhaps someone else will have better luck searching for them than I did.

One wonders if MIT Portugal will provide a model for the new Albertan institute.  If so, we would expect that it would have these general properties: it would use existing infrastructure (current Albertan universities and labs), it would add a new administrative component (to organize its courses, degrees, etc.), it would focus on a small number of areas predicted to be high reward, and it would only train graduate students.  Of course, it would also require specialized government funding (e.g. grant support to foster research in targeted areas).  Would it also require funding to obtain external expertise as leverage to diversify the provincial economy?  Is MIT Alberta on the horzion?  Presumably we will have a much better idea of the structure and costs of this new institute, and how its funding will affect the funding of other postsecondary schools in Alberta, in a matter of weeks after the new panel presents its recommendations.

Writing and the Dictionary of Cognitive Science

Disseminating knowledge is one of the most important elements of my job.  One of the most effective means of disseminating knowledge is writing about what one has discovered, and publishing this writing as a journal article or as a book.

Writing, however, is an activity that requires a great deal of practice.  There are times when one cannot write during a research project – for instance, when a project is just starting or is ongoing, and you do not have any results to write about!  How do you keep your writing habits sharp in such lean times?

I try to keep in the writing habit by taking on projects that permit me to write when the need arises, but which can be left alone when other kinds of writing projects are put on the ‘front burner’.  One of my most important tools for maintaining my writing habit is the University Of Alberta Dictionary Of Cognitive Science.  It is a perfect writing project, because it can be left dormant for long periods of time.  When the need arises, it is easy to extend, because you simply find terms that can be defined, and which do not currently have a definition on the site.

 

This Dictionary of Cognitive Science is simply that: a web resource that provides brief descriptions of terms that are related to cognitive science in one way or another.  Most descriptions in this dictionary talk about a term in a paragraph or two, and provide a handful of references.  The Dictionary is organized alphabetically, and is also searchable.  It currently has entries for 373 terms, beginning with ‘abecedarium’ and ending with ‘z-lens’.  Since June 12, 2012 I have been tweeting links to its entries, in random order, every weekday as a ‘cognitive science word of the day’, or #cogsci #wotd.  I will have exhausted this list sometime by the end of 2013, and will have to add more definitions to continue this practice!

The Dictionary of Cognitive Science began as a class writing project.  Students in a graduate course on cognitive science wrote a handful of definitions, and I posted these definitions on a website that was being delivered by a lab SPARCstation.  One of my former graduate students, David Medler, wrote some routines for searching and posting on this website; David and I even published an account of this as a pedagogical activity (Dawson & Medler, 1999).  The current version is maintained as an Adobe Dreamweaver site on my office desk machine, and is served out on a new Linux box that is housed in my basement lab.

The Dictionary started as a class writing exercise, but it soon took on a life of its own.  It turned out that a lot of people were connecting to it.  As a result, I began to feel a responsibility to grow it, and to clean up entries in it that I felt were substandard.  I started this phase of the project in 2009.  In addition to editing existing entries, I added new entries related to material being moulded into a book on LEGO robots and embodied cognitive science (Dawson, Dupuis, & Wilson, 2010).  After another hiatus, another set of terms were added while I was writing my current book on the foundations of cognitive science (Dawson, 2013).

While the Dictionary of Cognitive Science exists as an internet resource, its control structure is a narrow plywood bookshelf that is slowly being filled with hundreds of index cards.  This physical instantiation of the Dictionary stands in my office, as shown in the image below.  The writing process proceeds as follows:  First, I scan through the Dictionary, looking for terms related to my current work that have no entries, or looking for terms that need to be revised.  For each term that I could create or revise, I write the term on an index card.  Second, I take a handful of these cards home, and spend a while writing an electronic version of a definition for each.  Third, I create a page for each new term in Dreamweaver, and update the required links in the website that permit the new definitions to be indexed.  At this time I stamp a ‘completed’ date on the index card of each definition that has been created.  I then upload the updated Dictionary to the server, and am ready to post the new entries on Twitter, one day at a time.  With every post, I stamp a ‘posted’ date on the index card, and then place the card on its alphabetized shelf in my office.

 

 

As the fall term comes to an end, I will have run out of current Dictionary entries.  Fortunately, I am working on a couple of new projects (relating neural networks to Bayes theorem, and a book about interpreting the internal structure of neural networks trained on musical tasks), which will serve as a source of (needed) new material for the Dictionary of Cognitive Science.  I am stocked up on index cards, and ready to write new definitions to keep the rust off my writing while I collect new data on these new projects.

References

 

 

·         Dawson, M. R. W. (2013). Mind, Body, World: Foundations of Cognitive Science. Edmonton, AB: Athabasca University Press.

·         Dawson, M.R.W., Dupuis, B., & Wilson, M. (2010). From Bricks to Brains: The Embodied Cognitive Science of LEGO Robots. Athabasca University Press, Edmonton.

·         Dawson, M. R. W., & Medler, D. A. (1999). The Dictionary of Cognitive Science: One approach to teaching students how to create their own WWW instructional materials. International Journal of Educational Telecommunications, 5, 65-78.

 

 

 

Surprising Response To Suspended Programs

Since last March’s provincial budget delivered a 7% cut to Alberta’s postsecondary institutions, there have been many announcements of program suspensions at a number of schools.  Most recently, the Faculty of Arts of the University of Alberta announced plans to suspend 20 programs because of their low enrollment, making the front page of today’s Edmonton Journal.

Given the size of the budget cuts, and the fact that they took the postsecondary sector apparently without warning, the most recent announcement from the University of Alberta is not really surprising.  While the government of Alberta has declared that it will not balance its budget on the backs of students, the simple fact is that cuts to postsecondary funding will necessarily impact students, by reducing access to services, by increasing class sizes, by eliminating instructors, and by removing programs.  This is simply because the core purpose of these institutions is to educate students. The Edmonton Journal article simply provides a snapshot of each of these implications as they take shape in one faculty in one university (e.g. eliminating course sections, cutting funding for graduate student teaching assistantships, eliminating faculty positions, and of course suspending programs).  Of course, similar stories have been unfolding throughout the province in recent months.

These Faculty of Arts cuts themselves are not surprising.  However, what has surprised me a great deal is that this recent news has touched a nerve, at least in terms of activity on Twitter that uses the hashtag #abpse.  I have been following this thread for many months, and over the last few days two things have become apparent.  First, there has been an explosion of the number of tweets that use this hashtag.  Second, these tweets are coming from individuals who to my knowledge are new to this discussion.

I am not sure why the recent University of Alberta news has produced such a strong response.  Perhaps with the new term approaching, more students are paying attention to current events on campus.  Perhaps the response is because this announcement is from such a large Faculty at such a large institution.  At any rate, I believe that the reaction to the Arts news is healthy and important.

A close reading of the Edmonton Journal article also surprised me, and tweaked a growing concern.  Dean of Arts Lesley Cormack is quoted as follows: “It’s important to recognize that this is good management of programs as much as it is anything to do with budgets,” Cormack said Sunday. “It’s unfortunate that it’s had to happen as quickly as it has. But the problem is, if you do it slowly, it sort of never happens.”  Of course, it is quite sensible that programs be regularly evaluated, and possibly removed if they are no longer serving their intended needs.  However, Thomas Lukaszuk, minister of Enterprise and Advanced Education, gives the sense that ‘program evaluation’ is essentially simple economics.  According the Edmonton Journal, the Minister’s position is that “students vote with their tuition dollars and have sent a strong message to university administration”.  In short, the Minister apparently believes that the worth of a program is revealed by the number of students it attracts.

In my mind, the Minister’s position is disturbing and simplistic (but perhaps not completely surprising!).  Just because a program attracts a small number of students does not mean that it is not important.  A broader perspective than just numbers is required to properly evaluate a program’s importance.

 A look at 20^th century history provides a good example of this.  At the start of WW II, pure mathematicians were few and far between (it is a complex and abstract field that does not attract multitudes of students!), and largely ignored by British and American military leaders.  However, when finally called upon by their governments, pure mathematicians made huge contributions to the outcome of the war; they were responsible (for instance) for cracking the German enigma code. Fortunately for all of us their programs weren’t cut because of budgetary constraints on low enrollment programs.

Cursive Writing and the Extended Mind

Recently, National Post columnist Andrew Coyne gave his personal reaction to children not being taught cursive writing in school. This is a growing trend in North American schools, a trend that Coyne finds alarming. Why? Because Coyne recognizes that writing is not just done ’in the head’, but is an activity that involves interacting with particular external media.  He writes, “How we write, in other words, affects what we write. You compose in a different way using pen and ink than you do on a computer.”

I must admit that I do not find myself in agreement with some of Coyne’s specific claims about why writing cursively is different than composing at a keyboard. For instance, he describes typing as ‘file retrieval’, because you have to remember where a particular letter is on the keyboard. In contrast, “With handwriting, you create the letters anew each time, using much more complex motor skills. Whether it’s the flowing motion of the arm, or the feel of the page under your hand, or the aesthetic satisfaction of a well-turned ‘f’, it seems to engage the more intuitive, right-brain aspects of cognition.” As a cognitive scientist, I am reluctant to appeal to intuition or to right-brain processing.

As an embodied cognitive scientist, though, I am in complete agreement with Coyne’s view that how we write affects what we write. The extended mind hypothesis makes the claim that the external world is a fundamental component of our mentality; change that world and you change the mind. Coyne provide some wonderful examples of how his own writing processes are affected by constraints imposed by external media, and I see these as compelling examples of the extended mind hypothesis in action. For instance, Coyne takes advantage of the extended mind to deal with writer’s block: “Often when I am stuck at the keyboard, unable to find my way out of whatever mental cul-de-sac I have put myself in, I will pick up a pen and start writing — and the words start to come again.”

My own experience with the physical act of writing complements Coyne’s. In my final year of high school, I took a typing class as an option, and have long since thought that it was the most important part of my high school education. But as an undergraduate student, and as a graduate student, typing was never my first line of attack. Instead, I would take lecture notes by hand, and would later study for exams by typing my notes up. The first draft of any paper that I wrote was created in longhand. I would then edit that handwritten manuscript, and only when I was happy with it would I type the final version. It wasn’t until my last year as a PhD student that I learned to compose at the keyboard because of the newfound pressure of ‘publish or perish’. Cursive drafts simply took too long to produce.

I am now quite expert in composing manuscripts at the keyboard; most of my current writing is done on a laptop, sitting in a reclining chair in my living room with my dog sleeping on my legs. When I encounter writer’s block, I -- like Coyne -- deal with it by changing the medium. But I don’t go back to longhand. Instead, I’m more likely to activate my speech recognition software and dictate to my computer. (I used this software to compose this very post.)This approach does make me think about writing in a different way, but one more important thing that I’ve noticed is that it changes my writing style. Coyne’s column makes me wonder what would happen to my writing style if I went back to my old ways and pulled out pencil and paper.

 

Coyne’s column also makes me wonder about the research that has been conducted on the effects of writing medium on writing ability. In a recent post, I suggested that the embodied experimental psychologists involved with the Canadian Society for Brain, Behavior, and Cognitive Science were missing the key implications of the extended mind hypothesis. Does removing cursive writing from the school curriculum impact the thought processes involved in converting our thoughts into text? I think that I’m going to explore the existing literature on this issue; this seems exactly like the sort of applied problem that is crying out for extensive contributions from embodied cognitive science.