Conversation

1/ Let's talk about how note taking can help you accelerate expertise. Yes, I know how that sounds like. No, this isn't hype. There's some solid cognitive science here, and it has FASCINATING things to say about the nature of learning in messy, real world domains.

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2/ The theory I'm going to talk about is Cognitive Flexibility Theory, originally published by Spiro, Coulson, Feltovich and Anderson in a 1988 paper. The theory has 30 years of ACTUAL system implementations. We're going to talk about those in a sec.

researchgate.net

(PDF) Cognitive Flexibility Theory: Advanced Knowledge Acquisition in Ill-Structured Domains

PDF | On Jan 1, 1988, Rand Spiro and others published Cognitive Flexibility Theory: Advanced Knowledge Acquisition in Ill-Structured Domains | Find, read and cite all the research you need on...

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3/ What is CFT? CFT is a theory that asks: "how do experts deal with novelty?" Some domains are well-structured, like chess. But other domains, like business or medicine, are ill-structured. CFT is a theory about this second type of domain. It comes from medical education.

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4/ CFT has four big ideas. Two of them are the central claims of the theory. Before we get to those, we need to do some setup. There are two big ideas that we have to look at first. Then we'll talk about the claims, and then note-taking. 😉

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5/ Idea one: CFT is interested in ill-structured domains. What is an ill-structured domain? An ill-structured domain is a domain where there are concepts, but the way these concepts show up in reality are HUGELY variable.

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Replying to

The whole thread and in particular the idea of ill-structured domains reminded me of complex-adaptive-systems, where formulas don’t work and it’s more important to have a wide vocabulary of models to deal with emergent behaviour. Did you see similar connections?

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Yeah I wouldn’t necessarily conflate the two domains. ‘A wide vocab of models for dealing with emergent behaviour’ is one way of coping; another is ‘learn to watch the tendencies of the system so you can react faster.’ I tackle CASs more directly here:

What I Learnt From Complexity

M. Mitchell Waldrop's book on the Santa Fe Institute is a gateway drug to a powerful if subtle idea. Here's why it matters.

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The caveat here is that I actually haven’t thought through the similarities, so this is a really good observation. Let me stew on it for awhile. Thanks for pointing it out!

2:46 AM · May 1, 2022Tweetbot for iΟS

Replying to

I’ve been running a workshop and been thinking about teaching-learning techniques. One experiment we tried with module structure is: 1. deep end 2. case studies 3. tools map 4. practice 5. key models This has been working really well. And it seemed related to your thread.

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Will try to expand on this over the next few days.

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