Why? The argument the authors make is that at the higher levels of expertise, you start to grapple with the fact that everything is connected to every other damn thing.
Teaching concepts atomically hinders the student’s ability to apply them in real world cases.
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So the next question is obviously: what do you do when you’re studying cases?
The authors suggest something surprising to me: you mark up all the possible concepts that are instantiated in each case (and here you might need an expert) and then link to all OTHER cases.
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This forces the learner to grapple with the real complexity of reality, instead of learning just the clean simple abstractions that frameworks seem to offer.
And the reality of medicine (and business) is that everything is messier than you think.
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A couple of follow-up thoughts: first, the authors write about a learning system they developed called Cardioworld Explorer, which means there’s probably some empirical results I can look up.
I’m planning to dig into that later.
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Second, this DOES sound like the ‘backlinking’ and ‘complex shared knowledge networks’ that the tools for thought people keep harping about, doesn’t it?
Except the authors here focus on the cognitive science of learning, not the trappings of the tool itself.
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The important thing to focus on seems to be:
1. You encode a multi-dimensional set of concepts for each case.
2. These concepts link cases together.
3. You are required to read through the messiness of each case, which is described in prose. (Though snippets may be recombined).
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I’m just now wandering into #CognitiveFlexibilityTheory and its application in teaching/learning in the management domain. Curious if you ever found ways to implement these recommendations in a contemporary hypertext system (like Obsidian or Roam or the like).
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I’ve started work on a hyperlinked case library of business cases, but it’s still early days, I’m afraid! I think part of the difficulty is two-fold: identifying the concepts, and gathering the cases.
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The latter is comparatively easier, to be honest. There is a rich business literature, so there are many books and news articles to draw from, just time consuming.
It’s the former that’s challenging. How do we know the concept instantiations are valid?
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Thanks! And I’ve started to assemble a case library as well (in Obsidian, so tagging and linking are highly flexible and easy to change). Now considering how to store and code cases in segments rather than long form.
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On my end, I’ve found dumping or quoting passages from books, with narrative written and drawn from annual reports + articles to be useful. It gets much harder if you have to write your cases yourself. :/
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Agreed. In my field (#ArtsManagement) there are lots of books and reports and articles that contain mini-cases. Starting with those! Grateful for your ideas and your online summaries.
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