Recently in my email I received the first edition of an e-Newsletter from the Society for Neuroscience titled "Brain Awareness Headlines". This four-times-a-year publication will strive to provide information - news, resources, etc. - to those interested in neuroscience education. The newsletter seems to stem from SfN's flagship educational vehicle, "Brain Awareness Week", which I helped FA to participate in last year by speaking about the brain and the importance of neuroscience research at a school-wide assembly. To learn more about Brain Awareness Week and some of the educational outreach opportunities that the SfN provides, go to www.sfn.org/baw.
While "Brain Awareness Headlines" is itself a new resuorce, the first edition highlights "NERVE", another new educational resource, and one that is targeted specifically at the K-12 audience. NERVE is an acronym that stands for Neuroscience Education Resources Virtual Encycloportal (nice...), and it serves to organize by theme a variety of digital neuroscience education resources from all around the Internet. Some of the resources are "flat" printouts, while others are interactive and/or animated. The resources included in NERVE can be limited by the intended audience, which includes students at different grade levels as well as teachers.
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As an aside, it recently occurred to me that I took my first undergraduate course in Neuroscience - Intro to Neuroscience at Brandeis with Dr. Eve Marder - at this time of year a full 10 years ago! In researching this article, I happened to discover that Dr. Marder is the President of the Society for Neuroscience this year -- congratulations! I'm sure I wasn't the best student in my class in Fall '98, but her presentation and discussion of the subject inspired my further study and solidified the brain as a central point of interest throughout my professional and educational development. And, of course - thanks for the chocolate before each test -- it's a tradition that I've passed on to many of my own students - along with the requisite neuroscientific justification ;-)
Exploring relationships among neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and learning. Sprinkled with education policy, reform, and leadership, STEM education research, and technology.
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Neuro-Education Initiative at Johns Hopkins University
Johns Hopkins University recently announced their Neuro-Education Initiative, a program to develop the links between neuroscience and education. The program will involve a variety of opportunities to share current information, further research, and to develop new ideas by establishing a formal collaboration between the Brain Science Institute and the School of Education. The Initiative began this past summer and continues this fall with a series of interdisciplinary lectures. Starting in 2009, the School of Education will offer a 15 credit graduate certificate in Mind, Brain, and Teaching. The certificate program will be coordinated by Mariale Hardiman, a leader from the Baltimore Public School system who's published extensively on improving educational models through employing the findings of research in neuroscience. Information on the certificate program appears limited at this point, so it may be safest to assume that the program is available only to those who can be in residence at JHU, and not through distance learning at this point in time.
Labels:
professional development
Friday, October 24, 2008
Scale-free learning: the synapse
Synaptic Learning Rules and Sparse Coding in a Model Sensory System (Finelli et al)
The major impetus for the scale-free/fractal, modular, stochastic model for cognition presented in my last post is to investigate the link between the structure and function of the brain with (at least some) of the structure and function of the mind. Although it is not yet specified in the graphical models, my thought is that as we explore the deeper nestings of cognitive resources, we'll get closer and closer to clear links with descrete brain structures like neural networks or even individual neurons. I think it's important to show that learning is not just a mental event, but also a brain event; ie: when learning occurs it is the result of physical and chemical changes in the brain. Although I'm not necessarily arguing that the mental changes that occur in learning are themselves physical and/or chemical, the modeling of learning at the cognitive scale involves changes in the relationships and patterns of activity among cognitive resources.
The above-linked article from Finelli et al uses the locust olfactory system to demonstrate that learning occurs in the synapse level (a change in behavior at the synapse). Although certainly the human brain is much more complex than the locust brain, an interesting ability in both is to be able to process sensory data in a way that involves fewer and fewer neuron activations as the data is more and more processed. The authors found that the activity of a very small number of cells in higher-level processing of smells were sufficient for the locust odor recognition. Interestingly, the authors also suggest that exposure of the olfactory system to a wide variety of odors helps the system to process new odors more effectively.
While I'm not sure that the demonstration of learning at the synaptic level has any practical application to human learning experiences in the classroom or in other traditional learning settings other than to help educators appreciate more deeply that so many different people *can* actually learn the same skills and concepts in the same way, I do think that the implications of this research can improve educational experiences by helping us to focus on how the brain processes information. Particularly, I think it's interesting and important to note that early exposure to a wide variety of information helps the brain to process new information more effectively at later points in time. This suggests that our educational systems, particularly those targeted at young students, should strive to present very broad curricula - perhaps even at the expense of depth - so that later in life those learners can process the new and more complex information that they are exposed to more deeply.
The major impetus for the scale-free/fractal, modular, stochastic model for cognition presented in my last post is to investigate the link between the structure and function of the brain with (at least some) of the structure and function of the mind. Although it is not yet specified in the graphical models, my thought is that as we explore the deeper nestings of cognitive resources, we'll get closer and closer to clear links with descrete brain structures like neural networks or even individual neurons. I think it's important to show that learning is not just a mental event, but also a brain event; ie: when learning occurs it is the result of physical and chemical changes in the brain. Although I'm not necessarily arguing that the mental changes that occur in learning are themselves physical and/or chemical, the modeling of learning at the cognitive scale involves changes in the relationships and patterns of activity among cognitive resources.
The above-linked article from Finelli et al uses the locust olfactory system to demonstrate that learning occurs in the synapse level (a change in behavior at the synapse). Although certainly the human brain is much more complex than the locust brain, an interesting ability in both is to be able to process sensory data in a way that involves fewer and fewer neuron activations as the data is more and more processed. The authors found that the activity of a very small number of cells in higher-level processing of smells were sufficient for the locust odor recognition. Interestingly, the authors also suggest that exposure of the olfactory system to a wide variety of odors helps the system to process new odors more effectively.
While I'm not sure that the demonstration of learning at the synaptic level has any practical application to human learning experiences in the classroom or in other traditional learning settings other than to help educators appreciate more deeply that so many different people *can* actually learn the same skills and concepts in the same way, I do think that the implications of this research can improve educational experiences by helping us to focus on how the brain processes information. Particularly, I think it's interesting and important to note that early exposure to a wide variety of information helps the brain to process new information more effectively at later points in time. This suggests that our educational systems, particularly those targeted at young students, should strive to present very broad curricula - perhaps even at the expense of depth - so that later in life those learners can process the new and more complex information that they are exposed to more deeply.
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