Brains working towards machine consciousness

Drivers

There are increasing numbers seeking qualifications from the Higher Education institutions in the UK, and static or decreasing budgets available.  

Additionally, some institutions are seeking to re-align themselves to focus more on research, which means they have a need to reduce the teaching 'overhead' for staff to free up time for them to conduct quality research.

Issues

With the increase in numbers of students, it is hardly surprising that many staff report that ability levels appear to be declining, on average.  

In general, Research and Learning are treated as separate entities in the HE sector, which, if we look at definitions of the words, might seem a bit incongruous:

Research 

Research is work that involves studying something and trying to discover facts about it

 Over at TestFirst.org there is a nice (early stages) learning resource which I believe will be useful for helping people learn to program.  Using the Ruby language, and the RSpec gem as the basis for test driven design, the learning materials provide specifications which the learner then writes short programs to satisfy.

John Davis wrote a piece for the ALT newsletter in which he advocates a broad system boundary for eLearning pointing toward the field being a means to improve the learning process for everyone.  As so many people in the education sector, he seems keen to emphasise the technology playing second fiddle to the existing culture and processes; a view I was also trained to accept working as a developer.

The general model adopted can be viewed, as Davis describes, in terms of the 'fried egg' diagram:

Mike Bogle (@mbogle on Twitter) has a great post on the change needed to support education in the future, which he drew my attention to after I Twittered "knowledge and learning are incarcerated in a monopolistic mould/mold which inhibits innovation and accentuates elitism. Discuss". I might argue it is change that was needed in the past, but I am guessing we can't achieve that now. I recommend Mike's post over this one. Mine is truly a rant, but sometimes a rant is needed...

First, my model of mind and (therefore) of learning - we are pattern matching creatures by dint of the way out brains work, and look for the similarities and differences between things. We also create models in our minds of what we perceive, which are, by definition, abstractions and simplifications of the 'objective reality'. Our perceptions are, I believe, affected by the internal models.