Cognitive Flexibilty Theory and the Post-Gutenberg Mind: Rand Spiro's Home Page - ***TEMPORARILY UNDER RECONSTRUCTION. Contact directly at [email protected] in the meantime***

Visit me on Twitter. @CognitiveFlex

I'm starting to Tweet.  But for now they're mainly going to be Brain Bursts.  KInd of gnomic.  Quick little thoughts that try to fractally capture some aspect of Cognitive Flexibility Theory, the Post-Gutenberg Mind, and how we can use the Web to learn in deeper and more open ways than we currently do.  Sometimes I say the only way to see a world is in a grain of sand (updating Blake for the age of information overload). Later I'll be adding more informational tweets as well.  

Check it out, @CognitiveFlex .

TEMPORARILY UNDER (RE-)CONSTRUCTION. Contact directly at [email protected] in the meantime.

A popular old paper on CFT: "Cognitive Flexibility, Constructivism, and Hypertext: Random Access Instruction for Advanced Knowledge Acquisition in Ill-Structured Domains"

 

Download Spiro92

This one is still quite pertinent.  I often recommend it as a staring point to learn about Cognitive Flexibility Theory.  It forms a foundation with a few other papers that can be found here:  The Spiro, Coulson, Feltovich & Anderson paper from the 1988 Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society and the 1990 Spiro & Jehng paper from the Nix & Spiro book, Cognition, Education & Multimedia.  

 

New York Times article quotes me regarding the Web & the future of reading

Here's the URL for a piece by Motoko Rich (a terrific reporter at the Times) that appeared on the front page of the Sunday NY Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/books/27reading.html?hp

They have some quotes from me and from various representatives of different sides of the issue of whether reading on the Internet will help or hurt comprehension and learning.  Ms. Rich interviewed me for several hours for the piece.  As you can see, it got distilled to a small fraction of what we discussed -- that's her job (and then her editors push her to cut further!).  So it is natural and unavoidable for some context to be missing, something worth keeping in mind as you read it. Feel free to get in touch with me at [email protected] for more of the context for my remarks, or if there's something at this site you'd like to talk with me about. 

Quoted in the Wall Street Journal

Click here for the Wall St. Journal quoting me in an article about online high schools.  

Washington Post quotes me

Click here for my quote in the Washington Post (go to p.2):

 

An oldie... (Spiro & Jehng)

I'm going to begin putting older (but still relevant) papers up on this site.  Here's one that is a little harder to find on the Web, so I thought it would be a good one to start with.  It's a detailed treatment of many aspects of CFT  and the theory's application to the building of learning environments.  It appeared in my book with Don Nix, Cognition, Education & Multimedia.

Download spiro_jehng.pdf

New paper on modes of openness in CFT systems

This paper talks about the various ways CFT systems promote open rather than closed knowledge.

The citation is:  Spiro, R. J., Collins, B. P., & Ramchandran, A. R. (2007).  Modes of openness and flexibility in “Cognitive Flexibility Hypertext” learning environments.  In B. Khan (Ed.), Flexible learning in an information society.  (pp. 18-25). Hershey, PA:  Information Science Publishing.

Download khan_chap. PDF.pdf

New paper on the constructivism debate

Here's a paper on the debate between constructivism and direct instruction.  It's based on the invited American Educational Research Association debate I participated in back in 2006.  Many other researchers and theorists have been added to the mix since the AERA debat, including Walter Kintsch, John Sweller, David Klahr, and others.  It should be quite a book.

Download constructivism_chapter.pdf

Excerpts from Column

Pending getting all the columns back online (I want to do some minor editing and updating), here are some excerpts from past columns....

Download excerpts_from_column.pdf

Zippy takes on Cognitive Flexibility Theory

Here's a view of CFT from the perspective of the Zippy syndicated column:

The "Wikipedia as Old-Gutenberg Trojan Horse" column

Here's one of my favorite columns from Educational Technology. I'll have the other columns up again soon. 

Download ed_tech_col_5pdf.pdf

New paper: Deep learning on the Web

The paper linked to below is a piece bearing on some of my claims about deep learning on the Web that I've made in my column on the New Gutenberg Revolution and the Post-Gutenberg Mind (excerpts can be found elsewhere on this page, along with one of the full columns, where I talk about why Wikipedia is not Post-Gutenbergian).  The co-author is a very talented doctoral student named Mike DeSchryver -- keep your eye out for him. 

The paper appeared in a book called Cognitive Effects of Multimedia Learning (the full citation appears at the top of the first page of the piece). A comprehensive theoretical piece on a new model of deep and open learning on the Web I am writing with Mike is nearing completion. 

[Some of you are arriving here from a New York Times article on this topic.  You should click on "Main," above, to get to my home page, which contains more articles as well as biographical information.]

Download deep_learning_on_the_web.pdf

New paper on CFT and digital video

Here's a recent paper on the latest uses of digital video in CFT-based learning environments (it was published in 2007; the rest of the citation is at the top of the pdf file): 

Download spiro_cft_dig. Video.pdf