Learning by Categorization

Jerome BrunerMarvin MinskyHarold C. Conk by Learning by Categorization on NotaScholars & BibliographyJerome BrunerMarvin MinskyHarold C. Conklinhttp://www.sciencedirect.com/science/book/978008044612Jerome BrunerBruner's work in cognitive psychology led to an interest in the cognitive development of children and related issues of education, and in the 1960s he developed a theory of cognitive growth. Bruner's theories, which approach development from a different angle than those of Jean Piaget, focus on the environmental and experiential factors influencing each individual's specific development pattern. His argument that human intellectual ability develops in stages from infancy to adulthood through step-by-step progress in how the mind is used has influenced experimental psychologists and educators throughout the world. Bruner is particularly interested in language and other representations of human thought. In one of his best-known papers, Bruner defines three modes of representing, or "symbolizing," human thought. The enactive mode involves human motor capacities and includes activities such as using tools. The iconic mode pertains to sensory capacities. Finally, the symbolic mode involves reasoning, and is exemplified by language, which plays a central role in Bruner's theories of cognition and development. He has called it "a means, not only for representing experience, but also for transforming it."Bruner's view that the student should become an active participant in the educational process has been widely accepted. In The Process of Education (1960) he asserts that, given the appropriate teaching method, every child can successfully study any subject at any stage of his or her intellectual development. Bruner's later work involves the study of the pre-speech developmental processes and linguistic communication skills in children.Marvin MinskyThinking always begins with suggestive but imperfect plans and images; these are progressively replaced by better–but usually still imperfect–ideas. http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/Frames/frames.htmlhttp://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/BBC3.mp3Harold C. ConklinHarold Conklin is a well-known professor at Yale University. He grew up in Manhattan. He was first educated in public schools near Long Island. Thanks to a lot of hard work and dedication he was accepted first at University of California at Berkeley, then Yale. He earned his Ph.D. at Yale there in 1955.Since school he has worked in many places. He was on the anthropology facility at Columbia University from 1954-1962. Then from 1962 to the present he was worked out of Yale. He has been many places, studying things from farming to the people that farm. Conklin is best known for his studies of shifting cultivation. Most of those studies occurred in the Philippines, where he also studied the Ifugao people. He is especially interested in ethnology and ecology of tropical forested areas and of Pacific Basin. Again, most of his ethnography has been done in areas such as the Philippines and Malaysia.In 1963 he wrote a book entitled The Study of Shifting Cultivation. This is one of his many publications. In total he has written about ten or so books. Conklin is a master of ecological description with maps. He likes to use detailed topographic maps that show land use along with village boundaries. Others in his field say that he sets the standards for such maps.Harold Conklin has been at Yale University since 1962. He just recently retired from his spot atop the Anthropology division. On May 18, 2000 Anthropologists from around the country came to his retirement party. Until his retirement, Conklin had been the Curator of Anthropology. In years before, Conklin had served as Chair of the Anthropology Department, and Director of Graduate Studies.References:Conklin, Harold. The Study of Shifting Cultivation. Washington: Technical Publications, 1963.Written by: Adam Sexter, Minnesota State UniversityMarvin Minsky has made many contributions to AI, cognitive psychology, mathematics, computational linguistics, robotics, and optics. In recent years he has worked chiefly on imparting to machines the human capacity for commonsense reasoning. His conception of human intellectual structure and function is presented in The Society of Mind (CDROM, book) which is also the title of the course he teaches at MIT.He received the BA and PhD in mathematics at Harvard and Princeton. In 1951 he built the SNARC, the first neural network simulator. His other inventions include mechanical hands and other robotic devices,the confocal scanning microscope, the "Muse" synthesizer for musical variations (with E. Fredkin), and the first LOGO "turtle" (with S. Papert). A member of the NAS, NAE and Argentine NAS, he has received the ACM Turing Award, the MIT Killian Award, the Japan Prize, the IJCAI Research Excellence Award, the Rank Prize and the Robert Wood Prize for Optoelectronics, and the Benjamin Franklin Medal. Want to learn more about learning by categorization? Click on the link below to access the PDF of an online book containing numerous journal articles on the topic.BACK(Enable JavaScript in your browser, please.)