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August 30, 2010

Five Minds for the Future

Harvard Professor Howard Gardner in his new book, Five Minds for the Future, proposes five minds, or skills, students need to master. Three relate to the intellect: the disciplined, synthesizing and creative minds; two emphasize character: the respectful and ethical minds.

Gardner is known for his theory of Multiple Intelligences that describes nine different ways individuals demonstrate intelligence:

  • Visual/Spatial
  • Verbal/Linguistic
  • Mathematical/Logical
  • Bodily/Kinesthetic
  • Musical/Rhythmic
  • Intrapersonal
  • Interpersonal
  • Naturalist
  • Existential

    VISUAL/SPATIAL - learning visually and organizing ideas spatially. Seeing concepts in action in order to understand them. The ability to "see" things in one's mind in planning to create a product or solve a problem.

    VERBAL/LINGUISTIC - learning through the spoken and written word. This intelligence was always valued in the traditional classroom and in traditional assessments of intelligence and achievement.

    MATHEMATICAL/LOGICAL - learning through reasoning and problem solving. Also highly valued in the traditional classroom, where students were asked to adapt to logically sequenced delivery of instruction.

    BODILY/KINESTHETIC - learning through interaction with one's environment. This intelligence is not the domain of "overly active" learners. It promotes understanding through concrete experience.

    MUSICAL/RHYTHMIC - learning through patterns, rhythms and music. This includes not only auditory learning, but the identification of patterns through all the senses.

    INTRAPERSONAL - learning through feelings, values and attitudes. This is a decidedly affective component of learning through which students place value on what they learn and take ownership for their learning.

    INTERPERSONAL - learning through interaction with others. Not the domain of children who are simply "talkative" or "overly social." This intelligence promotes collaboration and working cooperatively with others.

    NATURALIST - learning through classification, categories and hierarchies. The naturalist intelligence picks up on subtle differences in meaning. It is not simply the study of nature; it can be used in all areas of study..

    EXISTENTIAL - learning by seeing the "big picture": "Why are we here?" "What is my role in the world?" "What is my place in my family, school and community?" This intelligence seeks connections to real world understandings and applications of new learning.

    From Multiple Intelligences Overview by Walter McKenzie

    See also: Multiple Intelligences: A Theory for Everyone Anne Guignon, Education World, 1998.

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    • August 23, 2010

    What I've Thinking About Lately

    The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
    by Nicholas Carr

    From chapter four: The bond between book reader and book writer has always been a tightly symbiotic one, a means of intellectual and artistic cross-fertilization. The words of the writer act as a catalyst in the mind of the reader, inspiring new insights, associations, and perceptions, sometimes even epiphanies. And the very existence of the attentive, critical reader provides the spur for the writer’s work. It gives the author the confidence to explore new forms of expression, to blaze difficult and demanding paths of thought, to venture into uncharted and sometimes hazardous territory. “All great men have written proudly, nor cared to explain,” said Emerson. “They knew that the intelligent reader would come at last, and would thank them.”
    On NPR 'The Shallows': This Is Your Brain Online

    Book Review - Cognitive Surplus - By Clay Shirky - NYTimes.com

    The time we might free up by ditching TV is Shirky’s “cognitive surplus” — an ocean of hours that society could contribute to endeavors far more useful and fun than television. With the help of a researcher at I.B.M., Shirky calculated the total amount of time that people have spent creating one such project, Wikipedia. The collectively edited online encyclopedia is the product of about 100 million hours of human thought, Shirky found. In other words, in the time we spend watching TV, we could create 2,000 Wikipedia-size projects — and that’s just in America, and in just one year.

    Book Review - Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg - The Letters - NYTimes.com

    “Tonight while walking on the waterfront in the angelic streets I suddenly wanted to tell you how wonderful I think you are,” Jack Kerouac began a typical letter to his friend Allen Ginsberg in 1950. “God’s angels are ravishing and fooling me. I saw a whore and an old man in a lunch cart, and God — their faces! I wondered what God was up to.” God’s purpose would remain opaque to Kerouac — try as he might to impart some glimpse of it in his work — and a decaade later he was pretty much a burnt-out case. Poring over his old correspondence with Ginsberg and others in 1961, he sadly wondered at “the enthusiasms of younger men.” “Someday ‘The Letters of Allen Ginsberg to Jack Kerouac’ will make America cry,” he wrote.

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