Deep Learning, Abstraction, and Aesthetics

I just came back from a stimulating lunch meeting with my friend and colleague Nancy Coleman. Nancy is the director of the office of distance learning at Boston university. I am the academic coordinator of an online program that her office administers. We only get together about once a year but I wish we had a chance to interact more frequently.

Our discussion today centered around student learning patterns in the online environment. The focus of Nancy's PhD work examines this question. And as a professor who is always struggling with how to get the message across to students this is a question of central importance to me.

As my sabbatical proceeds I have been thinking more and more about how learning happens. It seems clear that there is a role for abstraction in the learning process, whether we are learning with our hands, our eyes, or our ears. As I've written in previous posts I think it is important that students understand the "roadmap" of their learning process. This goes beyond the question of whether assignments and assessments reflect learning objectives. In fact, in my experience, as long as students trust the learning experience and understand the learning environment you can push the envelope with difficult exams or even tangentially related assignments and still carry the confidence of the students.

How does this relate to the question of deep learning? For one thing, deep learning is based on a hierarchy of concepts. Higher-level or "large" concepts are constructed from lower-level or "small "concepts. In the online environment, with limited contact between professor and students, It is essential to establish the relationship between higher-level concepts and lower-level concepts. Somehow, in a seven week course, this must occur very early in the course and it must be reinforced from week to week. To me, this is laying out a roadmap that instructs students in why they are learning what they are learning. The more we can reiterate the roadmap the more we encourage metacognition.

But how do we accomplish this? This comes to the second point regarding deep learning. In deep learning, learning representations (objects) are images. Images represent abstractions of varying levels. The online environment allows us to present a great variety (more than we could in a normal classroom) of images and sounds. When used frequently but judiciously objects reinforce the roadmap of learning. Consequently, students examining images can learn from them at many levels.

The image may convey an unarticulated aesthetic. It may present a whole array of aesthetic sensations interpretable only to the learner. I discussed this last week when I referred to Aztec aesthetics and my struggle to understand them. This points to the reality that deep learning through abstractions is a deeply human process that transcends cultural boundaries.

In a community of learners there are many different styles of learning and perception. One interpretation of this fact is the idea of "multiple intelligences." So, a learning environment that is rich with images can serve the multiple intelligences of the targeted learners. A learning environment rich with images conveys many layers and connections between abstractions that may only be barely articulated. These abstractions communicate with learners, perhaps unconsciously, through the learners' personal aesthetic.

In the vocabulary of deep learning, this phenomenon may be framed as semi-supervised learning or even unsupervised learning. This does not imply a lack of planning for the course. Rather, it is a highly choreographed process in which students are presented with tightly focused images, text, and sounds that elicit a variety of learning sensations. Whether "semi-supervised" or "unsupervised," especially with seasoned adult learners like ones in my online program, this kind of learning engenders confidence and trust in the process. This I think, is the core to a successful learning environment that is characterized by metacognition among the learners.

Interspecies Collaborations: How Was it to Make Art with Worms?

Every time I mention to someone that I was on a residency making art with worms they ask me how it felt. As I've written in earlier posts I still have to unpack that experience from early September. There was too going when I got back from the Catskills to be able to process it in writing.
So here's a start.

The residency was with a small, rather informal group called the Andes Sprouts Society in Stamford, New York. They took care of my accommodations (an off-the grid cabin) with no electricity, heat, or running water (no outhouse either...I had to go down to the farmhouse, about a ten minute walk for any of the conveniences). I had a small flashlight but basically I was in bed as soon as it was dark (about 7:30 PM). And every morning I was down at the farm feeding and milking the goats.

Right away I saw it was an opportunity for inventiveness and a sort of adventure. Interestingly, I had been discovering what it means to invent using clay for the whole year before. As my friend Renato Riccioni mentioned a few weeks ago, clay allows you to do just about anything but it also requires that you concoct methods to support your ideas. A wonderful medium that prepared me for the sparse conditions in Stamford. Even though I barely did any work with clay at the residency I used the sensory tools I had developed with it. I found myself very much in touch with light, temperature, wind, sounds, and the phenomenon of being all alone for long periods of time. Exhilarating and exhausting are two words that come to mind.

My plan was to bring a bin of compost worms with me and experiment with them, what kinds of habitats, foods, and conditions they preferred. I was also hoping to experiment with them making art, which I think was the more successful experience.

For "painting" with worms I set up a sheet of polyurethane-coated paper and had an assortment of inks available. I pulled a dozen or so worms from the bin and kept them in a moist environment at my work table. I started by handling the worms with a tweezer but soon realized that the best way to do the job was to take them in my fingers.

I would put a worm on the paper and put the smallest drop of ink somewhere on its body. The worms have thin skins and I think the ink irritated them. Depending on the color of the ink (and its chemical makeup) the worms responded differently. In some cases (usually with purple ink) they just crawled ahead to get away from the ink. 

Sometimes they flayed around (this was the case with yellow and with the organic walnut-based ink I had bought in the hope that this would irritate them less). I think the "flaying" inks must have been pretty uncomfortable for them. 

Red ink, which seemed less caustic, caused them to lift up their frontal end and "search" for a way out. All of these different responses led to different patterns. So the ink was "put down" on paper differentially depending on the worms' behavior and movement.

The experience was amazing. In part because living closely with the worms I experienced their movement and life more closely. It was also remarkable to experience the immediacy of the worms' movement and its result, the not-so-random art we created together in an interspecies collaboration. 

When you look at some of the pictures I did with the worm you might get a feeling of chaos and confusion. Interesting to me is that the overall feeling was of great peace and sensitivity to the worms and our mutual environment during the time I spent with them.

Abstraction, Critical Thinking, and Postliterate Learning

In my last post I mentioned that instead of teaching scientific "facts" to my undergraduates I encourage my students to think critically about abstractions. Abstractions like protein folding, membrane permeability, mycorrhizae, and ecosystem diversity. Pretty wide ranging stuff, all part of the backbone of evolutionary biology, and all of it hopelessly abstract to a second-year undergraduate.

Marching to the library this afternoon I got to thinking about how a year ago I was writing about the importance of taking a break. Suddenly now, halfway through my sabbatical, I find myself thinking and writing about teaching. A strange dialectic.

So what about critical thinking in a postliterate world? I've always been big on showing my students images. I learned to use powerpoint to my own purposes, no bullet points, no wordy outlines, mostly images. I found that my students used their cellphones to photograph me during my lectures. They would come in for office hours with a printed version of my lectures, highlighted by pictures of me next to a gigantic mitochondria or chlorophyll molecule. Wow. Images (with a side serving of words) as a way of learning. Maybe deep learning!

This brings me back to the "Man in the Holocene" exhibit at MIT. One of the artists featured there is the Futurist artist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, whose early 20th century work used mathematical symbols to evoke the sensations brought about through modern technology and science.

Protoemoticons?

Thinking about Marinetti's work brought me back to my NEH trip this summer, where we learned that among royals of the Mexican central highlands, iconography evolved as a lingua franca to accommodate feasting and gift giving associated with ethnic intermarriage. Iconography and glyphic communication systems allowed diverse peoples to make meaningful, long lasting, and politically potent contact with one another.

We discussed this in the perspective not of a prehistoric, non-literate cultural milieu, but in the context of an advanced, highly refined set of human interactions that had cast aside the written word in favor of images.

So here we are in this century in this world cascading toward an international, intercultural, postliterate system of communication. How can we harness this cultural trend to make our teaching and learning environment more effective?

Metacognition and Knowing Where You Are

In my post yesterday I wrote about metacognition and connectedness. I addressed the importance of having a contextual framework for understanding, and how perceiving connections adds to that framework. I want to add something related to those thoughts.

When I teach my undergraduates I encourage them to construct a map of what we've learned over the semester. This is a bit different than an outline and much different than the flash cards they love, in that a map implies movement over connected terrain, not a hierarchy (like an outline) nor definitions ( flash cards). When you have a map you stand a good chance of knowing where you are and where you're going.

We can solve problems all kinds of ways, but knowing where we are at a given juncture helps. This isn't easy. When Renato suggests that I work more on an abstract sculpture I usually have no idea where I am or where I want to go with the work. Personally I have struggled with developing a metacognitive model for what I'm doing there. His class has been so helpful to me because I have begun to find that roadmap. It helps to have a nudge from someone who sees the situation from a different perspective, and who has experience with this kind of problem solving. Renato came to sculpture from a background as a theater director. I came from Planet Biology.

This gets me to think... when we are working on a scientific problem we can find ourselves in a thicket of observations that tend to confuse us about how we want to go forward. Of course you can see there are analogies here to all kinds of problem solving.

I've often considered that I teach my students not facts about biology but how to think critically about abstractions. I realize now how close to the truth that is. It seems to me that the more abstract the concepts we are working with, the more it helps to have a metacognitive roadmap.

Metacognition, connectedness and the built environment

Just returned from a great walk with my colleagues Margarita Iglesia and Jim Newman. We visited the amazing site at Northpoint in preparation for our sustainability course in January. Riding my bike around the site before we met a few ideas crossed my mind. These had to do with metacognition and connectedness.

There has been a lot of talk about metacognition recently among educators.
Through metacognitive process we hope to encourage students to understand why they are learning what they are learning. Metacognition helps us deconstruct the learning process so we can come to understand how we learn what we learn. Potentially all of this leads to a more productive process of gaining and using knowledge.

Looking around Northpoint Park and its surroundings it's remarkable how geographically isolated it is from nearby neighborhoods. Yet the recent improvements in the park have led to very great connectivity between parts of the park and between neighborhoods on either side. Walking around the space you get a feeling not only of expansiveness but of connection with the built environment of the city. All this with surprising moments of visual intimacy.

The site is large and complex and as we walked we grappled with the problem of how to introduce it to the students. With its long history of multiple uses and the current iteration which suggests those uses, why not provide students with a series of historical maps and accompanying images to help with them contextualize the site. Then we thought we would be able to bring students to the site at least a couple of times for them to get their bearings and make observations. Finally, we hope to engage students with a set of questions that will help them frame their designs for the future of this built environment.

So in preparation for our course in January we exercised metacognition in planning how we will utilize the site with students. We also built in a metacognitive component for the students. By observing recording and analyzing the site they will gain a connection with the unfolding process of its development.

This on top of the fact that the Northpoint site is so connected in its design. In a built environment the feeling of connection seems so important. The same can be said for any intellectual model. By feeling connected, by understanding the context of a problem, and by participating in analysis of the problem, we come to understand the process of our understanding. This, I think, is the essence of metacognition.

Art, Aesthetics, Evolution, and Work in Progress

In my last post I wrote about the nature of abstraction and the (possible) responsibility of the artist to work the abstract idea until it becomes somehow understandable to a viewer. We might look at a successful abstract artwork as a conveyance of the artist's ideas, something unique to the artist communicated to the one engaging the art. This challenging idea, suggested to me by my friend and teacher Renato Riccioni, led to more challenges.

Once again the "Man in the Holocene" exhibit at MIT provided a nourishing substrate for new ideas that arose from Renato's challenge. Lots of sparks there and as an aside, a great example of how it helps to take in an exhibit several times. The heuristic nature of a well curated show emerges as you study it more. Just like nature.

All of the ideas of a scientist arise from observing nature. Though they are processed in some subconscious, the fact of nature provides the material for the scientist's thought.

Roger Caillois, a thinker whose work I had never heard of was featured at the Holocene show. He wrote that biological mimicry is a form of photography. Here is my interpretation of that idea.

Everything alive is a product if evolution. Though we cannot see the process of evolution, every form, every living tissue, every biologically derived molecule reflects the evolutionary process. In a lab manual I wrote for my undergraduates I noted that the world as we see it is a sort of snapshot, the physical manifestation of an instant in time that is constantly, inexorably changing. The words of Caillois put this idea in another, perhaps more nuanced light.

The living world is an evolutionary work in progress. Whatever we observe has been shaped by billions of years of evolutionary history. Any living body, whether a single cell or a redwood tree was literally formed and survives by the forces of evolution. Its physical existence captures all the forces that shaped it in a visible, tangible, albeit temporary presence. Like a photograph that captures the moment, the living body is a proof of the physicality of evolution.

We could take the idea of Caillois a step further and consider the life as a sculpture molded by the "hand" of evolution. In a sense, this makes a satisfactory connection to the concept of communicating abstraction. In another sense the question is left unanswered. Darwin and modern science understand that evolution is the force of change behind all life. And it's hardly rocket science to understand the biological function of most of the things we observe in nature. The difficulty comes in trying to understand the smaller nuances, a curve, a color, a combination of shapes and angles, the folding of a bud or the trail of a slug. How has evolution shaped these things?

A further look at this question may reside in the realm of aesthetics, a work in progress we still need to uncover.

Rethinking the Abstract

A great conversation with my friend Renato Riccioni today as he coached me through an ongoing sculpture challenge. In yesterday's post I wrote about the abstract. I suggested that ideas emerge in an abstract fashion. I also wrote that abstract ideas need to be translated in order to communicate them. I implied that in the act of translation something may be lost.

In our discussion today Renato suggested a different interpretation. Where I implied that the abstract idea he emerges in a burst of creativity, Renato countered with the idea that the act of translation extends the creative process. In my artistic process I have tended towards the immediate. This tends to result in pieces that are difficult for other people to interpret.

Renato put a more blunt interpretation on this. "If you want to stay in your own bubble you can focus on the immediacy of the creative process. But if you want to communicate with others successfully you need to extend the process by working on your piece."

Renato's idea remains a challenge to me. But if I want to communicate with others through my art it makes sense for me to pay attention to this challenge.

Of course there is no "right answer." But it's amazing to have the opportunity to discuss the creative process, cognition, and the way we do art with another person.