What would happen if you gave thousands of students around the world
a single pad of Post-it® Notes and challenged them to innovate... in one
week! What would they do? How would they use their imaginations?
What would they create? This is the story behind the first film in the
documentary series imagine it!
In the early 1970s at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, Minsky and
Seymour Papert started developing what came to be called The Society
of Mind theory. The theory attempts to explain how what we call
intelligence could be a product of the interaction of non-intelligent
parts. Minsky says that the biggest source of ideas about the theory
came from his work in trying to create a machine that uses a robotic
arm, a video camera, and a computer to build with children's blocks. In
1986 Minsky published a comprehensive book on the theory which,
unlike most of his previously published work, was written for a general
audience (Robotics).
In November 2006, Minsky published The Emotion Machine, a book that
critiques many popular theories of how human minds work and
suggests alternative theories, often replacing simple ideas with more
complex ones. Recent drafts of the book are freely available from his
webpage.[5]
Minsky's The Emotion Machine (2006) - the book made available on
wikipedia
This chapter will develop the idea that each person has many different
ways to think. One could ask why we have so many of those, and one
answer would be that our ancestors lived through a host of varied
environments, each of which required ways to deal with different
conditions and constraints. Then, because we never discovered one
uniform scheme that could meet all our needs, we retained large parts
of that collection of methods for coping with different situations.
HE EMOTION MACHINE
Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the
Human Mind
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By Marvin Minsky
Simon & Schuster. 387 pp. $26
Writers about the human mind generally fall into three camps:
philosophers, psychologists and others who weave elaborate theories
about the mind without any reference to the brain; neuroscientists who
attempt to link mind matters with brain states; and, finally, members of
the computer science and artificial intelligence (AI) communities who
suggest that it's possible to replicate human thinking in a machine.
Marvin Minsky, professor of electrical engineering and computer science
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an early pioneer in
developing artificial intelligence, is an eminent denizen of the third
camp.
Dialogue Box allows a teacher to pose a question, suggest a 'yes' and a 'no'
response and then ask students to create an avatar and place themselves
on the spectrum of opinion.
Stephen spent around a quarter of a century building Ultralab, which
established an exceptional, unique, reputation as a world leading
learning technology research centre. He has been a professor for 18
years, including nowadays a number of visiting chairs too, he joined the
CEMP team in late 2007 as Professor of New Media Environments. Email:
stephen@cemp.ac.uk
Prof. Stephen Heppell: "Europe's leading online education expert"
Microsoft 2006. "Europe's leading online education guru" Guardian
2004. "The most influential academic in recent years in the filed of
technology and innovation" the Department for Education and Skills. UK,
2006
Stephen has very considerable experience in policy, research, practice,
new technologies, learning and more. He enjoys global respect. Stephen
leads the collegiate Learnometer team, and the project.
Over 25 years I've had a lot of involvement in the design of virtual
communities on-line and in the design of physical learning spaces like
schools, companies, communitiy centres and colleges. I now get heaps
of requests for help in these areas, which I am delighted to offer, but
have assembled this site as a "primer" for anyone exploring these design
issues."
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