KANE - short for "Knowledge Acquisition in Non-Linear Environments" was an interactive laser-disc based on the film Citizen Kane. An early example of cognitive flexibility theory put into practice.
In leading up to my presentation at IA Summit 2010, “Think Like an Instructional Designer,” I’m posting on the important learning theories that any interaction designer would be well served to know the basics of.
Theory #4 – Cognitive Flexibility Theory
If ever there was a learning theory that was tailor-made for the web interaction designer, it is cognitive flexibility theory. In fact, the theory’s emphasis on the power of hypertext would imply that it was developed with the world-wide web specifically in mind. Yet it came to prominence in 1992, right about when the Mosaic browser started development, and before the ubiquity of the modern web . So ironically, its most famous implementation deploys a special laserdisc of the movie Citizen Kane that serves up scenes in non-linear “random access” mode.
KANE, short for “Knowledge Acquisition in Nonlinear Environments,” is intended to show that literary “texts” offer more than one interpretation. Random it is not. A CFT based learning environment modularizes content into “mini-cases,” then links these mini-cases to conceptual themes. Any one mini-case can, and should, be used in multiple themes for complex schema acquisition in the learner. The user can thus criss-cross the same material from a variety of thematic contexts. In KANE, the film was re- edited to show just those scenes that illustrate a selected conceptual theme of the film (e. g., ‘Wealth Corrupts,” ”Hollow, Soulless Man,” etc.). “Using this option, the learner could, for example, see five scenes in a row, taken from various places in the film, that illustrate different varieties or ‘flavors’ of the ‘Wealth Corrupts’ theme. Each scene essentially forms a miniature case of the Kane character’s behavior that illustrates the targeted theme.” (Spiro, Feltovitch, Jacobson, Coulson 1992) Rand Spiro is the father of the theory, writing first about it in 1987. He is also the co-creator of KANE and continues to write and blog about modern applications of the theory to domains such as Wiki-pedia and YouTube and was even interviewed by the NYTimes in 2008 about the future of reading.
Cognitive Flexibility Theory is an argument for complexity, one of my personal favorite themes in this new age of googly-ness. People always want interaction designers to keep things simple, yet Spiro was highly suspicious of the reductive bias in terms of oversimplifying instructional material. His central argument was that other instructional theories work fine when the domain is ordered and linear, but for higher order inference-based understanding of complex and ill-structured domains, most prescribed theories fall over. And like Cognitive Apprenticeship Theory, CFT provides a nice middle ground between discovery learning and structured environments. It’s limitation lies in the difficulty in applying it beyond the “text” based models of Spiro’s work (even if “text” is used in the widest Barthesian sense of the word), which is probably why Spiro has emerged as such a guru in textual based modern applications such as search and e-reading. It also may explain why it’s very difficult to find examples of CFT used in modern applications. Hypertext (and hyperlinking) was once the de facto way of describing interactivity but feels like such an inadequate metaphor in the world of Modern Warfare 2.
To design a learning environment so that it is consistent with Cognitive Flexibility Theory:
- Use multiple case studies to insure that a variety of possible situations are presented.
- Focus on cross-case differences in how concepts and principles are applied.
- Allow users to ‘criss-cross’ the materials in flexible ways, to see the same content in different contexts
- Modularize content to exist in multiple contexts (or provide enough background information for each concept to be understood in each context)
- Consider multiple perspectives (individual points of view) as an aid to understanding the connected nature of the domain concepts and promoting flexible knowledge building.
(partial source: edutech wiki)
Like many learning theories, cognitive flexibility theory could use some updating. The metaphor of mini-cases linked via hypertext feels inadequate when describing what's possible with modern technology (such as Modern Warfare 2.)
It seems to me that we already have the perfect design pattern for cognitive flexibilty theory - faceted navigation. Here it's used to sort images by all sorts of thematic criteria in order to sell them. If the pattern was used to present learning content, it could be very powerful.
Dvd menus allow users to navigate to scenes but rarely to reorder them by theme. Adding such a feature could make the Reservoir Dogs dvd into a cognitive flexibility learning environment.
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