“Professor Roger Schank has long been one of the world’s most innovative thinkers about education. This book is the culmination of his lifetime of thinking about teaching and learning. Although I’ve known Roger for over 20 years, I’ve learned a lot from this book and I know that you will too.” —Ray Bareiss, Professor and Director of Educational Programs, Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley“Finally, some fresh thinkin...

Bring meaning and curiosity back to school. In this reader-friendly guide, the author engages educators and leaders in a powerful conversation about modern learning. Explore the 10 criteria for new curricula, encourage students to develop their skills and passions, and consider changes in teaching that can make school fun and relevant to students’ lives in the real world.

In the author's words: "This book is an honest attempt to understand what it means to be educated in today's world." His argument is this: No matter how important science and technology seem to industry or government or indeed to the daily life of people, as a society we believe that those educated in literature, history, and other humanities are in some way better informed, more knowing, and somehow more worthy of the descriptor "well educated." This 19th-century conception of the educate...

Introducing issues in dynamic memory and case-based reasoning, this comprehensive volume presents extended descriptions of four major programming efforts conducted at Yale during the past several years. Each descriptive chapter is followed by a companion chapter containing the micro program version of the information.The authors emphasize that the only true way to learn and understand any AI program is to program it yourself. To this end, the book develops a deeper and richer under...

First Published in 1977. In the summer of 1971, there was a workshop in an ill-defined field at the intersection of psychology, artificial intelligence, and linguistics. The fifteen participants were in various ways interested in the representation of large systems of knowledge (or beliefs) based upon an understanding process operating upon information expressed in natural language. This book reflects a convergence of interests at the intersection of psychology and artificial intelligence....

To hear politicians talk, one would think the entire purpose of school is to assess children rather than educate them. Excitement about learning doesn't seem to be on anyone's agenda. The villains are those who profit from testing mania, make the tests, coach for testing, publish the books on which the tests are based, and believe that the results matter. Children are being taught things they don't need to know and nobody seems to care.Scrooge Meets Dick and Jane is a caut...

This book is the third volume in a series that provides a hands-on perspective on the evolving theories associated with Roger Schank and his students. The primary focus of this volume is on constructing explanations. All of the chapters relate to the problem of building computer programs that can develop hypotheses about what might have caused an observed event. Because most researchers in natural language processing don't really want to work on inference, memory, and learning issues, most...

It is not unusual for a festschrift to include offerings from several areas of study, but it is highly unusual for those areas to cross disciplinary lines. This book, in doing just that, is a testimony to Bob Abelson's impact on the disciplines of social psychology, artificial intelligence and cognitive science, and the applied areas of political psychology and decision-making. The contributors demonstrate that their association with Abelson, whether as students or colleagues, has resulted...

The fourth in the Inside series, this volume includes four theses completed under the editor's direction at the Institute for the Learning Sciences at Northwestern University. This series bridges the gap between Schank's books introducing (for a popular audience) the theories behind his work in artificial intelligence (AI) and the many articles and books written by Schank and other AI researchers for their colleagues and students. The series will be of interest to graduate student...