MITPressLog

Mindreading and Autism

How empathetic are you? Most of us interact with other people─ family, friends, co-workers, strangers─ by an unwritten set of rules based solely on our ability to “mind read” a situation. That is, to be intuitively aware of others around us and respond accordingly. Those who have autism have a difficult time mindreading. What comes naturally or intuitively to people without autism often must be taught like a set of concrete rules to those with autism. Mindblindness by Simon Baron-Cohen, Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at the University of Cambridge and Director of the Autism Research Centre in Cambridge, explores this notion of mindreading. In his book, Baron-Cohen challenges his readers to see the world differently:

“Imagine what your world would be like if you were aware of physical things but were blind to the existence of mental things…blind to things like thoughts, beliefs, knowledge, desires, and intentions, which for most of us self-evidently underlie behavior. Stretch your imagination to consider what sense you could make of human action (or, for that matter, any animate action whatsoever) if, as for a behaviorist, a mentalistic explanation was forever beyond your limits.”

Baron-Cohen’s research in the difficulties that people with autism face in interpreting the actions and intentions of others has helped lay the foundation of autism research today.

If you’re interested in testing your “mindreading” skills and discovering how empathetic you truly are, check out the Empathy Quotient Test developed by Baron-Cohen.

Want to learn more about autism? Autism Speaks is a great place to find information about the basics of autism, read personal stories, and get involved in autism awareness.

 

Opening Up Education

Today's the pub date for a book that's important not only for its scholarship but for how that scholarship is being delivered to the reader. Opening Up Education is a collection of papers by scholars that explore how open access - the free, online availability of materials - can transform education. The book - a copublication with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching - describe the challenges and benefits of a whole range of initiatives that marshal open access tools, resources, and knowledge.

Fittingly, in addition to making the book available in standard hard copy form - for a very reasonable price, might we add - we're also making the book itself and open access resource. You can go here and either download a PDF version or read a very attractive iPaper edition.

Willinsky on Stanford's OA move

Stanford University's School of Education recently mandated an open access policy to faculty scholarship. Members of the school's faculty unanimously voted to all require all their published articles to be made available in a free online database.

The move was announced by SUSE faculty member John Willinsky at last week's International Conference on Electronic Publishing in Toronto. A video of his presentation is here. Willinsky is the author of The Access Principle, in which he makes a sustained case for open access to scholarship as a public good. Information about the book - as well as an open access PDF version - is available here.

(Hat tip to Lila Guterman at the Chronicle of Higher Education's News Blog.)

The Right to Romance

Paul Abramson, who teaches psychology at the UCLA, has made a forceful contribution to the debate over regulations prohibiting consensual relationships between students and faculty. Abramson thinks that such rules are not only unwise but unconstitutional. He set out his thoughts in an essay that appeared yesterday in the Boston Globe's Ideas section. A sample:

"Over the last decade, there has been a dramatic shift in how universities handle romantic relationships between teachers and students. Sparked in part by fears of expensive sexual harassment lawsuits, colleges have widely banned such relationships, adopting strict rules on dating among students, professors, and even teaching assistants. These rules ignore the rights and liberties of students and professors alike, and treat both as if they were children. They also represent an assault on one of the most fundamental rights of conscience: the right to choose our relationships."

You can read the whole essay here. Abramson sets out his position in his book Romance in the Ivory Tower, which we will publish later this month.

FREE FOR ALL!

MIT officials have reported that the entire MIT curriculum will be freely available online by the end of the year. Through MIT's OpenCourseWare program anyone with access to the Internet will be able to download assignments, reading lists, lecture notes and even exams from any of its 1,800 classes for free. Yes, free.

Giving it away for free may sound like a crazy idea but this kind of knowledge sharing is becoming an essential tool in advancing access to education around the world not only for students and self-learners but for educators as well. A forthcoming (October 2007) MIT Press book, Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge edited by Toru Iiyoshi and M.S. Vijay Kumar, examines how open education tools and resources, like MIT's OpenCourseWare program, can improve the quality of education around the world. The contributors (from leading foundations and academic institutions, including those behind the MIT initiative) discuss the strategic underpinnings of their efforts first in terms of technology, then content, and finally knowledge.

In keeping with the spirit of open and free knowledge sharing and through the support of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, an electronic version of this book will be available under a Creative Commons license on The MIT Press website.

Read more at cnn.com, boston.com and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Barn cum Museum Takes Budding Cognitive Scientists by Storm

Harvard Medical School researcher and MIT Press author Dr. J. Allan Hobson (Dreaming as Delirium and The Dream Drugstore) has converted part of his barn into an "interactive sleep museum," reports Katie Zezima in today's New York Times. The Caledonia County farm owner envisions the museum--which features a "sleep chamber," a preserved brain, and multimedia presentations about the brain and dreams--as a pedagogical tool in a nationwide "sleep curriculum" that examines the encephalon and its activities in the land of Nod.

The Free Pursuit of Knowlege—Or Not

Academic freedom, a cornerstone of democracy, is in trouble, according to Beshara Doumani, professor of History at UC Berkeley and editor of the just-published Academic Freedom After September 11.  The book brings together some of the nation’s leading scholars (Joel Beinin, Judith Butler, Kathleen Frydl, Amy Newhall, Robert Post, and Philippa Strum) to analyze the new challenges facing higher education in the United States—including the rise of conflicting interpretations of what constitutes academic freedom.  Doumani recently spoke with Inside Higher Education’s Scott Jaschik about the book’s theme:

Q. How severe do you consider the attacks on academic freedom, post-9/11?
A: Academic freedom is facing its most serious threat since the McCarthy era of the 1950s. Some of the repressive but short-lived measures imposed on U.S. population after previous crises makes the post-9/11 period look tame in comparison. But the Global War on Terrorism is distinct from previous wars in ways that do not bode well for the future of academic freedom. The unprecedented curtailment of civil liberties following the passage of the Patriot Act in October 2001, the national “Take Back the Campus” campaigns of special interest groups, the changes in the grant language of major foundations, and the attempts to legislate political intervention in area studies programs are but some of the developments post 9/11 that have impacted academic freedom in structural ways. This comes at a time when the academy is in the midst of an economic and institutional transformation driven by the increasing commercialization of knowledge. Buffeted between the forces of anti-liberal coercion and neo-liberal privatization, colleges and universities are more vulnerable than ever to the myriad ways in which outside government agencies and special interest groups are reshaping the landscape of intellectual production.

Q: Do you think the war in Iraq has changed the state of academic freedom?
A: The war in Iraq is but a part of the Global War on Terrorism and its spinoffs on the domestic front. It is a truism that war and truth do not go well together, but we usually take comfort in the fact that wars end while the pursuit of knowledge is endless. Herein, however, lies the danger of this new and unique Global War on Terrorism. It is a war without end and it is a virulently anti-intellectual war in that terrorists are represented as irrationally evil and freedom is said to be a God given right. Both are located outside of history and society. The black and white warning by President Bush, “you are either with us or with the terrorists,” not only asks other countries to surrender their foreign policy. It also asks academics to give up what they hold most dear: the use of critical reason in the free pursuit of knowledge.

Read the entire interview (along with a growing discussion in the comments section) here. 

Spatial Thinking

Thinking spatially helps us solve many of the problems in our daily lives.  It helps us find our car in a crowded parking lot and to assemble furniture and toys (those directions are always so confusing).  But, as Nora S. Newcombe points out in a recent opinion piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription), it's not a subject that has been taken seriously in academia.  Sure, we study reading, writing, math and science, but Newcombe has been working to try to add spatial literacy studies to the curriculum. 

A new meta-analysis that I participated in took account of the many studies completed in the past 15 years. The new analysis shows that we can substantially improve subjects' spatial skill through academic course work, practice on specific tasks, and even playing computer games. Though such games sometimes seem to be a waste of time, many require players to keep track of where they are, and where other objects are or will be.

So we know that spatial cognition is malleable, and that spatial thinking can be improved by effective technology and education. But as the NRC report points out, we still don't know exactly how to infuse spatial thinking throughout the curriculum, and how to use new technologies like geographic-information systems, especially with young children.

What kinds of teaching best support spatial learning? Do different kinds work better at different ages, at different socioeconomic levels, or for women and men? We need a firmer theoretical understanding of spatial learning and intelligence, and scientists and educators should work closely together on efforts to enhance spatial thinking. Better teaching should not only improve students' spatial functioning in general, but also reduce the differences related to gender and socioeconomic status that keep some people from fully participating in our technological society.

Spatial literacy is as important a goal as traditional literacy is. We need to invest our resources and efforts accordingly.

Newcombe is coauthor of Making Space: The Development of Spatial Representation and Reasoning which argues for an interactionist approach to spatial development.   

A New Journal in Town

We're pleased to announce the launch of a new quarterly journal,Education Finance and Policy (EFP). This joint venture between the American Education Finance Association and The MIT Press will address topics in a burgeoning field attracting the attention of increasing numbers of policy makers and analysts.

Edited by David N. Figlio of the University of Florida and David H. Monk of Pennsylvania State University, the first several issues of Education Finance and Policy include important new research contributions on topics such as charter school effectiveness, the education of immigrant students, dynamics in the teacher workforce, higher education finance, and the fiscal burden of school accountability.

Articles from the current (inaugural) issue are now available for free online here.

The New Perils of Being a Couch Potato Academic

In case any of you book-spurning technolators out there are reveling in the hope that our digital manifest destiny is close at hand, take a look at the cautionary evidence that the Wall Street Journal's John Letzing put forth before you forsake your local academic library for the Google Book Search.

Tales of the Internet's unreliabilty as a research tool have been swapped for years, and you may have noticed that Wikipedia has recently taken quite a beating in the press. Tackling a different angle of this issue, Letzing talks with Geoffrey Bowker, author of the new book Memory Practices in the Sciences, about how infomation is getting marginalized or lost. The digitization process is unavoidably incomplete, leaving certain realms of scholarship behind. If scholars fail to get out and scour through the stacks, the users of digital databases are left "hoeing the same kind of territory."

Pablo Boczkowski furthers this point by accusing many academics of "failure to get out of their chairs." He is dismayed that people don't go to libraries anymore to research and thus cheat themselves of the "serendipity of accidental discoveries" and the "unexpected gems" that so helped him research his book, Digitizing the News.

The Wall Street Journal Online has the digital article. Your local libary has that lovely old book smell.