Preface |
We learn by adapting to new experiences. Persons who have never driven a car learn how to do so by driving one—a new experience for them to which they adapt by combining past experiences in novel ways. The more closely their past experiences resemble the operations required to drive a car, the easier those operations are to learn. Since most of us have steered bumper cars or similar vehicles in amusement parks, steering and braking a car are much easier to learn than shifting gears (especially on a stick shift) or backing into a parking space for which we have fewer analogous past experiences.
Mapping past experiences onto new ones is a vital aspect of learning. When I watched a Cricket match on TV for the first time with no prior experience of the game, as an American I tried to figure it out by mapping my experience of baseball onto the announcer’s narration. My initial attempts were mismatches. As I continued to watch, I revised my baseball template, noting its inadequacies, to make it a better match with Cricket. However inaccurate the resulting configuration, it is nonetheless the instrument of my understanding. The process of bridging the gap in my experiences is often a lengthy and time-consuming one. Patience and effort are required to redraw the “map” my past experiences to fit the new context.
Understanding people works the same way. When a person interacts with another person, they communicate their experiences (share their experiences) by narrating them. The narration evokes in the listener a “script” (a generalized set of events) that allows him or her to map their experience onto the narrator’s. When the listener has not yet had or cannot have the experience the narrator recounts, the listener maps various partial experiences in a configuration suggested by the narration onto the narrator.
Understanding people who have had experiences similar to ours is much easier than understanding persons unlike us. Complicating the problem is the simple fact that there are many experiences that some persons normally have which other persons cannot under any conditions have. My wife has given birth: I have not. My father drove a horse-drawn produce wagon as a young man; I never have driven a horse drawn wagon. I grew up without a TV set; my children have always lived with TV sets. I have never lived in a place where shooting was a routine daily occurrence; may of my students have. My father-in-law was in the Normandy invasion and my cousin fought in the Battle of the Bulge during WWII; neither I or my sons have fought in a war. Because of these “gaps” in experience, I can only imagine what it is like to give birth, drive a horse drawn wagon, live where I could easily get shot, or fight in a battle. I refer to experiences we have not had as “null experiences” because, even though we know about them, they have not registered in our memory banks as experiences. Whatever experiences I have of birth, horse-drawn wagons, or war are virtual experiences. Mostly, I have seen films of experiences I have not had. To what extent can virtual experiences help me to learn about null experiences? I have seen films about battles, some more realistic than others. Would watching films about battles prepare me to engage in one? This section of the C-CS site is about the extent to which virtual experiences can fill in the experience gaps created by null experiences.jjs
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last revised:
June 13, 2007
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