Tuesday, December 10, 2024

learning (kolb)

 David A. Kolb, Experiential Learning, 1984                      [ ]

p.35
     In experiential learning theory, the transactional relationship between the person and the environment is symbolized in the dual meanings of the term experience — one subjective and personal, referring to the person's internal state, as in the "the experience of joy and happiness," and the other objective and environmental, as in, "He has 20 years of experience on this job."  These two forms of experience interpenetrate and interrelate in very complex ways, as, for example, in the old saw, "He doesn't have 20 years experience, but one year repeated 20 times."  Dewey describes the matter this way:

—<begin citation, John Dewey>

                Experience does not go on simply inside a person.  It does go on there, for it influences the formation of attitudes of desire and purpose.  But this is not the whole of the story.  Every genuine experience has an active side which changes in some degree the objective conditions under which experiences are had.  The difference between civilization and savagery, to take an example on a large scale, is found in the degree in which previous experiences have changed the objective conditions under which subsequent experiences take place.  The existence of roads, of means of rapid movement and transportation, tools, implements, furniture, electric light and power, are illustrations.  Destroy the external conditions of present civilized experience, and for a time our experience would relapse into that of barbaric peoples . . . .
                The word "interaction" assigns equal rights to both factors in experience — objective and internal conditions.  Any normal experience is an interplay of these two sets of conditions.  Taken together . . . they form what we call a situation.
                The statement that individuals live in a world means, in the concrete, that they live in a series of situations.  And when it it said that they live in these situations, the meaning of the word "in" is different from its meaning when it is said that pennies are "in" a pocket or paint is "in" a can.  It means, once more, that interaction is going on between an individual and objects and other persons.  The conceptions of situation and of interaction are inseparable from each other.  An experience is always what it is because of a transaction taking place between an individual and what, at the time, constitutes his environment, whether the latter consists of persons with whom he is talking about some topic or event, the subject talked about being also a part of the situation; the book he is reading (in which his environing conditions at the time may be England or ancient Greece or an imaginary region); or the materials of an experiment he is performing.  The environment, in other words, is whatever conditions interact with personal needs, desires, purposes, and capacities to create the experience which is had.  Even when a person builds a castle in the air he is interacting with the objects which he constructs in fancy. [Dewey, 1938, p. 39, 43-43]

——<end citation, John Dewey>

     (David A. Kolb, 1984, Experiential Learning : experience as the source of learning and development, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.)
(Chapter Two, The process of experiential learning, p.35)
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Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets : a memoir of vietnam and the pentagon papers, 2002 

pp.185─186 
; an operation eight months later in the same paddies that was not even aware American troops had ever visited them before.  AS Tran Ngoc Chau said to me in 1968, “You Americans feel you have been fighting this was for seven years. You have not. You have been fighting it for one year, seven times.”

p.347
   I said that I thought strongly that he should, at least to read the summaries, which were only a few single-spaced pages at the start of each volume.  He could have an assistant read the texts and pick out passages that seemed especially pertinent.  But the summaries alone added up to about sixty pages.  “They make a very readable story.  You really should make the effort.”
   “But do we really have anything to learn from this study?”

p.347
Yet in fact each administration, including this one, repeated the same patterns in decision making and pretty much the same (hopeless) policy as its predecessor, without even knowing it.  

p.134
   Along the road was an unusual succession of abandoned the fortifications, of varying constructions, that dated from different periods successively further back in time.  There were recent Popular Force outposts.  WE had supplied the wages for the local militia that had built them and the cement, if there was any.  But basically these were mud forts, very primitive little outposts along the road supposedly to protect local hamlets.  They had been recently abandoned because of the regional nonviolent uprising against the Saigon regime, which had been paying the troops out of the U.S. aid.  Posts like these I'd seen all over Vietnam. 
   But next to one of them was a pill box of another kind, better constructed and made out of concrete, a cylindrical box with narrow portholes.  The interpreter driving with me, a young Vietnamese lieutenant, explained that this had been built by the French.  I recognized that it looked like one of the smaller pillboxes I had seen in pictures of the French Maginot Line at the outset of the German invasion of France.  We drove by several of those.  Most were from the 1946─54 war by France  to regain its colony, during which it had run a pacification program very similar to ours.  But some of them, the lieutenant pointed out, went back much earlier, to the twenties and thirties (when the Maginot Line had been built) and even much earlier in the French pacification of Vietnam. 
   In the midsts of these, along the road, were some pillboxes of a distinctly different sort, also concrete but rounded, like ovens.  I recognized those from pictures of the Pacific island fighting by the marines in World war II.  They were Japanese, built when the Japanese had pacified  the area of what was now I Corps in their occupation of Vietnam during the war.  Finally, we came to a massive knoll, overgrown with grass and studded with very old stones.  I was told it was an ancient Chinese fort, constructed when the Chinese had pacified Vietnam, starting with what was now I Corps, over a period of a thousand years.  When the interpreter told me that, I was reminded of that Tran Ngoc Chau had once  said to me:  “You must understand that we are a people who think of ourselves as having defeated the Chinese though it took us a thousand years.”
─“”

   (Secrets : a memoir of vietnam and the pentagon papers / daniel ellsberg., 1. vietnamese conflict, 1961─1975──unitd states., 2. pentagon papers., 3. ellsberg, daniel., DS558 .E44 2002, 959.704'3373──dc21, 2002, )
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