A frame-based pedagogy

Semantic frames provide a useful means for representing knowledge. In the Mean Mythic Ferrets project knowledge is regarded as the capacity for action.

The central thesis of a frame-based pedagogy is that associated with each frame - a clearly individuated information structure - will be a corresponding cognitive functional unit whose purpose is to carry out the actions corresponding to the knowledge required to understand the frame.

In general these cognitive functional units will be composed of simpler functional units. One way of looking at this is that, corresponding to the semantic frame (information) network there is a corresponding action network.

This is not a particularly new idea, more a different perspective on existing theses in the literature of epistemology and cognitive science.

Daniel C. Dennett talks about thinking tools and virtual machines for carrying out particular kinds of thinking tasks: see his book Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, for example.

Similar ideas can be found in the work of Douglas Hofstadter: see for example, his book, I Am a Strange Loop.

Jerry Fodor in his book, The Modularity of Mind, describes faculty psychology, in which the mind is considered to be comprised of a number of (innate) modules, or faculties, each responsible for a particular cognitive task.

The term cognitive tool is in widespread use (see, for example, information engineering blog) and is often taken to mean some mental device that aids cognition.

And so, define for each frame, a frame module or frame virtual machine or frame cognitive tool that is responsible for processing the information provided by a frame to produce actions that indicate that a sentient agent possesses the knowledge represented by the frame.

This frame virtual machine represents the class (b) of structural ingredients of the processes of an embodied cognitive agent in the following quote from Brian Cantwell Smith (Reflection and Semantics in a Procedural Language) :

Any mechanically embodied intelligent process will be comprised of structural ingredients that a) we as external observers naturally take to represent a propositional account of the knowledge that the overall process exhibits, and b) independent of such external semantic attribution, play a formal but causal and essential role in engendering the behaviour that manifests that knowledge.

A frame virtual machine represents the procedural aspects of knowledge. This will incorporate both cognitive processes and their external physical consequences. For example, the "add two integers" frame virtual machine would include functionality for carrying out an addition together with the ability to convey the result to another cognitive agent. At the very least the frame virtual machine will be able to express what the agent should be able to do, even if it does not yet have the organs to achieve this.

Three benefits

At least three major benefits can be accrued from a frame-based pedagogy.

Firstly, the functionality of each frame virtual machine is a set of actions which are the intended learning outcomes (ILOs) associated with each frame. Hence this approach requires that there is a coherent relationship structure between ILOs, a network of ILOs, in fact.

Secondly, since all frames sit in a semantic frame network, this allows a formal method of examining the relationships between ILOs, semantic frames and learning activities.

Thirdly, the coherent grouping of ILOs should provide guidance to the creation of learning activities in the process of learning design. For example, there is a natural convergence of ideas between, on the one side, frame virtual machines and, on the other, proximal implicit knowledge and cognitive holes in the kungkhies learning design method.