On the eve of his fortieth birthday, renowned cognitive scientist Gary Marcus decided to fulfil a lifelong dream and learn to play the guitar. He had tried many times before - failing miserably. This time, he decided to use the tools of his "trade" to see if he might suceed. On his quest he jams with twelve-year-olds and takes master classes with guitar gods. A groundbreaking exploration of the allure of music, Guitar Zero is also an empowering case for the mind's ability to grow throughout life.

Discussion on the Web is mediated through layers of software and protocols. As scholars increasingly study communication and learning on the Internet, it is essential to consider how site administrators, programmers, and designers create interfaces and enable functionality. The managers, administrators, and designers of online communities can turn to more than 20 years of technical books for guidance on how to design online communities toward particular objectives. Through analysis of this "how-to" literature, Designing Online Communities explores the discourse of design and configuration that partially structures online communities and later social networks. Tracking the history of notions of community in these books suggests the emergence of a logic of permission and control. Online community defies many conventional notions of community. Participants are increasingly treated as "users", or even as commodities themselves to be used. Through consideration of the particular tactics of these administrators, this book suggests how researchers should approach the study and analysis of the records of online communities.

Studies of learning are too frequently conceptualized only in terms of knowledge development. Yet it is vital to pay close attention to the social and emotional aspects of learning in order to understand why and how it occurs. How Students Come to Be, Know, and Do builds a theoretical argument for and a methodological approach to studying learning in a holistic way. The authors provide examples of urban fourth graders from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds studying science as a way to illustrate how this model contributes to a more complete and complex understanding of learning in school settings. What makes this book unique is its insistence that to fully understand human learning we have to consider the affective-volitional processes of learning along with the more familiar emphasis on knowledge and skills.

First published in 1987, Learning by Expanding challenges traditional theories that consider learning a process of acquisition and reorganization of cognitive structures within the closed boundaries of specific tasks or problems. Yrjo Engestrom argues that this type of learning increasingly fails to meet the challenges of complex social change and fails to create novel artifacts and ways of life. In response, he presents an innovative theory of expansive learning activity, offering a foundation for understanding and designing learning as a transformation of human activities and organizations. The second edition of this seminal text features a substantive new introduction that illustrates the development and implementation of Engestrom's theory since its inception."

Western and East Asian people hold fundamentally different beliefs about learning that influence how they approach child rearing and education. Reviewing decades of research, Dr Jin Li presents an important conceptual distinction between the Western mind model and the East Asian virtue model of learning. The former aims to cultivate the mind to understand the world, whereas the latter prioritizes the self to be perfected morally and socially. Tracing the cultural origins of the two large intellectual traditions, Li details how each model manifests itself in the psychology of the learning process, learning affect, regard of one's learning peers, expression of what one knows and parents' guiding efforts. Despite today's accelerated cultural exchange, these learning models do not diminish but endure.

Western and East Asian people hold fundamentally different beliefs about learning that influence how they approach child rearing and education. Reviewing decades of research, Dr Jin Li presents an important conceptual distinction between the Western mind model and the East Asian virtue model of learning. The former aims to cultivate the mind to understand the world, whereas the latter prioritizes the self to be perfected morally and socially. Tracing the cultural origins of the two large intellectual traditions, Li details how each model manifests itself in the psychology of the learning process, learning affect, regard of one's learning peers, expression of what one knows and parents' guiding efforts. Despite today's accelerated cultural exchange, these learning models do not diminish but endure.

The cognitive and neural sciences have been on the brink of a paradigm shift for over a decade now. The traditional information-processing framework in psychology, with its computer metaphor of the mind, is still considered to be the mainstream approach. However, the dynamical-systems perspective on mental activity is now receiving a more rigorous treatment, allowing it to move beyond the trendy buzzwords that have become associated with it. The Continuity of Mind will help to galvanize the forces of dynamical systems theory, cognitive and computational neuroscience, connectionism, and ecological psychology that are needed to complete this paradigm shift.
In this book, Michael Spivey lays bare the fact that comprehending a spoken sentence, understanding a visual scene, or just thinking about the day's events involves the coalescing of different neuronal activation patterns over time, i.e., a continuous state-space trajectory that flirts with a series of point attractors. As a result, the brain cannot help but spend most of its time instantiating patterns of activity that are in between identifiable mental states rather than in them. When this scenario is combined with the fact that most cognitive processes are richly embedded in their environmental context in real time, the state space (in which brief visitations of attractor basins are your 'thoughts') suddenly encompasses not just neuronal dimensions, but extends to biomechanical and environmental dimensions as well. As a result, your moment-by-moment experience of the world around you, even right now, can be described as a continuous trajectory through a high-dimensional state space that comprises diverse mental states.
Spivey has organized The Continuity of Mind to present a systematic overview of how perception, cognition, and action are partially overlapping segments of one continuous mental flow, rather than three distinct mental systems. As a result, the apparent partitions that were once thought to separate mental constructs inevitably turn out, upon closer inspection, to be fuzzy graded transitions. The initial chapters provide first-hand demonstrations of the 'gray areas' in mental activity that happen in between discretely labeled mental events, as well as geometric visualizations of attractors in state space that make the dynamical-systems framework seem less mathematically abstract. The middle chapters present scores of behavioral and neurophysiological studies that portray the continuous temporal dynamics inherent in categorization, language comprehension, visual perception, as well as attention, action, and reasoning. The final chapters discuss what the mind itself must look like if its activity is continuous in time and its contents are distributed in state space. The Continuity of Mind is essential reading for those in the cognitive and neural sciences who want to see where the Dynamical Cognition movement is taking us.

Educate students in mind and body-and optimize their success. There is no issue today that gets more attention and incites more debate than children's use of technology. Technology offers exciting new opportunities and challenges to you and your students. Meanwhile, movement is essential to learning-it increases mental energy and helps brain cells develop. But screen time often comes at the expense of physical activity. How do you choose? You don't! This blended instructional approach combines kinesthetic teaching methodologies with technological resources to meet content standards, increase achievement and test scores, and enrich the learning process. Here you'll find A neuroscientific overview of the powerful brain-body connection Step-by-step instructions for balancing movement and the use of technology in the classroom Practical tools, templates, and vignettes to ensure successful implementation Classroom management tactics and useful remedies for common problems Educating the whole child means promoting social, physical, mental, emotional, and cognitive growth. By joining two powerful teaching tools, you'll prepare students for a bright future-in school and in life-while growing your instructional expertise as well.

While Experiential Learning has been one of the most influential methods in the education and development of managers and management students, it has also been one of the most misunderstood. This Handbook offers the reader a comprehensive picture of current thinking on experiential learning; ideas and examples of experiential learning in practice; and it emphasises the importance of experiential learning to the future of management education.
Contributors include:
Chris Argyris, Joseph Champoux, D. Christopher Kayes, Ruth Colquhoun, John Coopey, Nelarine Cornelius, Elizabeth L. Creese,
Gordon Dehler, Andrea Ellinger, Meretta Elliott, Silvia Gherardi, Jeff Gold, Steve G. Green, Kurt Heppard, Anne Herbert, Robin Holt, Martin J. Hornyak, Paula Hyde, Tusse Sidenius Jensen, Sandra Jones, Anna Kayes, Kirsi Korpiaho, Tracy Lamping, Tony Lingham, Enrico Maria Piras, Sallyanne Miller, Amar Mistry, Dale Murray, Jean Neumann, Barbara Poggio, Keijo Rasanen, Peter Reason, Michael Reynolds, Bente Rugaard Thorsen, Burkard Sievers, Stephen Smith, Sari Stenfors, Antonio Strati, Elaine Swan, Jane Thompson, Richard Thorpe, Kiran Trehan, Russ Vince, Jane Rohde Voight, Tony Watson, and Ann Welsh.