All life is problem solving. Karl Popper, 1991
The basic idea of the CROP web site is to provide ideas and tools to better discover (find and share), think about (reframe, refine) and solve problems.
To better follow this process means learning more about digital technologies and the emerging strategic thinking model that undergirds the global idea processor commonly known as the World Wide Web. CROP, or eCROP, which stands for Communities Resolving Our Problems, is one way to make this model visible. Within this model, the term community refers to any group of 2 or more.
Why? Relentless and accelerating change in world culture (Friedman, 2007; Gleick, 2000; Toffler, 1970) and growing knowledge of our limited capacity to predict (Houghton, 1989; Smith, 2000) requires equally relentless pursuit of ideas and systems that can address our problems and questions even faster than they emerge. This three stage conceptual model frames the three main branches at the top of the CROP web pages. This model aids two audiences that seek to spell out and solve problems, individuals and communities. CROP's design also plans for an integration of school-based and work-based learning communities. To support this integration, this performance-support system pulls together a wide range of previous telecomputer applications. CROP also serves as a model for the development of similar but more specialized web problem processors which could be designed for a wide range of disciplines. Through problem processing we reflectively teach ourselves and others. CROP is a new kind of application, a web based problem processor. So, use this web site to help solve any problems, including your problems and those of your community.
The Practice of CROP
Understanding CROP, is a brief summary of the basic idea of behind CROP as a personal, classroom and community problem solving model.
A Map of the CROP Site , a single web page with all the major CROP branches.
Education and Training for CROPSuch a problem based line of thought that connects real world knowledge with intellectual growth has long been pursued by educators (Kliebard, 1999) and researchers (Strand el al, 2003; National CBR; PolicyOptions). Those interested in entrepreneurship and the health and economic growth of businesses pursue a similar agenda. The information age has accelerated this reassessment of learning and teaching as central cultural goals. This web site pursues educational and community reform and innovation through a focus on a goal important to every area of study and life, problem processing. The acts of finding, reframing and solving problems are at the heart of economic and cultural growth in the 21st century, and therefore should be at the heart of the teaching and learning process as well.
| Because the pace of societal change shows no signs of slackening, citizens of the 21st century must become adept problem solvers, able to wrestle with ill-defined problems and win. Problem-solving ability is the cognitive passport of the future (Martinez, 1998). |
Problem solving provides a meaningful and useful context through which CROP integrates a number of socially important agendas: preservice teacher reform, educational leadership, authentic learning, technology skills, information literacy, community building, school-parent-community building, university research that is community-based and business entrepreneurship. This site provides considerable support and guidance for increasing problem solving skills with new technologies and further integrating legacy or older technologies. But solving any given problem is just part of a larger model for problem processing. The CROP site also seeks to find and provide the right amount of support for not only solving problems but in discovering and refining the problem itself.
The CROP (Communities Resolving Our Problems) design is a system for processing problems. In concept, it is a general model for problem processing from K-12 into adulthood. It makes a clear distinction between problem processing and problem solving. Problem solving is just one sub-part of this larger problem process. The term community applies to a community of one (the community of interacting thoughts in one's own head) and to the communities of larger numbers of interacting people (within a classroom, work team, or state or nation, etc.). At one level, the CROP model works well as a personal problem solving system or model. At another level, it becomes group based, inviting collections of problem solvers to work together. CROP activities integrate problem processing with current school and community resources. This site also provides models of transition technologies, a migration path from no computer to one tele-computer (computer with Internet connection) to settings with more and more telecomputer resources. The links in the CROP model at the top of this page integrate three major features of a problem solving community: people; perspective; and process. They parallel Popper's 3 stage model for knowledge making (Firestone, 2004). These three elements can also be expressed as problem finding or sharing, framing and solving.
At this site, these features at the top of each page are labeled and expanded via the graph on the right:
Given the general problem, what questions can be answered? This branch leads to support to help build good questions or refine them. Conceptually I think of this as meta-analysis. There are many ways to attempt to solve a problem and each form of the question is a different approach. Visually I imagine a fire tower far above the tree line that provides perspective on the overall condition of the forest and provides a place to make decisions on the nature of the smoke or fire that has been seen and on how to approach the problem.The conceptual and operational skills of SUP, THINK, and LEAP form the foundations for what Professor Florida (2002) estimates are the key skills of the some 38 million workers in the United States of America that make up its rising creative class, "roughly 30 percent of the entire U.S. workforce". Each of these three major topics contains several important sub-features.
A key part of the CROP model involves finding, collecting and sharing real and Still Unsolved Problems (SUP) and sharing contributions to their solution. Several models for stimulating problem discovery and awareness are provided. However, the act of noticing and making the nature of a problem clear is the most difficult and yet rewarding part of problem processing. Further, it is the philosophy of the CROP site that the term problem means the same thing as the term opportunity.
The willingness to face-up-to or look for problems/opportunities is as much a challenge of attitude and spirit as it is one of knowing process and technique. One such attitude that teachers must assist is risk taking. To take an interest in something is to expose and reveal some aspect of yourself. An accompanying attitude is caring. It is very difficult to notice a problem or see it as an opportunity in an area about which you are bored or have no feeling.
Once a sufficient level of caring has been achieved, it is difficult to suppress noticing and sharing problems. When learners discover and create a resolution to the problem themselves based on their teacher's training, this is a very empowering moment for both learners and teachers (Dewey, 1907; Dewey, 1934; Jonassen, Peck & Wilson, 1999). Such moments provide the sustaining energy that enables learners to continue to take the risks necessary to progress (Outward Bound, 1998; Rugen, 1998; Richardson, 1994). Such moments also provide the sustaining energy to keep a teacher teaching. This activity is one of the critical elements of the creative process which also brings enthusiasm to workers and employees at many levels of economic activity (Florida, 2002). It is this vital activity that is most often removed from learning and teaching situations. There also is an overwhelming and often conceded desire for teaching and learning to begin with a problem, not with its discovery. To skip discovery is an intuitive and seemingly time-saving simplification, but if continued without relief it ultimately becomes a life-force suppressing activity. To build the capacity to discover problems is to build the capacity to continue to resolve them (Holt, 1981; Miller, 1998).
Once you have the vision to notice problems, we become aware that we are practically swimming in them. Problems might come from neighborhoods, from educators and their classrooms, from businesses and government and private agencies.
The Internet has its own special model for sharing problems. The Internet stores answers in thousands of text files called FAQ for Frequently Asked Questions. This process has a fundamental flaw. The FAQ files list the trivia of the Internet, that is the easier or known answers to basic problems. Buried in email-archives are the unanswered or partially answered questions that its email conferences cannot resolve. To counter the natural shortcoming of the FAQ process, the CROP project adds the concept of SUP, collections of Still Unsolved Problems. The CROP model also seeks to provide a centralized database through which participants trade and share questions and responses. Though a specialized CROP question database has been provided in the past, it was killed in a denial of service attack, an overwhelming stream of messages from some unknown hacker, and the database shut down. Phoenix like, it will rise again stronger but those resources have not yet been found. Fortunately, a number of other question-response systems now exist that can be used.
CROP works to raise the negative perception of problems to their positive perception as opportunities. This long standing business perception is also essential to economic and community development in the information age. Community development of opportunities is also a social skill. The SUP database is not only a database of questions and responses, but a database of email addresses of those individuals interested in certain questions. The database then provides a mechanism for setting up face-to-face meetings through which de-voicing (Locke, 1998) is avoided and deeper and more significant relationships are built.
It is a goal of the CROP project to provide an SUP database for each community's questions. As the CROP model is extended to many locations, each database of individual and community problems will feed a master database that will someday contain millions of questions and problems.
To ask a question is to identify a problem. To ask a better question is to better define the problem. One key component of problem solving is the ability to build or ask questions and then refine them. Time and again studies have shown that question asking skills are often weak, that good models are available for higher order questions, and that instruction has been too inadequate in this area. Higher quality solutions must begin with higher quality statements of the problem. CROP links to many web pages that address such needs. With knowledge and the rate of change doubling at ever faster rates, learners and teachers must become connoisseurs of authentic questions. Authentic higher-order questions steer our instruction clear of the trivial pursuit of facts. Real problems put learning and teaching in context.
Sometimes problems fit patterns that have been used to solve problems elsewhere, even in different fields of study. Examining the study of patterns yields many useful approaches (Alexander, 1979; Cunningham, 2005). Finding and applying those patterns is also part of the problem framing phase.
The third key part is a unified model for moving from problem discovery to problem solving. The LEAP (Look, Evoke, Assess, Perform) model is a synthesis of many problem solving models.
At the Look stage, the learner is seeking and receiving information, which may come from their own directed inquiry or direct scripted instruction from a teacher. Either approach can be heavily supported by networked computers. The CROP site provides links to a vast set of tools for searching and advice on strategic approaches for doing so.
At the Evoke stage, the learner must create or compose a response using something. A computer provides more options, from word processing to video editing, for supporting such invention than any single technology in the history of mankind. The CROP site provides an extensive list of such tools and tutorials on how to use many of them.
At the Assess stage, the learner needs feedback about the progress of their creations and projects. Computers provide some automated feedback tools such as spell checkers, but more importantly they provide fast access to communities of others with interest in a learner's creations using email, chat and other tools.
At the Publish stage, the learner needs to share finished activity, creations and projects and once again hear from a larger community. Computers provide the world's fastest delivery and biggest arena for sharing completed activity, whether the creation is a short essay, or pictures, or an oration or a video or more. A table shows how LEAP integrates many problem solving models used across many subject or content areas. The table also provides conceptual integration with many tools of the information age. Further, this table highlights the balance between human and computer strengths and weaknesses. Whatever terms we use, successful learners, professors, designers and leaders spend an appropriate amount of time at each stage of the LEAP model. Web pages provide numerous branches to support many aspects of each stage. These procedures in this table for solving problems are as useful to the K-12 community as they are to the community of adults that surround our schools.
CROP is operational yet under continual development and change. If you would like to share other ideas and models for communities of problems solvers, please send me email at the Page author address below.
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| Communities Resolving Our Problems: the basic idea | ||
| [SUP: Problem Finding] | [THINK: Problem Framing] | [LEAP: Problem Solving] |
Questions are the seeds of solutions. Robert S. Houghton