An Interview with Linda Brody: About Cogito

Michael F. Shaughnessy Michael F. Shaughnessy
Senior Columnist EdNews.org
Eastern New Mexico University

Linda Brody is Director of the Julian C. Stanley Study of Exceptional Talent (SET) at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth, in Baltimore, Maryland. She is currently co-directing the development of Cogito.org with Dr. Carol Blackburn. In this interview, she discusses her current work and this exemplary web site!

1) I recently encountered a web site entitled "Cogito". What are you trying to accomplish with this web site?

Cogito.org's mission is to create a virtual home for exceptional young people who have strong interests and abilities in mathematics and science. It is intended to not only enhance students' knowledge and understanding of science and math, but encourage them to think about and question the biological and physical world in which they live. Most importantly, Cogito.org's members can connect with peers, mentors, and role models from around the world, individuals who can help them achieve their goals. We hope Cogito.org will inspire its users to become the innovators, visionaries, and problem-solvers of the future.

2) Who started it and how is it funded?

The development of Cogito.org was funded by a 3-year grant from the John Templeton Foundation. The grant will end this summer, and Cogito.org very much needs support from others to sustain and expand it. We hope that individuals, corporations, and foundations will be eager to support its mission and provide ongoing financial support for Cogito.org.

The initial inspiration for Cogito.org came from the John Templeton Foundation whose staff wanted to provide a way for brilliant young people, regardless of where they live, to connect with opportunities to develop their talents in science and math. CTY was eager to become involved in this endeavor, as Cogito.org's goals match the mission of CTY in so many ways. CTY has a long history of developing programs and opportunities that offer rigorous academic content.

We recognize the importance of providing students with access to intellectual peers, role models, and mentors, and of encouraging intellectual discourse. These elements are all included in Cogito.org. With the power of the internet, boundaries of time and place break down, making Cogito.org a particularly exciting opportunity.

3) Who is it geared toward? Kids, parents, teachers? Or all of the
above?

Cogito.org is both a public Web site and an online community for members.

All of the science news, staff-written articles and interviews, links to other Web resources, and searchable database of programmatic opportunities are available on Cogito's public Web site. We hope it will be widely accessed by students in the 8-18 age range, and that they will be inspired by reading about the accomplishments of young scientists to achieve at high levels themselves. We also hope that many of these students will consider pursuing careers in mathematical or scientific fields, thus helping to increase the pipeline into STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) careers, which is a concern of many policy makers and educators today. While Cogito.org is primarily for students, it can also be a valuable resource for parents and educators. We would like to see it incorporated into classroom use for reading about science news, while parents should find the database of program offerings helpful as they look for resources for their children.

A smaller group of students is being invited to join as members, and these students have access to the more interactive parts of Cogito.org, especially the discussion forums. The initial members are being invited by CTY and the partner organizations that contributed to the development of Cogito.org. The list of affiliates who will nominate students is expanding to many other organizations that serve gifted students, and trusted mentors can also recommend students for membership in Cogito.org.

Cogito.org is intended to be international in its reach and scope. We are inviting student members from around the world and will be looking for help to add educational programs and opportunities located in countries outside of the United States to the Web site.

4) This seems to be a great resource for kids. What other resources do you link to?

Cogito.org links to a wide variety of other Web sites, tools for learning, and programs. Its database is one of its most valuable components.

5) Do you espouse any particular view? Acceleration; Enrichment?

Julian Stanley coined the term "smorgasbord of educational opportunities" with the recommendation that gifted students should be able to choose from a wide variety of options, including those that might be considered acceleration or enrichment, to select those most appropriate for their own individual needs. Cogito.org supports this approach. We strongly endorse the concept that students with advanced abilities should be able to access course work and content at a level and pace appropriate for their abilities (acceleration).

But we also value many rigorous competitions, summer programs, and extracurricular activities (enrichment). All of these opportunities are included on Cogito.org, and students are encouraged to consider them.

6) Math and Science seem to be the key areas of focus. Who determined these to be the main areas?

The Templeton Foundation was interested in having the site focus on math and science, and we share their concern about the need to stimulate gifted students' interests in STEM career fields. In particular, there is huge value in creating a community of future scientists, with access to peers, role models, and mentors, as early as possible to support their achievement and goals.

However, we interpret science and math on the site very broadly, and Cogito.org has channels for "science and the arts" and "science and society," for example, as well as many interdisciplinary topics. In addition to inviting students who have already excelled in math and science to join Cogito.org, we have invited some students with exceptional verbal talents to join the site, believing that their scientific interests and literacy are likely to be enhanced if they are exposed to exciting scientific content and discussions.

Regardless of whether Cogito users ultimately become scientists or mathematicians, or journalists or politicians, we know that a solid grounding in science, math, and technology will be essential for them to make important contributions to our increasingly technical society in the future.

7) I see that you have interviews with prominent scientists and
mathematicians. Do gifted kids seem to relate to these individuals well ?

Students benefit enormously from exposure to role models and mentors. In our work at CTY, we have found that it is particularly important for students, who might be aspiring to careers with which they have little exposure in their daily lives, to have access to people working in those fields. Cogito.org is still too young to be able to evaluate the effectiveness of the interview format, but students have been submitting questions for interviews and interacting with scientists in the forums, and we hope these features will become even more lively and provocative as the membership increases.

8) Are you the first web site designed specifically for gifted kids or
are there others?

There are other excellent Web sites that gifted students access for a variety of purposes, and Cogito.org links to them. However, we do not know of any that offers the combination of features that Cogito.org does. In addition, Cogito.org was developed with the cooperation of eight prominent organizations that serve gifted students: CTY at Johns Hopkins, CTD at Northwestern, TIP at Duke, the Belin-Blank Center at U. of Iowa, C-MITES at Carnegie Mellon, the Davidson Institute for Talent Development (DITD), the Center for Excellence in Education (CEE), and Science Service. This collaboration contributed to the comprehensiveness of the site and allowed us to reach a large initial pool of diverse users. This collaboration is now growing to include affiliated organizations that serve gifted students around the world, thus expanding the international reach of Cogito.org.

9) Could you provide the exact site so that our readers can visit and peruse your site?

The site is Cogito.org This provides access to the public site. For forum access, membership or affiliation is required.

9) What question have I neglected to ask?

You might be wondering about the name "Cogito." It is Latin for "I think," and is best known as part of one of the most famous maxims in intellectual history, Descartes' "Cogito, ergo sum," or "I think, therefore I am." Students helped to choose the name, and we want to emphasize that the site encourages students to think about and discuss scientific issues, not just be exposed to the content.

The ultimate success of Cogito.org will depend on many people committing time and effort toward keeping it going. We need the scientific community to lend their expertise, whether as interviewees, content specialists, or contributors. We need college and graduate students to share their experiences with their younger peers, to light the way for them as they go forward. We need volunteers in communities around the world, possibly parents, who will put local "happenings" on the site, whether it is a special museum exhibit, a science fair, or a prominent lecture. And we need educators looking for students to join and benefit from Cogito.org, especially those students who aren't in talent searches, or gifted classes, but who exhibit a spark that suggests a possible future Einstein. We hope the gifted community and the scientific community will embrace Cogito.org as their own resource to use in their work with talented students.

Published February 15, 2007

Thursday

February 15th, 2007

Michael F. Shaughnessy

Senior Columnist EducationNews.org

Education News

An Interview with Linda Brody: About Cogito

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