Misery is a great instructor
Delphonse's new approach to teaching typing is "revolutionary"

By PATRICIA DONOVAN
News Services Editor

In 1995, Joseph B. Delphonse, a Haitian-born doctoral student at UB, developed a revolutionary approach to typing instruction that cut learning time in half and produced an accuracy rate of 98 percent.

The success of his patented learning method, called "conceptual effects," has been born out by the statistical results of field studies (see http://www.joebis.com/faq.htm).

The Conceptual Effects Typing Method (CETM), an application of "conceptual effects," first was used by Delphonse in 1995 to teach typing to students in several Buffalo-area post-secondary schools. To do so, he employed a software package developed by Simon and Schuster Interactive, a division of Viacom, Inc.

The results convinced Simon and Schuster to work with Delphonse to produce and market a 1998 CD-ROM typing tutorial based on CETM that now is used in schools worldwide.

Delphonse is about to market an advanced version of the tutorial through his own company, JoeBis (his middle name is Bismarc). It soon will be on the market under a new name, to be announced later this year. He also is negotiating with MIT and other institutions to expand his research in learning methodology.

Delphonse says that since the conceptual effects learning method already has proven to be an extremely powerful instructional tool for children and adults who know nothing of the typing keyboard, he expects it to be equally powerful in teaching musical instrumentation, which calls for the same kind of neurolinguistic digital training.

It is likely to help students learn the piano keyboard, for instance, not only accurately, but in record time, an experience different from his childhood teachers' tortured attempts to teach Delphonse to play an instrument.

The spur for Delphonse's work was his experience as a schoolboy in Haiti, where he was force-fed different academic subjects, including musical instrumentation, by instructors who employed standard teaching methods with little success.

"I'd like to write a book about that aspect of my life," he laughs. "The experience was so miserable that I knew intuitively that there must be a faster and more enjoyable way to learn."

Later, he became proficient on several musical instruments and his understanding of how and why he was able to learn easily what he could not learn in school led him to pay more attention to the learning processes involved and to consider applying conceptual effects to learning basic skills.

"The purpose of conceptual effects is not to develop speed for speed's sake," Delphonse says. "The idea is that once basic skills are learned, students are able to artfully apply them to their writing or to the interpretation and performance of music. That's the purpose for which we learn those skills in the first place."

He explains the conceptual effects method differs from conventional teaching/learning methods in that it derives from an understanding of the architecture of knowledge and the nature of human learning. It involves processes of which most students are completely unaware but that are at the heart of why and how we learn.

"Cognitive scientists would call these processes 'subsets of metacognition,' 'cognitive processing,' 'contextual-regulation' or 'contextual-rule thinking,'" he says, "but they can be more easily understood by a lay audience as 'muscle memory,' 'associational acquisition, 'discrimination,' 'motor coordination' and so on."

He first applied his understanding of these processes to his teaching in 1995 while pursuing a doctorate in communication with an interdisciplinary track in cognitive science.

It began, Delphonse says, with considered examination of the cognitive process involved in typing a key. This information was used by him to assess the process by which an individual becomes a proficient typist. From this understanding came his "conceptual effects" and CETM, which led to the 1998 marketing arrangement with Simon and Schuster Interactive.

Using this method, he explains, as a student learns he or she develops a distinct neurolinguistic connection for every aspect of the operation-a cognitive relationship between learning elements of which he is not necessarily conscious.

The traditional method of typing instruction, he explains, trains the mind to type specific words and to remember the keys associated with commonly used diphthongs, vowel and letter groups: "t-h-e," for instance, or "i-n-g," "d-i-s," "o-t," "o-w."

CETM instead uses word forms that are not actually words to drill each finger relentlessly until it not only "knows" the location of every letter and symbol for which it is "responsible" on the keyboard, but knows how each of these keys relate to one another spatially.

By repeatedly typing these "words," he says, students recall the keys assigned to a particular finger, make accurate judgments about their location, form mental images of the keys' positions relative to one another and then visualize how far to extend or not to extend each finger on the keyboard. It becomes an automatic process, much less prone to error than the traditional method.

Conceptual effects is just one of the novel approaches to problem solving to come out of studies in cognitive science, an interdisciplinary field in which many disciplines are informed by one another's principles and methodologies. Those disciplines, from psychology, education and brain science to linguistics and philosophy, have thus far produced an astonishing array of new discoveries over the last 20 years.

CETM, for instance, reflects not only Delphonse's study of communication and philosophy, but of neural physiology, statistical mechanics, computer science and other fields of inquiry that constitute the basis for his interdisciplinary studies.

He says the principles of the conceptual effects learning method are based in a specific set of attitudes and values toward life, nature and society that Delphonse says have roots in Asian and Western philosophical thought. In developing the process, he says he focused on both analytic philosophy-the logical study of concepts and synthetic philosophy-and a unified philosophical system based on arrangements of concepts.