Thoughts on Learning Theories and Instruction

Now that my first online course is coming to a close, I have thought about what technology means to me personally, and what learning means to me. I wish above all that I could inspire my students to think of learning as I do.

I am not as purely constructivist as I imagined myself to be. I love to make connections, of course. In fact, at my son’s Back to School Night this week, his Computer I teacher shared a video which covered technological evolution and its impact on society. The video was probably less than five minutes long, but it relates to some of what this course has made me think about. Two things stood out for me in light of this course: the amount of original production and information that was published on the web between 2006 and 2008 exceeded the amount of recorded information for the last 5,000 years of civilization, and the students of 2006 are being asked to solve problems in technologically related careers that did not exist when they were students (and the video is already two years old). It made me think about the difference between how people are typically educated, and what is actually required to navigate society and find a ‘good’ job. We have to teach them the up and coming technology, but also how to problem solve. And it’s sometimes difficult to motivate students to solve problems whether or not they relate to their lives because so many of the students in my experience refuse to think for themselves when they can connect to the web and find readymade answers on Ask.com and the like. I still don’t have answers for some of my questions – such as how can we possibly motivate a person who desires to “fit in with” a culture where participating in any academic area is practically taboo? Is the relative isolation of the online environment the best option for these students? Or is the behavior so ingrained(habit) that no amount of incentive can overcome the conditioning (until perhaps they experience a lifestyle change and become adept adult learners)?

These questions nag at me because I am at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy: I consider myself to be a thinker and a writer and a teacher (and so a learner), therefore, I learn. I learn actively. I search out new information in a dozen ways – watching Chasing Mummies on television this evening, listening occasionally to MPR (though I rarely have five minutes of quiet to engage in those reports), reviewing math with my Jr. High Student off of (gulp) paper, and finding healthier no-salt and no-cholesterol recipes online for an ailing relative online. I also see connections between the food we eat and health and how the Ancient Egyptians were also quite aware of the effects of various foods and herbs. It’s fascinating. Learning is enjoyable. The door is wide open. This course has brought my own metacognition into working memory insofar as I am very aware of what I’m doing as I’m learning and integrating what I know with these new tidbits of information. Maybe it’s not that working memory is so freakishly long as it is that I’m pretty adept at organizing new schema and transferring between organizational methods. Whichever it is, I have been very aware this month of how ridiculously active my mind is even while watching television, and I see why some of my students in the past have been a little annoyed when I force them to analyze a media they are used to passively absorbing. Once those synapses form, it’s really hard to make them stop firing. Yet I wonder why anyone would want to stop them.

Understanding how learning occurs is interesting in so many ways as well. I think one striking realization for me was that learning on purpose is as much a behavior as it is a cognitive process of connections through a variety of experiences and social/environment lenses. Students with cognitive abilities sit in a social environment to construct new knowledge into meaningful learning. It’s all happening, and extremely complex, but successful learners make it a habit to learn. Last week, I asked my youngest daughter what she had done during her second day of school. She answered, “I don’t know.” When I asked her why she did not know, she told me, “Because I didn’t try to remember, so my brain just forgot it.” She’s only six, but she is already aware that it takes a conscious decision to learn. Based on the course and experiences as a learner and teacher (and partly on my insightful six-year-old’s revelation), I know that motivation is a huge factor in whether information ever finds a home in a person’s brain. A motivated learner will find a way to encode and learn to some extent; passive learners may or may not. Accommodating all learning styles is likely to help, but with the world changing so exponentially fast, I know I would perform a better service to give students the tools to solve problems, to make different styles of delivery work for them, than to cater to every changing preference. Giving students the tools, getting them to encode, is how we can make sure that they are able to successfully navigate the adult world.

Technology is an incredible tool to provide a variety of experiences and touch on several modalities in each lesson. I was surprised – and a little relieved – to see our readings take into account that the same technology can be as much an obstacle as a path. It’s easy to forget, sitting in that computer classroom at my son’s junior high school, that not every person has the kind of privileged access to technology as so many of us enjoy and take for granted. So seeing ways to help scaffold and support the less technologically savvy is well appreciated. Even as I’ve become much more comfortable in this online environment, I still feel like I have only touched the tip of the iceberg – there’s so much more out there to learn, and there’s going to be even more tomorrow.

I learned a lot about teaching theories in my teacher-prep program. Connectivism is new and, while I’m still not completely sold on the idea that it is a new stand-alone theory, it did make me think about how much technology is changing what we do and how we do it. In two years the world (only the world connected online) produced more information than the past 5,000 years. That says a lot, but more importantly – how can we possibly learn enough? It makes sense that some of our knowledge has to be stored away, like recipes in a cookbook, for those occasions when we need them. I have a vast repertoire of recipes, but only a few dozen are ingrained enough that I don’t have to stop and review my cookbook on occasion.

Specifically for my teaching career, I know that I will have to model more, expose students to more than one or two activity types to make sure information finds a home in their own varied schema. I am inspired to do more with experiential learning, and to continue with the constructivist approaches. This course has opened my eyes to the many ways in which students might need support as they deal with technology, and I really want to learn more about making online animations and interactive applications that will engage students – even if some of their motivation is from the novelty of the presentation. Introducing complicated reading with a cartoon-scenario would be a fun way to make students familiar with the plot of, for example Hamlet, instead of summaries – or having students make their own storyboard presentations where their talents could be published might get kids a little more excited about reading something that is practically in a foreign language to them. I want to make tutorials on how to do this for students. I want to incorporate blogs and wikis in my class; I want to make information as interesting and readily available to students outside of the classroom as inside. (I know I can be entertaining in person, but that does not always come across so well in text format). It’s exciting, and I feel fired up to continue learning!

In this bog, the last for my Learning Theories and Design Course at Walden U., I will be reflecting on my own learning styles, preferences, and the role technology plays in these. At the beginning of our course, we were asked to identify the type of learners we are, and I responded with the following:

“Having taken a number of those surveys and quizzes to determine my learning style, I have tons of evidence to support that I am an abstract thinker rely as much on creativity as knowledge to problem solve and produce. I can learn in all kinds of environments in multiple styles. At the same time, I have been forced to recognize that this is a freakish quality, and most people are less comfortable beginning with abstract conclusions (unless they have extremely practical knowledge of something similar). There is something powerful in the concrete.

I think I see general education as being both constructivist and cognitive. In fact, they both seem to have very similar assumptions that the brain must build on what it knows and observes. We relate new knowledge, or situate it physiologically, based on established knowledge and "mental schema."

Understanding and reviewing instructional theories will redefine and reinforce the ways I approach teaching and designing effective instruction for students.”

At the (almost) end of the course, we are asked to re-evaluate our responses based on what we have learned in the course:

• Now that you have a deeper understanding of the different learning theories and learning styles, how has your view on how you learn changed?
• What have you learned about the various learning theories and learning styles over the past weeks that can further explain your own personal learning preferences?
• What role does technology play in your learning (i.e., as a way to search for information, to record information, to create, etc.)?


I do not feel my understanding of the different learning theories has changed the way I view my own learning, but I am reminded (as I often remind my students) that the social aspect of those building blocks we use to construct our knowledge of the world is as important as ever, especially considering the way that technology is constantly streaming a more global culture into our lives. I still see the individual learner as the locus of learning per se, but the institution of education is also a preserver of social traditions and values.

Again, I know I am freakishly adept at learning in all manner of styles. Thankfully, the reading we did by Gilbert and Swanier (2008) made me feel a little less like an oddball since people's preferences appear to fluctuate. Generally, I prefer to do more individual activities, and I love reading just about everything I can lay my eyes on, but I also appreciate a good lecture or interview with or without any visual, and manipulatives or movement are usually at least entertaining, and I love the actual aesthetics of writing and drawing even though I find typing much more efficient. I tend to purposely relate information I learn to stuff I already know - which came in really handy when I was learning Spanish since so many words share similar roots like "edifice" and "edifico" - so the cognitivist/constructive theories still apply pretty well.

Technology is encompassing ever more of our lives - honesty, how far are we from implantable devices for which we can serve as the battery? - so the ways I use technology are changing. I appreciate the ability to quickly access a variety of information, store it, "write" or create (though I am fairly paper trained in terms of prewiritng, drafting, planning, etc. because no single screen can hold everything the way a desk of several papers can). Technology opens up an avenue for more individuals to take in and put out whatever they choose. There is an audience for everything and every audience has a leader.

I think the point of the learning theories is that, no matter the course or style of delivery, it is still the individual (the learner situated in a social environment, equipped with various dendrites and synapses) that is left with the task of interpretation, the meaning-making and value-attributing, as well as the decision of whether to do anything with these building blocks of information.

Connectivism

The idea for connectivism, to encode it my own way, would be that the nature of accessing knowledge has changed drastically with technological advancements so that now, instead of only trusting to indoctrinated experts/researchers and edited publications, we also access knowledge through a variety of instantly gratifying ways which include people (of varying and diasporic knowledge themselves), gadgets (of which Siemens seems to exclude traditional books, but that might be extremely judgmental me) and the internet/gadgets we use to access the web and all its dot numbers.

So how does this all work with what we've learned? This question has filled those hours of doing dishes and trying to fall asleep when the A/C decides it's had a hard day, too. It doesn't seem mutually exclusive with any theory in that it supports the structural building that contructivists support, the behavioristic (almost compulsively so) patterns of behavior that behaviorists might look into, and the bi-polar internal brain workings within a societal/communal environment of postmodernists and other -ists. These thoughts led me to the mind map below.

I focused only on the learning support network. The three most important groupings I could think of were People, Myself, and Technology. I realize that it might seem just a tad egocentric to put myself there, but I still, perhaps archaically, think that the learner (myself) is the most important part of the learning equation (and yes, I see that the learner is invested in all the limiting elements of a particular society or culture, but that's the background of the mindmap, not a separate resource. To quote one of my favorite teaching experts, I am the source, all these other things I use are my resources.)

People: I started out with experts because, when I'm learning in a formal way, I like to be able to have an expert - hence my willingness to pay tuition, right? That seemed obvious. Educators, myself included, rely on researchers and theorists and the publications of these groups. I also have learned and continue to enjoy learning from colleagues and peers when we are focusing specifically on educational matters. But then I thought about how often I talk to my colleagues, family and friends, students and others about these issues, and I learn a lot about other values. Getting to know the students and seeing how others are problem solving had taught me a lot. None so much as dealing with my own children at home about how every child is unique and how different generations (even a few years' difference) can change the way people think - or at least what they will relate to easily. Finally, I am an observer all the time, so I rely on my own observations and theories to problem solve and challenge my preconceived notions of life in general.

Technology is opening up to me. I've never been intimidated, but there have been times where I felt like something was brand new and students or colleagues had been using it for ever. There have also been areas of technology - blogging, for instance - where I kinda know about it but, because of something one of my closest friends refers to as "Tyranny of the Urgent," I needed some outside source to prompt me to fully investigate it. That said, the computer is probably the single most important technological source. It has this nifty internet that - much to some students' surprise, is not just for entertainment after all! There are thousands of resources such as blogs, wikis, wikipedia (I know, as a starting point only), databases, publications, history, humanity, etc. The TV, phone, and recording devices deserve credit here - I am such a Discovery Channel and History fan that they ought to pay me for PR.

The "thing" that matters here, though, is me. It's my experiences and my previous learning that allows me to connect this information in meaningful ways (and then re-present this encoded learning). It's my other, non-related knowledge from the History Channel or that Ursula LeGuin novel that allows me to make up metaphors and mnemonic devices and models (or borrow others') that allows me to retain information (and pass it along). It's me choosing to identify myself as a learner and taking time to reflect (as opposed to just zoning out in front of a sit com) that makes the information stick in my brain, related to lots of different little branches in the magic trees that are our brains - which I'm not sure fits with the connectivism theory. It's my own questions that motivate me to find more information, to learn more.

I'm not sure my network has changed the way I learn. It has changed at times the way I access new information, but the basics are still fundamental - I'm reading articles and people's opinions online as much as in books and magazines. I'm listening to web lectures as I listen to my friends and co-workers. I'm watching presentations online as I would watch my latest favorite serial documentary Chasing Mummies. I am even taking the time to reflect on this as I take time to reflect on the last novel I've read. I even caught The Simpsons this evening and enjoyed how the plot related to Orwell's 1984 and marveled at how MLK Jr's famous speech can relate to every kind of stereotyping when Lisa paralleled elements of the speech in her diatribe against stereotyping blondes - and all of you probably get all these references because the concepts of Big Brother and "I Have a Dream" and even the blond stereotype are ingrained in our culture. To take a longer view, I assume I began learning by merely observing and mimicking as all infants seem to do. At some point the habit of learning became ingrained, and all of this network has only added to a learning organization that was already there.

I enjoy the ease of access to information that the web offers. Accessing books online is convenient in a lot of ways (and much less expensive!) but I like that I can pick up our course text book to read at the park while the kids roam and I don't have to worry about things like the battery in a laptop dieing. As Jurassic as this probably makes me sound, my phone is for conversations and the occasional text or digital picture when I forget my camera. Instantly looking up something is not of much interest to me since I can set something on my back burner and get around to it later. There's usually something else I need to focus on in the now.

Which brings me to the next point for pondering: How do I get new knowledge when I have questions. How don't I? It is entirely dependent on the situation. I ask questions. I try to problem solve. I make a mental note and later refer to some resource whether digital or not. I have even been known, when faced with an especially difficult quandary, to sit myself down and write until an answer occurs to me, or call a friend to discuss - although, I probably wouldn't do this for the average math problem.

My personal support system does not refute the concept of connectivism as a phenomenon of modern civilization. Information is spread out between people and caches of all shapes and models. Our access to such information is ridiculously easy when compared to such access even 25 years ago. But. Connectivism moves the focus of learning from individual understanding in the interest of conceptualizing the complexity of knowledge. It's interesting, but a system-based and visualized knowledge doesn't really seem new to me - visualizing and re-visualizing is something we do anyway, we connect knowledge to other knowledge in internal schema anyway, the most complex systems we have are still typically understood a little bit at a time anyway. It's nice to have a name or -ism for it, I suppose.

Learning Mind Map

http://mywebspiration.com/view/494806a1679f

My Learning Network Resource Map outline

• People

• Family

• Colleagues

• Friends

• Sounding Boards and fellow learners

• Common Sense Gurus

• Experts

• Educators

• Producers of theories and discourse

• e.g. Vygotsky

• Authors and Content Producers

• e.g. Laureate Education, Inc., Dr. Jean Ormrod

• Also fiction like Ursula LeGuin and Terry Pratchett

• Researchers

• e.g. Piaget, Siemens

• Students (reflection)

• Seminars (temporary learning communities)

• e.g. CTAP on the Road, webinars, PD conferences like AVID

• Preservers and Agitators of a Common Culture/Environment

• Myself

• Experiences

• Loosing my first tooth

• Getting along with mom

• Dad's death

• Life...

• Previous Knowledge

• My Brain (that is conditioned and primed to learn, makes connections between prior knowledge and metaphors and models) and my "habits" that make me an expert learner:)

• Reflection

• Identitiy as a Learner

• Culture

• Conforming/preserving

• Resisting/critiqueing

• Technology

• Basic

• phones (connect to other people)

• emails

• TV/Movies

• e.g. documentaries, characterizing fictional accounts of life like Boston Public

• Cameras

• Computer

• Programs

• e.g. Adobe, Microsoft Word

• Content Producers

• Publishers

• e.g. Writer's Inc.

• Youtube, teacher tube, forum for experts and others to publish materials

• Internet

• Google!

• email, search engines, web 2.0

• Blogs, RSS Readers

• e.g. http://www.connectivism.ca/

• online courses

• e.g. Walden, Phoenix, Capella

• collaboration tools and sites like wikis

The Brain and Learning

This week has been fascinating in terms of learning how learning works from the inside. I found a really interesting site that posts news and video segments that center around the brain and learning that I thought might be interesting for my classmates: http://brainandlearning.blogspot.com/ The segment about how we are easily swayed to think alike is worth the few minutes to watch.

Shirelle Stadel (http://aaaclub-learningfromeachother.blogspot.com/) suggested two fantastic sites that I found useful as well: http://blog.cathy-moore.com/ and http://www.iddblog.org/?p=475. These sites offered practical applications for the interesting information we are learning. I suppose, to use this week's jargon, that the sites are helping me to encode the learning in a variety of ways to make retrieval easier.

Practicing, still not perfect

This is my very first blog - an assignment from an elearning course. I can see that I need a little more practice with this stuff. Fortunately, I had a gmail account already, and love Google just a little more. Here goes:

ELearning Curve Blog, I'll admit, seemed to be written for this assignment. I loved hte title, and the homepage has a graphic organizer for the learning theories and pedagogies we've learned this week. I was especially interested in the analysis of formal vs non-formal learning, and was impressed that Michael Hanley was looking at solutions to the problems presented instead of just harping on the inadequacies - as so many of the site I reviewed seemed to be doing.

After browsing for a LOT longer than I would have thought, I found a blog that was linked with EDSITE, a site I am familiar with when one of my colleagues let me use her computer and the page was still up. It has tons of info on the humanities (on practically ever subject I've ever cared to search) so a blog about it seemed a natural fit for me. 21st Century Educational Technology and Learning is also interested in social networking for teachers around the world to open up our collaborative powers. This site also had a link to ISTE, or International Society for Technology in Education so I also subscribed to their daily news feed for their reports on technology in the classroom. Along with the Daily Bell from NEA, I have plenty of reading to do!

I think the biggest challenge in the elearning atmosphere is going to be staying abreast of the changes in technology. These sites, I noticed, provide readers and subscribers with both philosophical opinions as well as updates on what is changing and developing. CTAP, or California Technology Assistance Project, has been a standby for me on some of the most user-friendly instruction in using technology in the classroom as well. It's not exactly one I had to research for this assignment, but I've always enjoyed their seminars and conferences.