Dave’s Whiteboard

Thanks to Jay Cross’s Internet Time Wiki, a link to a 1999 National Research Council report: How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School.

From the executive summary:

As a result of the accumulation of new kinds of information about human learning, views of how effective learning proceeds have shifted from the benefits of diligent drill and practice to focus on students’ understanding and application of knowledge…

Major sections of the report include:

• Learners and learning
  • How experts differ from novices
  • Learning and transfer
  • How children learn
  • Mind and brain
• Teachers and teaching
  • The design of learning environments
  • Effective teaching (examples from history, math, and science)
  • Teacher learning
  • Technology to support learning
• Future directions for the science of learning

The report is 8 years old. Sadly, I doubt much has happened to change one gloomy conclusion: “Much of what constitutes the typical approach to formal teacher professional development is antithetical to what promotes teacher learning.”

From The Washington Post today, an opinion from Patrick Welsh: A School That’s Too High on Gizmos.

Welsh teaches at T. C. Williams high school in Alexandria, Virginia. He’s concerned about what a former school administrator calls technolust — the tendency (as Welsh sees it) for the school to apply technology for technology’s sake.

He mentions a $495 device called a school pad, which allows a teacher anywhere in a classroom to underline an image projected by the room’s LCD. This pad reminded one teacher of “the Magna Doodle pads we had as kids.”

Welsh talks about other technological problems — student laptops that can’t connect to the school’s wireless network, for example.

I suspect there’s a midpoint between technolust and teacher inertia. And I wonder whether Welsh or his colleagues are exploring ways to harness blogs, wikis, or other collaborative tools to foster learning. I think I’ll drop him a line and ask.

Although he wrote about it last month, I didn’t see Dick Carlson’s highlighting of a virtual hip replacement operation until today.

It’s one of many resources at Edheads, which looks to be a real asset for teachers.  I dove right into the Flash simulation.  It starts a bit leisurely, but then, I’m not in the target audience of 7th through 12th graders.

At first I thought the interactions were a bit obvious, and when I tried making my incisions in the wrong place, nothing bad happened to the patient.  But putting the lesson in context — demonstrating for children how hips get replaced — I thought it did a solid job.  Make the incision, stop the bleeding, retract the muscles, all using believable animation which avoids the overrich detail you’d have with video of actual surgery.

And avoids the expense, too…

Created by Michael Wesch and a couple hundred students at Kansas State.

Speaks pretty well for itself:

An online double play (Stephen Downes to Graham Wegner to Konrad Glogowski) took me to a thoughtful post on creating genuine learning experiences.

I particularly noted Glogowski’s striving to balance the demands of his job. At one point he says, “We need to move beyond the traditional approach of ‘pick the tools, add students, and stir.’” The next sentence: “My curriculum is still to a large extent dominated by units, lessons, assignments….”

He offers a “work in progress,” his five-stage process for creating learning experiences. (Click the image to view a larger version.)

Chart by Konrad Glogowski. Used here under a Creative Commons license.

As I read the post and the chart, I immediately thought of comments in the August/September issue of Scientific American Mind. Mark A. W. Andrews wrote about satisfaction:

In your question you hint at a distinction between pleasure and satisfaction. In fact, MRI brain scans have provided evidence that there is indeed a significant difference between these feelings. Pleasure and happiness are passive emotions that happen to us as the result of outside stimuli. Satisfaction, on the other hand, involves an active pursuit — it is the emotional reward we get after adapting to a new situation or solving a novel problem.

Glogowski’s work with his students, it seems to me, will greatly increase their satisfaction with their ability to learn.