As we get ready to start this program in earnest, I am very excited to learn. This group of students represents a wide variety of ideas and experiences, and beyond what I hope to learn from the JHU faculty and the readings we do, I am even more excited about what I will learn from others who are on this journey with me. By the end of the program I hope to have a more realistic picture of what we really know now about the brain and learning. What is real knowledge? What is conjecture and/or wishful thinking? And as we plow into the next decade of what I expect will be exciting research, what questions are getting the most attention and why?
I have enjoyed the learning activities in the orientation. The synchronous learning experiences – real-time classes – are a new experience and will add to the learning. I am especially excited about getting to know members of a small team and collaborating with them. To be successful, I’ll use many of the ideas mentioned in our live session. Checking the weekly syllabus early will be important, and planning ahead so that needed time is set aside for assignments. Taking the time to reflect – the blog will be great for this – will also be critical to make learning personal and more lasting.
I will probably need support from team-mates to broaden my perspectives on readings. I realize that I bring biases based on my experiences and beliefs. I look forward to changing my mind and reaching deeper understanding. On a much smaller front, I expect I may also reminders with APA. I will freely admit that I tend to value ideas and clear, interesting communication more than following specific stylistic conventions. I do know why they are important, however…like my students, sometimes I just get annoyed with what I think of as “little stuff,” like putting commas in or making sure the period is inside or outside the parentheses. To compile the potential problem, as a journalist/writer I absorbed and used AP conventions for so long some of those habits are hard to break. Thankfully I did okay on the APA pretest, but when rushed, I may need to take extra time to use the conventions precisely.
It seems that you have taken away a lot from this online learning orientation course. I think you are well on your way to being a successful online learner. You are right. It is a great group of cohort members who bring a tremendous amount of knowledge and experience with them into these courses. You will truly benefit from working and learning with them. Good Luck!
ReplyDeleteHi Dawn,
ReplyDeleteGood thinking! You are really mulling over the concepts and ideas being presented in the course and by your team mates. You have zeroed in on some key concepts that are very relevant to educators.
For example, Perception – what does the child perceive? What do I/you perceive? How is a percept coded in their/our brain?
I had a very big paradigm shift on perception recently. For simplicity’s sake let’s get real basic…what does my brain “see” when it looks at a tree? What my brain’s visual systems actually “sees” is an upside down very incomplete (full of holes) image of the tree. Scientists call the real object in space the distal stimulus. The (for lack of better words) neural circuit within the visual system that “stand” for the tree is called the proximal stimulus as if the brains conjures up an approximation of the tree.
The cortex compares what it is seeing in the present to similar objects it has seen in the past. The brain then makes an understanding based on that comparison and says “Yes, that is a tree.” The brain uses its past knowledge to fill in the holes and “see” the tree.
The thinking process ( here the cortex is contributing) the brain uses to perceive something (to correctly grasp what it is) is comparison.
Now here where my paradigm shifted. Remembering EVERYTHING that happens in the brain is an electoral-chemical event. Seeing a tree is an electrical-chemical event and solving E=mc2 is an electrical-chemical event. The process for seeing/perceiving trees and seeing/perceiving anything else is the same.
Wow=we This has huge implications for me as a teacher. The old saying that teachers need to connect new information to old information is so true. But what does it mean…it means we have to help our students make meaning through comparison, analogy, metaphor. We teachers must provide or help our students find the right metaphors so that they can make meaning of all the distal stimuli they encounter in school.
How do I subtract? What is the water cycle? What did the author mean? Good teachers are good metaphor makers.
Hmmm…does this make any sense to you???
BTW here is a great video that explains perception. When you have a few momants (ha-ha) you might want to check it out. It helped me "see" things in a new way...ha ha forgive the pun.
http://www.learner.org/discoveringpsychology/07/e07expand.html