The Constructive Alignment of Educational Technology and Cognitive Neuroscience
Carnegie Horton – session chair
William Kennedy - Michigan Technological University
- Learning means acquiring new information
- Memory means retaining it so that it can be used
- Questions if we are getting the best students in college if they get in based on reading and writing. Some good students don’t necessarily perform to what we measure.
- The #1 cause of high school dropout is sheer boredom (Gates HS study)
- Digital natives are forced into analog world of digital immigrants
- Students immerse themselves in digitally mediated world outside of class
- Lectures are “excruciatingly slow, repetitious, irrelevant, and unbelievably one-sided affairs.”
- “Why not try a scientific approach to education?” Carl Wieman
- Ran through a top ten tips of Learning and Memory textbook
- Probed each point to see if there are ways to use tech to facilitate better memory
- Getting and maintaining attention: video, very short podcast, webquest
- Encouraging associations with existing ideas: ask if they can relate info to former events, pretest
- Using multimedia: voice feedback on assignments
- Asks students to write for him every night, information imprints more that way
- More has been learned about the brain in the last 30 yrs than in the whole of human history; we’re operating under an old understanding of the brain.
- Brain is created through experience. We need to think of ourselves as architects of that experience.
- Recommends The Art of Changing the Brain is excellent. I can verify this. Suggested, also: Memory: From Mind to Molecules, The Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are, On Intelligence, and Learner-Centered Teaching
- Said that we teach undergraduates differently than graduates, if we brought undergrads through the process we put graduate students through, they’d live up to those expectations.
Great session!
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Comments 2
The picture shows two people taking notes while a presenter talks over a bulleted PowerPoint. That seems ironic to me since he was apparently talking about how irrelevant lectures are. You said that some presenters used clickers, and that some sessions were only 15 minutes long. Besides that, was there evidence that presenters were themselves employing some of these new techniques to engage you? Just wondering, since this was a conference about new teaching techniques.
Posted 11 Aug 2008 at 10:00 am ¶Hey Carol, this photo was taken as the speaker gave an overview in preparation for collaborative work. That being said, plenty of presenters (us included for this conference) gave lectures. This is pretty standard for education conferences in my experiences.
Most people who are in academia excelled in a traditional-lecture based environment. They wouldn’t have gone on to grad school if they didn’t. But then, as we teach, we realize that a majority of students aren’t like us, and most don’t pay attention to the lecture-style format. So, perhaps ironically, a lot of education presentations are given in lecture format to best reach the audience, while the topic might be about using newer methods. Some speakers, like the one above, lecture enough to get the (more traditional) audience on board, but then move in to a modeling mode, demonstrating newer methods to make their point. However, I’ve seen a lot of more traditional faculty get very frustrated in these sessions, so it’s kindof a gamble.
An interesting issue, though!
Posted 11 Aug 2008 at 2:22 pm ¶Post a Comment