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1. what did you find 1.1. interesting about the article? I think the most interesting part of this article is the topic of “more information is better”. The www has given access to unlimited information for use in education. This has been integrated into education but has not had the effect most predicted. The current use model for the www and education is to increase the data rate in which students received information. However, this has backfired to some degree because students can only digest information at a finite rate. To add to the confusion, students digest information at different speeds and in different learning style. This has caused confusion to educations and they are trying to figure out why students aren’t learning more because we have access to unlimited information. In fact, the problem is that there is too much information and students are often overloaded. The problem is not “how do we get more information” but rather “how do we get important information to sink in”. This in itself is a can of worms because “important” in an subjective term. 1.2. not interesting about the article? The uninteresting part of this article was that it dealt more with the explanation of the problem and did not offer many solutions to the problem. 2. what do you consider the main message of the article? The main message of the article was that we live in a world that changes at a unprecedented rate. This means that contributors to society much continually educate themselves in order to remain productive. We can no longer follow the life plan of “go to school and then go to work”. The problem that we now face is that current education plans breakdown when trying to educate the workforce. People working full-time jobs are not willing to drive to campus for a 3 hour course in which 90% of the content is irrelevant to their situation. Technology can aid in this problem, but is not there yet. 3. click on one of the words in blue and see what happens? It takes you to a Glossary of Terms. 3.1. is this feature useful? Very 3.2. in which other situations have you encountered this feature? This is a hyperlink technology common to most websites. 4. global learning theories and approaches 4.1. do you know any of the people mentioned in the diagrams: 4.1.1. Skinner - No 4.1.2. Piaget - No 4.1.3. Papert - No 4.1.4. Illich - No 4.1.5. Vygotsky - No 4.1.6. Dewey - No 4.2. select one of the six - Papert 4.2.1. in case you know something–write a paragraph what she/he has contributed to a deeper understanding of learning? – N/A 4.2.2. in case you do not know something, find out something about her/him – write a paragraph what she/he has contributed to a deeper understanding of learning? Seymour Papert was a professor at MIT that focused his research on using computers as an integrated learning tool for children. His thought was that using computers would spark creativity. What was unique about his ideas was that he was working on them during the 60’s when computers were very expensive and feature-primitive by today’s standards. Today Papert lives in Maine where he works at his self-founded “Learning Barn”. The mission is to apply multi-media technology to education. 5. identify one website (and mention the URL) which you consider interesting and relevant for "learning." Write a one paragraph justification! I feel that http://www.webster.com/ is one of the most useful and practical websites in existence for the purpose of education. When learning new concepts, over 50% of the learning comes in the form of terminology. The language barrier itself can prevent the main message from getting across. In the past, the way to break though this barrier was to ‘look up’ unknown words in a dictionary or thesaurus. Because this was time consuming, most people did not do this and a lot of content was lost. Now, words can quickly and easily be looked up at this website. This takes the time burden out of the process and decreases the language barrier effect. I find myself using this website very often when reading these papers. |
