The Eide Neurolearning Blog has an interesting post on autobiographical memory. It seems to me that the best way to tap its power from the perspective of online learning is through discovery learning adventure games. Check out, for example, this great little action maze that teaches emergency first aid best practices. It was created using a great (and inexpensive) authoring tool called Quandary. By embedding the learning content into a first-person narrative experience, you should be able to acivate autobiographical memory.
Tag: cognitive-science
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Great Blog on Neurolearning
Thanks to George Siemens for calling my attention to a great blog called Eide Neurolearning. Lots of good stuff here about how our brains work.
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Learning Objects Aren't Legos, Part II
In my last post, I agreed with Stephen Downes that we have to be careful not to take our analogies too literally and specifically pointed out flaws in the “learning-object-as-software-object” analogy. Sometimes the best way to make sure an analogy doesn’t get too deeply rooted is to counter it with another analogy that causes just enough cognitive dissonance to keep you from getting intellectually lazy. (The classic example of this is the light-as-a-particle/light-as-a-wave analogy pair.) I’m going to attempt to create that kind of duality by balancing my course-as-a-sentence-of-natural-language analogy with another one. (more…)
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Re-usable Learning Content Objects or Re-usable Learning Experience Objects?
Yesterday, Stephen Downes replied to my most recent post on educational pattern languages:
Michael Feldstein is on the right track, mostly, with his exploration of the applicability of pettern language to learning. In this brief item, he asks, “Can we deduce sort of generative grammar of educational experience that enables us to string together these building blocks into ‘sentences’ of educational experience that are complete in both the functional and the humanistic sense?” And I respond – where was it written that language must be composed of building blocks strung together?
The glib answer would be “Aspects of a Theory of Syntax, Noam Chomsky, 1967.” (I happen to live with a linguist, in addition to having taken more than a few linguistics courses myself.) But as I say, that would be the glib answer, because I’ve read enough of Stephen’s work to know that his position on learning objects is considerably more sophisticated than saying “Sorry, no such thing.” To be honest, I’m not 100% sure what Stephen’s objection is here, but I do have a suspicion, and it has to do with some ideas he laid out in his paper “Design Standards and Re-usability”.
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Outstanding (and Practical) Learning Styles Research Paper
This piece [PDF] from the Learning Research Centre is one of the finest educational research articles I have read in a long time. To begin with, their literature review of the research to-date is superb. They break down each major theoretical school with its strengths and weaknesses, as well as weaknesses in research and methodology. These guys really get the science and understand why it’s so hard to produce meaningful, reliable answers. To wit, here’s the first paragraph under the subhead in their conclusions section entitled “No clear implications for pedagogy:”
There are two separate problems here. First, learning style researchers do not speak with one voice; there is widespread disagreement about the advice that should be offered to teachers, tutors or managers. For instance, should the style of teaching be consonant with the style of learning or not? At present, there is no definitive answer to that question, because –and this brings us to the second problem– there is a dearth of rigorously controlled experiments and of longitudinal studies to test the claims of the main advocates. A move toward more controlled experiments, however, would entail a loss of ecological validity and of the opportunity to study complex learning in authentic, everyday educational settings.
In other words, one of the reasons that some of the central theoretical claims have not been tested is that, in order to do so, you have to isolate the variable you are testing in a controlled experiment. But a controlled experiment is not like a classroom, and we don’t know how stripping away the other variables impacts the holistic learning process.
Nevertheless, all is not lost. The authors do offer some some good suggestions about how existing research can be used to enhance education as well as how to go about deciding which research to use in what ways.
Hot stuff.
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Your Writing Style Should Influence Your Blog Layout
You’ll get even more mileage from Amy Gahran’s must-read series on the seven styles of blog posts if you consider it in conjunction with the site usability findings of the Eyetrack III project. For example, the study found that pages with large headline font sizes relative to the article text encourage scanning and discourage careful reading. So if you tend to do a lot of link or blurb posts, then large headlines probably serve your readers well. However, if you tend to write a fair percentage of longer posts, though, (assuming that you want people to actually read those posts), then you probably want to keep the headlines smaller and in line with the main text of the post. Also, long posts tend to pull the reader down the page more than short blurbs. So if you use a lot of short posts (or if you write long posts but only show a paragraph or two on the main page) then your site navigation design will matter more, since users will tend to use it more heavily rather than following the content flow on the home page.
Other interesting findings from Eyetrack III:
- Most readers will scan at least five headlines, whether or not they are “above the fold.” So don’t worry too much about scrolling.
- The first few words of your post title have a strong influence on whether your readers keep reading. Make them count.
- “If your desire is to have website readers examine all or most of the type on your homepage, you may want to keep headline size and blurb size comparable.”
I’ll be incorporating some of these findings into the forthcoming site redesign of e-Literate.
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Multimedia vs. Text Comprehension: Empirical Data
The Eyetrack III project has has conducted a