Crash Course in Learning Theory: Part 1

Kathy Sierra’s ‘Crash Course in Learning Theory’ is an interesting read. The summary sheet is designed to help you apply the ideas to your own work. The ideas it brings up that I can relate to my work are:

• You need to get past the brain’s crap filter: The students’ brains will try and focus on something more interesting/important if your content is not interesting. Even if the student is interested in the subject! How to do that with WebCT? Well like I said at the end of the previous post, keep the language student focussed, and keep reminding them of how much time and effort they will save if they listen to you… although that doesn’t sound the most positive angle… if they use this technology there are benefits, and how amazing they will appear and be if they use it well!

• Knowledge is not passed from you to the student, it is co-created. Use metaphors and ideas that the student can use to understand what we are talking about. So the WebCT Discussion tool is like a notice board, threads are like conversations, WebCT is an area of the internet that you need a password to enter.

• Use visuals to improve understanding, retention and recall. We use the screens and ‘walk and talk’ through processes anyway, but I could make more use of the ‘Course Map’. You can add the icons to course map to help students recognise the icons as landmarks if there are a lot of files in a course.

• Use redundancy to improve and speed up understanding: e.g. the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon approach – say the same thing in a different way to expand the meaning.

• Use conversational language – not as if you are reading a text book on how to use WebCT, more like it was a 1-2-1 session.

• Maintain interest with variety and surprise – if we are on PCs, a question to answer in chat or on discussion can keep interest.

• Use mistakes, failures and WTF – Show the students things that will go wrong and might go wrong.