Enough on my soapbox!! I will write something more specific later!
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Learning and the Brain Conference
This is Lalita again! Everyone in the group from SCSU loved the conference! I agree with Kathy in her last post when she says faculty might be trying to "fight it" rather than "ignite it." The matter is very complex, though! Many of the speakers cautioned the participants about the problems with the i generation: their need for instant gratification, lack of face-to-face social skills, difficulty in recognizing non-verbal cues etc. I think we may have all seen that in some of our students. I also noted, with some pleasure and satisfaction, that the speakers endorsed and affirmed what I have always known as the principles of good teaching and effective learning with or without the "technology": engage the students with the material, with each other, and with the instructor actively, give learners control over how to learn and to some extent what to learn, and, finally, ensure that they reflect upon the product and process of learning, in other words, use metacognition and meta analysis complete the learning cycle. Those principles of learning have not changed; they have merely been taken over very successfully by the providers of technology, the digital game makers, the software writers, etc. We have to beat those guys to it, because we faculty are in stiff competition with them!!
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I also heard the reviews of the role of technology in our students' lives as being quite mixed. One keynote speaker on Friday morning (Marc Prensky, MBA) talked about technology as this generation's "birthright." Another presenter, Dr. Clifford Nass, who has written extensively on our relationships with digital devices along with our ability (or more accurately, inability) to multitask, cautions that chronic media multi-taskers demonstrate significant cognitive and socio-emotional deficits. According to his research, there are no positive social outcomes associated with high digital media use. Moreover, although the human brain is built to read emotion, we have to learn to do this by observing others' facial expressions and listening to their voices. When we are texting, we are not looking at faces or listening to voices and so, don't learn to read emotions. If kids don't learn how to read emotions, they become less likely to attend to them, and eventually, emotion ceases to have importance. As educators, we know that emotion, or passion, is essential to the learning process.
ReplyDeleteThere's just so much to think about! I liked the suggestions for interjecting novelty into our classrooms, which will help to maintain our students' attention. It was helpful to note what features of video games could be incorporated into the classroom to help engage students (without including the video games themselves). I also learned why our memories get worse as we get older, or when we multitask (this may affect how ... or when ... I test in my classes).
I have books to read and notes to synthesize. It will be fun to share this information with others!
It was ironic to attend a conference that really emphasized the importance of experiential learning, focusing more on the learning process than on content, etc., and everyone lectured to us :-) Had to laugh about that one!