As the school year ended, I was in several situations (including a Saturday morning at the barber shop) in which I overheard many conversations about schools and teachers and students and end of the year activities and summer readings… I stop the list here, but readers can imagine (with a good deal of accuracy I Read More
Category: Learning
Becoming Knowledgeable and Reasonable
Cognitive and learning scientist are finding evidence that brains process the information that is stored in memories. The processing allows the learner to find connections and organize the memories. As a result, what one “knows” is not a collection of discrete facts, but it is integrated and one’s knowledge can be used to create new Read More
Types of Learning
While it may seem unnecessary to observe “there are many different kinds of learning,” the importance of those differences and the effects that a failure to recognize those differences can have on learning experiences are often overlooked even by experiences teachers. While these types of learning are presented as different, most learning environments are places Read More
Types of Memories
Three types of memories are stored so they can be used later. Procedural memories are largely unconscious and are developed through procedural or statistical learning. Episodic memories encode the details of what happened on particular instances. Important, stressful, or traumatic life events are typically stored in episodic memory, but these memories are not reliable. Semantic Read More
Brain Development
Perhaps one of the most important discoveries of cognitive and learning sciences, and one that contradicts a long-held belief, is that the brain is much more adaptive that was previously thought. When I was a student in the 1980’s, it was believed that brains developed through one’s youth, but that developed slowed in adolescence and Read More
The Paradox of Knowledge
We all know “things.” What it means to “know” and “things” are all open to debate, but let’s ignore those debates for a moment, and recognize that some people know more than others about topics. Gary has a degree in technology and spends much time using, thinking about, and troubleshooting and repairing technology systems. Compared Read More
Humans as Social and Technology-Using Creatures
There can be little question that characteristics of our brains differentiate humans from other creatures. Increasingly, cognitive scientists recognize our brains are designed for the social interactions that have allowed humans to cooperate, and this cooperation has enabled our species to avoid extinction. Cognitive and developmental psychologist Michael Tomasello (2014) described the importance of social Read More
Decreasing Distractions
I wrote this piece for another audience a couple of years back… it still seems quite relevant given the observation I made this year in middle schools. It was with horror that I walked up and down the boardwalk of the mid-Atlantic beach I visited for the first time with my family this summer. Every Read More
Leverage IT for Education
The idea of using new technology for cognitive tasks has been well-received by some and ill-received by others, and that has been true throughout human history, especially at transitions when one dominant technology was being replaced by another. Using computers to support human cognition was a central theme of information theorist Vannevar Bush’s seminal article Read More
Prosumers
Alvin Toffler (1980) is credited with introducing the term prosumer to describe the pattern of media use that he accurately predicted would dominate in the digital age. The term combines producer and consumer, and a prosumer is described as one who both produces and consumes, sometimes simultaneously. Wikipedia, the open source encyclopedia, is an example Read More