Group items tagged

Tools to create 'cognitive tutors' for maths and science.

"This paper defines and examines three generations of distance education pedagogy. Unlike earlier classifications of distance education based on the technology used..."

This paper defines and examines three generations of distance education pedagogy. Unlike earlier classifications of distance education based on the technology used, this analysis focuses on the pedagogy that defines the learning experiences encapsulated in the learning design. The three generations of cognitive-behaviourist, social constructivist, and connectivist pedagogy are examined, using the familiar community of inquiry model (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2000) with its focus on social, cognitive, and teaching presences. Although this typology of pedagogies could also be usefully applied to campus-based education, the need for and practice of openness and explicitness in distance education content and process makes the work especially relevant to distance education designers, teachers, and developers. The article concludes that high-quality distance education exploits all three generations as determined by the learning content, context, and learning expectations.

"The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which an unskilled person makes poor decisions and reaches erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to realize their mistakes.[1] The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average, much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. This leads to the situation in which less competent people rate their own ability higher than more competent people. It also explains why actual competence may weaken self-confidence: because competent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. "Thus, the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others."["

Interesting article reporting an academic paper which suggests that forcing cognitive overload through the use of 'bad' font choices can actually improve comprehension. Make it hard to read and you are forced to concentrate on it rather than it slipping off your braincells. 

"Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia in old age."

"Optimal learning occurs when students are active participants in their own learning, rather than passive recipients of teacher-delivered content. For this to be effective, students really need to think about their learning. I worked with a group of teachers recently who felt their young students were not capable of writing meaningful reflections for their end of semester reports. That might be true. But only if reflection and meta-cognition are not integral parts of the learning in their classes."

"Learn. Unlearn. Relearn. In addition to the content of our course-which ranged across cognitive psychology, neuroscience, management theory, literature and the arts, and the various fields that compose science-and-technology studies-'This Is Your Brain on the Internet' was intended to model a different way of knowing the world, one that encompasses new and different forms of collaboration and attention. More than anything, it courted failure. Unlearning."

Strategies for helping learning

Audrey Watters analyses the recent statements that the OLPC project has failed because test scores have not increased.

Post by Dave Snowden on why editing Wikipedia is a good thing whilst being frustrating. Links to lots of other posts he has made about specifics. This is a summary of sorts.

Post by Dave Snowden on the poewer of story and narrative.