Teaching, Learning, Technology & Reflection

Read  3 E-Learning Lessons Learned on the Road , and impressed with the first tip. It is really enlightening. This can go to one's teaching philosophy. Maybe I should add a section of distance education in my teaching philosophy. This is also a good research topic: how to make elearning courses warm and personal? The scenario is below: "I stopped in one of those airport shops to pick up a couple of knickknacks for my kids. The young woman who processed my sale really stood out.  It was one of the best customer service experiences that I‘ve had in recent years. ......What’s funny is that she really didn’t do anything out of the ordinary.  ...Yet, the experience with her really stood out.  Why? It’s because she connected with me in a real way.  She had a welcoming disposition, warm smile , and actually engaged me.  As a busy traveler, I felt less like a sales order being processed and more like a real person.  What she did was connect with me as a p...

...symbolic interactionists were among the first in the social science community to join issue with postmodernism... interactionists have rejected the subject-object dualism , spectator's theory of knowledge , and correspondence theory of truth , opting instead for the subject-object relativity , participant observation , and perspectival approach to truth . (p. 303) emphasis on the marginal, local, everyday, heterogenous, and indeterminate (p. 304) self-identity, seen as socially constructed, emergent, and plural (p. 304) Unmistakable though it is, the affinity between interactionism and postmodernism is highly selective.   Source: Modernity, Postmodernism, and Pragmatist Inquiry: An Introduction by Dmitri N. Shalin (1993). Symbolic Interaction, 16(4):303-332

keywords : Mental model, cognitive structure, cognitive flexibility, new information, assimilation, accomodation Lakatos (1970) distinguished between two types of propositions within students’ conceptual frameworks. Hard core propositions cannot be altered without rebuilding the large sections of conceptual framework, but protective belt propositions can be altered while preserving the key meaning in the existing conceptual framework. Brewer (1993) suggested there are seven basic responses a student can assume when entertaining new information including: ignore the data, reject the data, exclude the data from the domain of theory A, hold the data in abeyance, reinterpret the data while retaining theory A, reinterpret the data and make peripheral changes to theory A, or accept the data and change theory A, possible to theory B. (p.73) Chinn and Brewer (1993) proposed three factors that interact to determine how students respond to new information: students’ prior knowledge , if...

There are many reserachers... who refer to Novak and Gowin (1984), but clearly mix concept maps with Buzan's (1974, 2000) mind maps, which are much simpler association maps. Most articles published that describe the use of concept mapping refer to Novak and Gowin (1984). Novak (1998) has applied for a trademark of his style of concept mapping: Concept Maps TM. from http://cmc.ihmc.us/papers/cmc2004-206.pdf Example of Concept Map: http://bulsa.helsinki.fi/~maahlber/ Ahlberg, M. & Ahoranta, V. 2002. Two improved educational theory based tools to monitor and promote quality of geographical education and> learning. International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education, 11(2), 119 - 137. http://www.multilingual-matters.net/irgee/011/0119/irgee0110119.pdf "A concept map is a graphical knowledge representation method (Åhlberg, 1990a, 1993), among many (e.g. mind maps, Buzan, 1982, 1993). Concept maps were originally based on Ausubel’s learning theory (Novak &...