September 14

September 14, 2009

Meta Cognition

Thinking about thinking – I have learned about and thought about meta cognition many times. As a education major at BYU I don’t think you could possibly make your way through a SecEd class without having that word thrown at you a few times. I didn’t think I would hear anything new but I was surprised.

I liked the idea of sub-vocalization – how many times do we actually stop to think about what we are doing as we read? How often do we hold conversations with ourselves in our heads? I wonder what the implications are for teachers, designers, etc. – I’m sure there are some big implications here. What if we could design effectively enough that we could not only affect the sub-vocalization of our students, but also find a way to know what sort of sub-vocalization is going on? I don’t know – just thoughts I had.

I also liked the point about implicit and explicit knowledge. I really do believe that it’s important to know what sort of implicit knowledge our learners have so we can design with that in mind. Implicit knowledge is something hard to test I think – I mean most people I don’t think ever realize the implicit knowledge that they have. I don’t know that I ever sit and think about the implicit knowledge I have gained through the years – it’s just become part of me – part of what I bring every time I try to learn something new.

Production Systems

I wasn’t really impressed with this research – I’m sure that John Anderson is a very smart person but I do not agree with his thoughts that all human thinking can be characterized by ‘if-then’ statements. What ever happened to agency? What ever happened to the times when humans make decisions on a whim, or when we make decisions that are completely irrational? I do like the idea of breaking a larger goal into several smaller sub-goals that will lead to the accomplishment of the larger goal, but I think he tries to make too many objective statements about a largely irrational thing – human decision making and behavior.

Skill Learning

This was interesting to me because I had a teacher who used to always use ‘just-in-time-learning’ – he even called it that. I adopted this method when I began teaching at the MTC thinking that he had invented the idea. I think teaching principles that all build on each other and then assisting the learner with ‘just-in-time’ information is one of the most effective teaching strategies I have employed. The part of this theory that stuck with me is the part-task practice section. I think often as a teacher I forget to employ this part – there are certain tasks that just need to be practiced over and over in order for the students to really master them.