World 1-4: Applications of Learning Theories to Instruction (ETEC 512)
In this course, I actually ended up re-exploring the world of learning theories. Of course, I had learned many of these ideas in my pre-service training, but they were not meaningful at the time, as I had no way of applying this to my teaching practise – as it had not started yet!
In this world, we explored the theories of Piaget, Vygotsky, and a host of others. We learned how these cognitive development theories could apply to an ed tech world. Personally, Piaget’s stages of development resonated more with me, as I find them easier to observe in children. The stage of Formal Operations is observed often in my classroom in regards to ed tech, as my students learn how skills learned in one aspect of technology can be applied (and should be sought to apply) with another aspect. Another learning theory idea that I found intriguing was situated learning – “the idea that much of what is learned is specific to the situation in which it is learned” (Anderson et al., 1996).
In this world, we explored the theories of Piaget, Vygotsky, and a host of others. We learned how these cognitive development theories could apply to an ed tech world. Personally, Piaget’s stages of development resonated more with me, as I find them easier to observe in children. The stage of Formal Operations is observed often in my classroom in regards to ed tech, as my students learn how skills learned in one aspect of technology can be applied (and should be sought to apply) with another aspect. Another learning theory idea that I found intriguing was situated learning – “the idea that much of what is learned is specific to the situation in which it is learned” (Anderson et al., 1996).
Information processing was another area that we explored in depth in this course. We looked at how the brain absorbs, uses, and accesses information. Any fact about the brain amazes me (if I can understand it!), and one area that I found quite pertinent to this day-and-age was the concept of transactive memory – the idea that our brains rely on the comfort that knowledge is out there. There is no need to actually memorize as much anymore. But at what cost? What if something disastrous were to happen to our Internet infrastructure? How would we fare in our survival? This is illustrated beautifully in the video above.
One other area of information processing that resonated with me was Bloom’s Taxonomy. When creating unit or lesson plans, or another avenue of instructional design, it is to the benefit of your students to provide them with opportunities to go beyond answering “textbook questions” – to provide them real-life (or close to) situations to apply their learning.
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Lastly, and most importantly for me, was the foundation that was laid in exploring gamification and video game theory – of which I will detail further in World 2-1.