Thoughts on the Mind Map

I’m looking at my mind map below and wondering how this network has changed the way I learn. The easy answer is, of course it has. It has only been within the last three years that I’ve been connected to every branch of the Social Networking limb. In fact, within the past 5 years most elements of the mind map were unknown to me apart from Google. My network was comprised solely of physical, brick and mortar connections. Now my search for answers first wanders through a maze of electronic connections, Google scholar, RSS Feeds, informative blogs. I take that information and then present it to and gain feedback regarding it, to my social networks. They are both electronic, Facebook, Wabash, ATLA listserv, and physical, colleagues and friends from my own work environment and the the schools I attended. I take that reworked raw information and run it through my own experiential grid and come to some sort of answer. Once I get an answer I often turn around and teach it to my students using the same networked online tools such as Prezi and Google Docs to start the cycle over again for a whole new set of networked learners. While the route is now more far flung than it ever was before I think I have benefited from a broader perspective. It has made my learning experience a richer one.


If I had to give my digital tools a ranking I’d have to start with Google, in all its iterations. While I know I need to be careful of the mass of un-vetted material it is a great place to start if you are looking for a clue, a starting place for your learning. From there I often taken my clues to online databases that hold thousands of peer reviewed articles ready to be exploited in my learning processes. After that it is a return to the social networks where I can gain valuable experiential insights from past and present colleagues and scholars. As I look at this I see that it is also the way I gain new knowledge. With my ear to the electronic ‘ground’ I catch what’s coming next. But this is only one way to learn and the ranking can fluctuate from day to day. Perhaps I’ll hear something intriguing in a podcast I subscribed to off of iTunes. That will lead me to a blog that has been reliable in such matters in the past. I’ll see what’s been written about what I heard in the podcast and with that information proceed to my listserv and see what the peers in my field are saying. Once I’ve passed all that information through my grid I pass it along. And the cycle begins yet again with something I saw off of one of my RSS Feeds!

Does this aforementioned learning style refute or support the central tenets of Connectivism? I’d have to say that there is much that supports Davis’s (2008) idea that there is some “delicate interplay between complexity and self-organization” in all I do. I do make use of many voices when I seek out my social network. As well I do seem to hop from one specialized node, say Google Scholar, to another, some RSS Feed, to seek, strengthen and support my collection and analysis of raw data. And all these connections, both human and non-human, facilitate continual learning for me. That seems to definitely spell Connectivism for me and my learning style.


Davis, C., Edmunds, E., & Kelly-Bateman, V. (2008). Connectivism. In M. Orey (Ed.), Emerging perspectives on learning, teaching, and technology. Retrieved from http://projects.coe.uga.edu/epltt/index.php?title=Connectivism

Connectivism

Brain Based Learning Debated

Have two interesting articles on Brain-Based Learning (BBL) that approach BBL from opposite sides of the spectrum. J. Diane Connell (2009) is very positive about BBL. She believes that since the research continues to expand there will be greater and greater opportunities to apply BBL in our local schools (p. 31). In spreading out to local schools educators will now be able to design curriculum around brain functions (p.37). The best thing about her article is a brief annotated list which she refers to as the 11 principles of BBL (p. 30). Unexpectedly, at least for me, were more nebulous principles such as “the search for meaning is innate,” and “emotions are critical to patterning,” among the more concrete statements such as “the brain is a parallel processor,” and “the brain processes parts and wholes simultaneously,” (p. 30).


While Connell is very positive about BBL, Andrew Davis (2004) is a different story. Very succinctly he states that “Neurophysiology cannot tell us what matters in terms of human flourishing” (p. 23). He uses an example of a scientist saying that lifelong learning is limitless because the brain continues to grow dendrites in an enriched environment. The problem with that scientist’s statement avers Davis is that the vision of lifelong learning does not necessarily follow from the observation that physiologically, dendrites grow in an enriched environment (p. 23). In a lengthy article Davis goes on to declare that what BBL supporters have done is to make a category mistake. As he says, “Might it even be the case that they [BBL supporters] believe neurophysiological connections sometimes actually are connections between psychological items such as beliefs? If so, is this not a blatant example of a category mistake?” (p.26).

So the field of BBL does not necessarily have unanimous support. I don’t have the academic chops to be able to make an unqualified decision as to who’s right and who isn’t. So I think I’ll just keep reading both sides of the debate.

Connell, J.D. (2009). The global aspects of brain-based learning. Educational Horizons, 88(1), 28-39.


Davis, A. (2004). The credentials of brain-based learning. Journal of Philosophy and Education, 38(1), 21-  
                35.

Helpful Blogs

I’ve followed an assortment of library and technology blogs for quite some time. They range from the personal to the technical, the outrageously funny to the soberly reflective. Among these are several which look at instructional design technologies and theories which can be of some help in teaching library literacy classes. Not all of them are library specific sites, but all are set up to help teachers stay on the cusp of the technological wave. Here are just a few.


The Learning Circuits Blog, created and maintained by the American Society for Training & Development, centers, mainly, on one big question a month. “Does the discussion of "how the brain learns" impact your eLearning design?” and “What tools should we learn?” are just two such questions posted recently. What follows are postings not only of informed and creative responses but resource links as well. While the blog is current and cutting edge the casual reader can stop anywhere in the archives, going back to 2002 (skipping a few years in between), and find a worthwhile discussion. Learning Circuits contains not only an archive but a helpful blog roll, and an indexed topics list. All this makes referencing different ideas or resources a simple click away.

The blog iLibrarian, maintained by professor, speaker and author Ellyssa Kroski, offers a current look at all manner of software and web enabled strategies to inform our teaching. Often technical when speaking about software resources and software functionality, it is nevertheless a very comprehensive guide to newsworthy technology assists for teaching. From Firefox add-ons to a guide to Twitter in Libraries, Kroski often seems to find creative and in-depth presentations to accompany her own observations. Providing an archive, blog roll, category list and a listing of the most popular articles helps make this blog site a great resource for the librarian trying to enhance her teaching skills.

The Instructional Design for Mediated Education is more commonly known as Instructional Design Open Source, or IDOS for short. IDOS is not really a resource center. While many other instructional design blogs point to many other blogs and useful resources IDOS is definitely on the more cerebral side. You can observe this even if you go no further than some of the blog titles. “The Allure of the Anti-Pattern Concept,” “Transcoding Work,” and “Creating Structure from Formlessness,” are just a few titles that indicate the overall direction of this blog. Not satisfied with just the newest technologies, and they do touch on new technologies, these bloggers take us places we might have forgotten in our rush to enhance everything we do with a technological trigger. In “Establishing Grade ‘Floors’ and Higher Grade ‘Ceilings’” our blogger once again established the need for trust and professionalism to be a cornerstone of any of our teaching efforts. The blog, deep in thought while narrow in resource referencing, is a needed anodyne to the technologically enamored among us who focus too much on the next best thing to come along. IDOS makes us pause and do something we don’t often get a chance to do . . . think.