It's been a while but the new powder and Christmas break are ample excuse for my absence. I'm starting a quasi-guide service to get some outdoorspeople into the Idaho backcountry, there's just so much undiscovered paradise that needs to see skis. Here's a link to my brochure. Call if interested.

M

Second Life. My initial reaction was not one of excitement. My knowledge of these avatar type settings was one where people would go to do things they shouldn't because using a screen name and image would allow for all kinds of indiscretions without them being caught. I was very wrong. When I first set up my account I was concerned with what I would find and it took me a while to learn to navigate the "world" but once I started to get the hang of it it became apparent what all of the wonderful and good things that could come from this type of learning. I love the idea of being able to chat with someone live that could be thousands of miles away without a horrendous phone bill. I like the chance to have a class made up of people from all over the world in one place at one time all learning and contributing, what amazing barriers this could overcome. My favorite part, though, is the chance to go places and see things with professionals that will never be possible in person in my life time. I would love to go see the Cistene chapel and have someone who understands what all of the artwork represents next to me, looking at the same thing I am looking at, and be able to teach me. So from my office I can go places and learn things that would never be possible otherwise. I know that there are many glitches that need to be worked out and a lot of details but I would love to start using this in my own line of work as soon as I can. I teach about the Old World of Jerusaleum and Rome, what a benefit it would be to have a section of those ancient cities loaded onto my computer and be able to walk through them with my students while I was talking about what happened in those very places. All I would need is my computer and account and a projector and we could all be in that place, seeing the actual prision or church or landmark while discussing it -- no one need wonder what a benefit that would be to my teaching. I' m going to be using this soon, I'm acutally excited about something computer oriented, wow.

M

My ideas of learning have changed over the course of the semester. I now realize that a lot of what I thought was learning was close to correct but very underdeveloped. I now see that a lot of my ideas were close but needed help. I like how all of the theories seem to tie into one another. Each of them is fairly case specific but held together they all show how learning can be done. Each of the theories seems to focus more on the teacher because he or she is the one implementing the idea. I wonder, though, if we need to be careful not to state a learning theory as the way to learn but as another piece of the puzzle that, put all together, will make up learning. The other thing I'm working more on this year is how to mix up the theories so that I use more than one per class and different styles of each per student. The homogeneous classroom is a myth and I need to find ways to implement multiple styles with multiple students. I think I need to utilize my student leaders better.

M

This newest theory, social constructivism, brings with it a bunch of sub theories. One of them that stood out to me was the idea that "past success served to distract from the ultimate goal." One of my major goals is to get my students to successfully identify principles in the scriptures. I define a principle as a statement of action that can be place in an If/Then format. My students are getting quite good at this but now I need to push them beyond that into an application idea. I need them to be able to identify the principle quickly and then spend the time on the application part of the lesson. If the application doesn't happen then I have largely failed. But I'm seeing that their past success in identifying principles is making it harder for them to go beyond the principle into an application type setting. So that is what my next lesson plan will focus on. As to what real learning is, this would suggest that a student and a teacher can never be satisfied with an initial success. Knowing what 2+2 equals is great but knowing how to perform addition is paramount. I need to go beyond simply identifying the principles already found in the verses, to creating an application that can influence my life. I love this.

M

Ah Bruner. There's a reverend in my town with this last name so I often see his face when I think of this theory. I'm struggling with this one. Perhaps I'm not understanding it all too well but, well let me compare it to a carburetor. The first couple of theories seemed much like a carburetor, they described what learning was and how to do it and offered useful advice/counsel on how to become a much more effective teacher. These latest theories seem to just change one minor part and claim to have a totally different machine. If someone were to show me a carburetor and then change the location of one screw, it would still be a carburetor and I would not feel the need to dissect and re-learn about carburetors all over again. I wonder how many of these theories are just minor modifications, almost not worth calling a theory. I love the idea of hands on experiential learning, but haven't we discussed this multiple times already? Surely I'm missing something, please help me clear this up.

M

Research paper papers

I'm finally whittling down my research paper topic to how cell phone usage in the classroom can be beneficial. Here are the articles I'm planning on using:

http://www.ncsu.edu/meridian/sum2008/roberson/
this first one is an article from Meridian, a publication from NC state

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.108.4410&rep=rep1&type=pdf
this one is a report of "Proceedings of the International Conference on Computers in Education (ICCE’02)"
0-7695-1509-6/02 $17.00 © 2002 IEEE

http://centre4.interact.ac.nz/viewfile.php/users/38/1965011121/ICT_PD_Online/ListentotheNatives.pdf
This one comes from the educational leadership journal

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=_CWxEPMmwlMC&oi=fnd&pg=PA1271&dq=cell+phones+in+education&ots=nH8rEv_CNg&sig=_35GpFCcuGncpXqgCULC_AjuDtk#v=onepage&q=cell%20phones%20in%20education&f=false
this is a google book review of a Marc Prensky article entitled "what can you learn from a cell phone, almost anything."

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=HAsfTumtYVoC&oi=fnd&pg=PT6&dq=cell+phones+in+education&ots=faqt3Qmpwd&sig=Yxdj0mz4Vh_UhlE8VhJliMTJ93Q#v=onepage&q=cell%20phones%20in%20education&f=false
this final one is also a google book review that addresses cell phones in developing countries but lends some additional statistics about prevalence of cell phones and individual peoples perception of how important this technology is.

I'll keep you posted as the paper takes shape.

I'm in the process of trying to separate this theory from so many of the others we have already seen. Sometimes it seems like a person wants to get their name out there so they tweak an already viable theory ever so slightly and then claim to have come up with a new theory. This idea of couching things in a story is so similar to teaching using stories and knowing that students learn based on the "story" of their life and showing an abstract thought/principle using a concrete example, such as a story that I wonder if we really need to distinguish between all the similar theories and call them different things. In fact, I almost posted my lesson from a week ago just to see if my idea was accurate, and if the professor was watching, but I didn't. Having said that, I do love stories and will always use them in some way to teach a lesson, I just wonder if I need to have 13 different names for the word story to make it more effective or can I just call it a story?

M