For me, I am driven by two main philosophies: know more today about the world than I knew yesterday and lessen the suffering of others. You’d be surprised how far that gets you.

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Buddhist Studies: Teaching and Learning ›

RADical Design for LEARNING ›

“All of a sudden, everything became effortless.  I was just floating along, you know, doing what came naturally, and I said ‘Ah! I’m playing tennis!’”

Learning happens when attention is focused.  Even if you don’t have a good theory of learning, you can still get it to happen by just helping a person focus.  One of the ways you can do that is by removing interference.

In general, for learning most things, it’s good to find a way of short-circuiting that mentaility that we think of as the ‘I’ that always tries to take over.

The problem with being a beginner, is that you get a lot of practice in staying a beginner

Take away the labels of ‘good students’ and ‘bad students’. Forget the tabula-raza theory that a skilled teacher can pour knowledge into someone’s head. Knowledge is constructed through the actions of the student, not the actions of the teacher. This 20 minute video is about John Biggs’ theory of understanding how students are activated.

Structure of the Observed Learning Outcome (SOLO) - SOLO 1 - ‘pre-structural’ no understanding/irrelevant/misses the point - SOLO 2 - ‘unistructural’ focus on one relevant aspect/identify/recite - SOLO 3 - ‘multistructural’ aspects considered independently/classify/combine/enumerate - SOLO 4 - ‘relational’ integrate parts into coherent whole/details linked to conclusion/relate/compare/analyze - SOLO 5 - ‘extended abstract’ generalize/hypothesize/theorize