P90 – “The theory of errorless learning (from B.F. Skinner)
gave rise to instructional techniques in which learners were spoonfed new
material in small bites and immediately quizzed on them while they still
remained on the tongue, so to speak, fresh in short-term memory and easily spit
out on to the test form. There was
virtually no chance of making an error.
Since those days we’ve come to understand that retrieval from short0term
memory is an ineffective learning strategy and that errors are an integral part
of striving to increase one’s mastery over new material. Yet in our Western culture, where achievement
is seen as an indicator of ability, many learners view errors as failure and do
what they can to avoid committing them.
The aversion to failure may be reinforced by instructors who labor under
the belief that when learners are allowed to make errors it’s the errors that
they will learn.”
P91 – “…people who are taught that learning is a struggle
that often involves making errors will go on to exhibit a greater propensity to
tackle tough challenges and will tend to see mistakes not as failures but as
lessons and turning points along the path to mastery.”
P201/202- …three keystone study strategies…
1.
Practice Retrieving New Learning from Memory
What does this mean? “Retrieval practice” means self-quizzing. Retrieving knowledge and skill from memory
should become your primary study strategy in place of rereading.
How to use retrieval practice as a study strategy: When you read a
text or study lecture notes, pause periodically to ask yourself questions like
these, without looking in the test: What are the key ideas? What terms or ideas
are new to me? How would I define them? How do the ideas related to what I
already know?...
2.
P203 Space Out Your Retrieval Practice –
What does this mean? Space practice means studying information more
than once but leaving considerable time between practice sessions.
3.
P205 Interleave the Study of Different
Problem Types
What does this mean? If
you’re trying to learn mathematical formulas, study more than one type at a
time, so that you are alternating between different problems that call for
different solutions. If you are studying
biology specimens, Dutch painters, or the principles of macroeconomics, mix up
the examples.
How to use interleaved practice as a study strategy: … “an example from sports, a baseball player
who practices batting by swinging at fifteen fastballs, then at fifteen
curveballs, and then at fifteen changeups will perform better in practice than
the place who mixes it up. But the
player who asks for random pitches during practice builds his ability to
decipher and respond to each pitch as it comes his way, and he becomes a better
hitter.”
P225 – “Students labor under many myths and illusions about
learning that cause them to make some unfortunate choices about intellectual
risk taking and about when and how to study.
It’s the proper role of the teacher to explain what empirical studies
have discovered about how people learn, so the student can better manage his or
her own education. In particular, students must be helped to
understand such fundamental ideas as these:
- · Some kinds of difficulties during learning help to make the learning stronger and better remembered.
- · When learning is easy, it is often superficial and soon forgotten.
- · Not all of our intellectual abilities are hardwired. In fact, when learning is effortful, it changes the brain, making new connections and increasing intellectual ability.
- · You learn better when you wrestle with new problems before being shown the solution, rather than the other way around.
- · To achieve excellence in any sphere, you must strive to surpass your current level of ability.
- · Striving, by its nature, often results in setbacks, and setbacks are often what provide the essential information needed to adjust strategies to achieve mastery.
P21 - A generation of Americans between the ages of
thirty-five and fifty-five will experience life in much the same way our
grandparents experienced the one-two punch of the 1920s-a decade of promise
that gave us skyscrapers, affordable cars and radios, and indoor electricity
and plumbing for the majority- and the 1930s, it’s opposite. Novelist Saul Bellow writes that the 1930s
were actually fun for young adults unburdened by family obligations and career
dreams. In the deflationary 1930s you
could attend a move for a dime and buy a hamburger for a nickel. It was a time to indulge in radical politics,
to overthrow Babbittry in art and culture.
IT was a good decade for bohemians. But the Great Depression was a
horrible and humiliating experience for the family man. The stock market fell
87 percent from it’s September 1929 peaks.
During the dust blow year of 1932 American unemployment reached 24
percent.
P23 – “As we grow out of childhood, we give up our dreams of
playing center field for the New York Yankees or starring in a Hollywood
thriller. Counselors call our new
attitude “maturity.” Likewise, the
Turbulent 2000s will force millions of Americans to reassess our adult dreams
of financial comfort and early retirement. How should we face this
reassessment? Must we say adios to our
dreams? No. But we might have to redefine them.” …
“For some reason, where is rarely considered as an important
ingredient to achieving the American Dream and one’s best self, even as
how-money, health, diet, fitness, self-esteem, spiritual contentment, ses, et
cetera-is beaten to death as an angle.”… “A polar bear is unlikely to find its
bliss in a rain forest, not matter how many Second Changes it gets. We, too, are creatures of our environment."
P1 - In
just twenty years, between 2000 and 2020, some 75% of our lives will change
dramatically. We know this because it
happened once before. Between 1900 and
1920, life changed. We moved from an
agrarian farming way of life to an industrialized way of life. Now it is all
happening again.
The way
we work is changing. The way we live is
changing. The way we learn is changing.
…We are
now moving from a time in which we were fairly certain of the basic facts about
life and of the rules that applied to it, to a time when we are not quite sure
what is real and what is not real.
This
ambiguity will be with us for another ten to twenty years. Living with the ambiguity, and feeling
comfortable with discomfort, is not easy.
…
Pp 5-6 ... (by) 2020 and 1920 - New way is clearly dominant and accepted. The old way is clearly in decline.…”…( we are ) predicting that all of these nine shifts are occurring
and will become commonplace by 2020.
- Shift One. People work at home. ... Community to an office will become a rarity, a think of the past. A significant part of the workforce will work from home or telecommute.
- Shift Two. Intranets will replace offices. ... Offices will diminish as primary work places. Intranets will replace physical offices for most businesses, companies and nonprofit organizations.
- Shift Three. Networks replace pyramids. ... The basic organizational structure of life in the last century, the organization chart or pyramid, goes into steep decline. It is replaced by a superior organizational structure, the network.
- Shift Four. Trains replace cars. ... The automobile, the dominant mode of transportation in the last century, loses its dominance and becomes a peripheral and supplemental mode of transportation. Trains and light rail become the dominant mode of transportation.
- Shift Five. Dense neighborhoods replace suburbs.
- Shift Six. New social infrastructures evolve.
- Shift Seven. Cheating becomes collaboration.
- Shift Eight. Half of learning is online. ... The traditional classroom rapidly becomes obsolete. Half of all learning is done online, changing the nature of how we learn and how we teach.
- Shift Nine. Education becomes web-based. ... Brick and mortar schools and colleges of the past century become outdated. All education becomes web-based, providing a better education for both young people and adults.