On Intelligence
1: In what ways can learning designers use these insights into how the brain works?
A teacher teaches a subject to a learner, but a learning designer creates a plan for teaching something to someone or develops a plan for teaching. A learning designer’s insight into constructing a well rounded approach to teaching the same subject from several different perspectives distinguishes them from a teacher. By understanding some of the basic ideas of intelligence and the brain, a learning designer can develop a plan for teaching that uses a variety of the learners senses as well as their memory, organization, prediction, and most importantly the neocortex’s most important element – pattern. Hawkins seems to capitalize on these elements throughout the first three chapters. He uses stories to draw parallels and to tap into our memories and patterns. By using descriptive stories we are able to visualize the complicated biological information.
2: Have these chapters changed how you view intelligence and the learning process as a whole?
These chapters really have not changed how I view intelligence and the learning process as a whole. I see intelligence in the same way I see learning styles. Everyone is different; everyone has strengths and weaknesses, and certain teaching methods that work well for them while other methods do not work for them. Hawkins ideas on intelligence gave me additional insight into how people learn. His examples of seeing with your finger tips and learning through our various senses were interesting analogies on how versatile our learning process can be.
test Filed under Uncategorized | Tags: LRND 6820 | Comment (1)
11:58 pm - 10-4-2010
I thought the example of “seeing” with your finger tips was compelling, too. I hadn’t thought of time/sequence as being an element of feeling texture before, but it makes a lot of sense. (Kind of like a needle on a record player moving across the bumps and grooves of a record at a pre-determined speed.)
One area where I think Hawkins would diverge from some of the theorists that talk about “learning styles” and “multiple intelligences” though is that he’s really saying that all learning for all people happens through the same basic process (pattern recognition), and that, to the extent that there are individual differences in the modes of instruction that work best for people, the differences stem from the fact that we all have different patterns in our brains (based on our unique experiences) that we call up to help us understand our current experiences (and then create/modify the patterns in our brains as we move through the world and forward in time.) Hawkins would probably argue that it doesn’t make sense to talk about one group of students being “visual learners” and others being “auditory learners,” as in his view, they’re all “pattern recognizers,” full stop. (However, it would still be useful to think about how to use all of the senses to activate relevant stored patterns that would help students make sense of new material and experiences.)