Neural Networks & The Human Mind
Chapter 2 & 3 of “Neural Networks & The Human Mind” were both very interesting. They focused on defining intelligence, the neocortex and the connections and functions that occur inside the brain that are critical to understanding how the human brain works. Ian did a great job summarizing the chapters and prompting discussion questions, and my replies are below.
I think to be an effective learning designer, one needs to know at least a little bit about intelligence and the general functions of the brain. I think Aaron makes a great point when he talks about utilizing teaching techniques that work in patterns, the same way the human brain does. In my personal experiences, repetition through the use of note cards or listening to my material on my ipod has helped me when studying large amounts of information because it creates study patterns.
My views on intelligence has not changed from reading this chapter, but I would say some of the facts and details helped put what goes on in the brain in-perspective. The brain is a fascinating subject and I like read about it. There are still a lot of unknowns about the brain, and I think that keeps my interest level high.
Speaking of your notecard/ipod repetition strategy, have you heard of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Ebbinghaus
Apparently, once you highlight material from at least 4 Kindle books, there’s actually a service which will automatically create online “flashcards” for you that it serves up according to Ebbinghaus’ spacing principles. (I haven’t tried it, but it sounds interesting, although I’m thinking the need for this kind of thing is a standalone tool is diminished somewhat by the fact that we can usually just the highlights later and “offload” some of the “remembering” to our gadgets. Still, i think there are some potential uses of this in in computer-adaptive curriculum for certain applications where rote memory is useful and taking even a minute to pull up an electronic resource is impractical. (For example, football players memorizing play calls or programmers learning how to write code in a particular language.)