Noah and Reg discuss teaching and learning theories

Teaching and learning in The Walking Dead (S05E14)

Reda SadkiCulture, Learning

In this episode, the young Noah has asked to meet with Reg, an elderly architect or engineer who had the know-how to build the wall that protects the community of Alexandria, which some believe has survived zombies and other predators mostly by sheer luck. Noah recognizes that it’s more than luck – and wants to Reg to pass on knowledge and expertise that is different from that needed only to avert death. Reg shows him a notebook in which he’s kept personal notes on events, and offers one of the notebooks so that Noah can begin to keep a record. Outcome? Noah dies in the next episode. So much for transmissive learning and container views of knowledge. (It appears that YouTube will prevent viewers in some countries from accessing the brief excerpt I’ve posted there. Apologies if you are unable to see it.) – How is it that you called this extremely early …

Neurons in the brain

Education is the science of sciences

Reda SadkiTheory

“We want to talk about science as a certain kind of ‘knowing’. Specifically, we want to use it to name those deeper forms of knowing that are the purpose of education. Science in this broader sense consists of things you do to know that are premeditated, things you set out to know in a carefully considered way. It involved out-of-the ordinary knowledge-making efforts that have a peculiar intensity of focus, rather than things you get to know as an incidental consequence of doing something or being somewhere. Science has special methods or techniques for knowing. These methods are connected with specialized traditions of knowledge making and bodies of knowledge. In these senses, history, language studies and mathematics are sciences, as are chemistry, physics and biology. Education is the science of learning (and, of course, teaching). Its subject is how people come to know. It teaches learners the methods for making …

Fluid Painting 79 Acrylic On Canvas

Flow

Reda SadkiTheory

In our studies, we found that every flow activity, whether it involved competition, chance, or any other dimension of experience, had this in common: It provided a sense of discovery, a creative feeling of transporting the person into a new reality. It pushed the person to higher levels of performance, and led to previously undreamed-of states of consciousness. In short, it transformed the self by making it more complex. In this growth of the self lies the key to flow activities. Source: Csikszentmihalyi, M., 1990. Flow : the psychology of optimal experience, 1st ed. ed. Harper & Row, New York. Photo: Fluid Painting 79 Acrylic On Canvas (Mark Chadwick/Flickr).

George Siemens at TEDxNYED (3 June 2010)

A few of my favorite excerpts from George Siemens’s Knowing Knowledge (2006)

Reda SadkiTheory

My own practice (and no doubt yours) has been shaped by many different learning theorists. George Siemens, for me, stands out articulating what I felt but did not know how to express about the changing nature of knowledge in the Digital Age. Below I’ve compiled a few of my favorite excerpts from his book Knowing Knowledge, published in 2006, two years before he taught the first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) with Alec Couros and Stephen Downes. Learning has many dimensions. No one model or definition will fit every situation. CONTEXT IS CENTRAL. Learning is a peer to knowledge. To learn is to come to know. To know is to have learned. We seek knowledge so that we can make sense. Knowledge today requires a shift from cognitive processing to pattern recognition. Construction, while a useful metaphor, fails to align with our growing understanding that our mind is a connection-creating structure. We do not always …