Staying the course

I found Kevin Honeycutt's blog through Wes Fryer. His Google vs. Brain post brings a few thoughts I would like to preserve.

Actually, I have said these before through another person's post, but it is very timely for me. Mostly because I am again in a great state of doubt. Is the change I have made in my classroom truly effective? Part of me wonders whether what I believe in is right and if I am truly on the right track. Let's face it, there is not much support outside of our own network. But to hear others say what I believe in my heart, reminds me of what I am trying to achieve.

He writes:

So in the information age, the web 2.0 era, the cyber-century, what are the emerging, relevant skills for success? Whatever they are, it behooves us as educators to be focused on them and to be sharing them with learners. I know this though. Memorizing and recalling for success is over. It’s what you do with data, knowledge, facts and figures that matters. What creative, innovative and useful things can your learners do? What happened to the world I was well-wired for before all of this change? You maniacs! You blew it up!

But most importantly it is Paul Bogush who comments:

"Studies show that emotional arousal focuses attention on the "gist" of an experience at the expense of peripheral details...with the passage of time, our retrieval of gist always trumps our recall of details. This means our heads tend to be filled with generalized pictures of concepts or events, not with slowly fading minutiae."
John Medina "Brain Rules" (Great book by the way)

You brain was never well-wired for data storage, the world is just shifting back to a place in which our brains excel. Meaning before detail. Focusing on the data, knowledge and facts forces student's brains to do something they never evolved to do...

Hmmm....another book for my to do list and another reason to do what I do even better next year.

Tags: brain, education, technology