Week 5--Cognitive Theory: Information Processing

Briefly, about Week 4: Behaviorism. Last week was an online forum class in which we reacted to/summarized either chapter 2 or chapter 6 of the textbook and posed one or more questions for our peers to respond to. Everyone made strong initial contributions and to the posed questions. The forum illustrates the multiple shades of interpretation that comes out of behaviorism: we all have our own view of the benefits and short-comings of Behaviorism. Important to remember is that Behaviorism has its strengths and usefulness in the right environment, and it can be supplemented by other theories as we learn more. I think we all agree how useful it is to our understanding of human behavior and learning.

OK, week 5.
Today we were graced with the presence of Athena Nazario, our friendly SFSU librarian, who delivered an informative presentation on conducting research. The PPT presentation is in iLearn under week 5. If you still have questions or problems you can email Athena at:

anazario@sfsu.edu

I won't cover the presentation much, since you can view the PPT, but there was a couple of interesting elements related to Google : the good, the bad and the ugly. Athenia used The Yes Men site to illustrate how web information can e deceptive. If you go to: http://www.gatt.org

and compare to: http://wto.org , the 'real WTO' site, you can see that they are nearly indistinguishable. The Yes Men apparently posed as WTO businessmen to lure outside parties, with success apparently. Interesting. The other example used was typing "Martin Luther King" into Google for results....one hit is www.martinlutherking.org which comes up as the third result. This is a frighteningly racist site that claims "true historic facts," which painfully underlines the reality that ANYTHING can be found on the internet without regard to accountability. There is scholar.google.com which is still in Beta, and the intent is for more scholarly articles, etc--but I'm not sure that it is imperious to bogus research hits...

http://democracynow.org was also a recommended site

Library search:

link+ shared catlog--regional

iliad –national search form (found under document delivery in library web Page)

---all freee services

Databases:

For education:

ERIC

Academic search elite (recommended*)

Education full text

Other:

PsycInfo (mind and tech)

Applied Science & Technology abstracts

Communications and Mass Media Complete (influence of media on humans)

Use of ‘AND’ between words on google search is implied by google

To limit search use OR, NOT –use caps

If unsure, use part word—like 'construct' will hit 'construct', 'construction', 'constructivist', etc. uses all variations of that word

Break into concepts for search (concept AND concept OR subject).

Use subject words or descriptors to limit search

Click scholarly, refereed or peer review…to limit to popular articles

Use subject terms to get more search hits if hits are limited

If you retrieve a siting, but no article go to : elec journal list, or catalog

We all logged on to begin our searches….Athena came around to answer questions, etc.

_______

Dr. Foreman brought up the Net generation—folks born after 1982. Computers are connected to them—multi-taks—always connected.
More motivated? Dr. Foreman suggested that the Net Gen are more hungry for stimuli, knowledge, more motivated.

Training needs to change to accommodate Net Gen.

Edutopia—why did I write this? For next week, read Chapter 4 and listen to lecture link under Assignment for week 6 ---respond in forum.

Constructivism—digital story telling march18. This will be exciting! BRING:

Story: 200 words, music, photos/images. We will work together to polish our writing—read, use iMovie for our digital story telling. Story is about whatever we wish, maybe something that changed us, transformation..important event. We watched Dr. Foreman's DST project; a poem about coming to a decision about travelling to Rwanda to comfort the children and people who survived the genocide--very moving piece.

We also watched a Behavior video—a student from last semester(?) final project. I don't think I was alone in feeling a bit awed by the level of production involved in this video, however, I found some of the film imagery distracting to the theme. I kept trying to associate what I was hearing with what I was seeing, and, at times, it was a bit much. Nonetheless, the theory of Behaviorism was distilled in a way that most of us seemed to grasp and find meaningful. By the way, Anthony volunteered to make a copy for anyone interested--I think we just need to pass along a DVDR? Money, too? See Anthony for details!

Carmen brought up a question about positive feedback/reinforcement. Where is feedback, reinforcer w/ 15 yr old fat kid, her nephew, who creates a false profile and pretends to be 22, virile, handsome, etc and 'snares' girls on the web. Some thought it was strange, but others seemed to applaud the creativity...successful results--what is reinforced? Every individual needs different reinforcers...Are reinforcers less valid? Equal?

_______

Cognitive Theory-

Encode, retrieve,

Sensory—attention

Short term memory—limited space

Lost w/o rehearsal or encoding strategy

Wee exercise: we all get to peer into box containing 20 items, we get 45 seconds to mentally log the items, then back to seats to write down as many as we can remember. I got:

Comb, Fork, Screw driver, Hair clip, Battery, Sugar, Non-sugar, Eraser, Cream-face bottle, Aspirin, Roll of clear tape, Post-it pad, Pen, Prism, Tangerine

Did Not get: Lipstick, Clip-binder, Candle, Cassette tape, Mustard

Dr. foreman:

Use a structure:
Group by origin, color, office supply, shape

Harder if no schema (ie office supply, food items, etc)

Terence(aka Mr. Memory)—recalled all 20!

Multi-media is good to reinforce different channels in brain—so use in creating instructional design!

Dual-code in play here

More manipulating (touching, some people verbalized items), more encoding..

We all are actively processing

Compare / contrast to help learners remember

Novel object we remember-but not too novel

Forget well-known objects…

Combine cognitive and constructive (const also encorporates behavior)

DIGITAL storytelling:

Constructivist project

If story accompanied the objects—we would remember:

3 types of long term memory

Declarative

Procedural

Episodic (story—easy to remember)

Dr. Foreman will be going to Japan, and speaking at a faculty development conference. Also she is going to go to Korea to speak at Korean Society of Educatonal Technology conference.

Remember:

For next week, read Chapter 4 and listen to lecture link under Assignment for week 6 ---respond in forum.

See you all on the 18th--bring 100-200 word story, 15-20 digital photos, music file, creativity and a dish to pass.

Desmond Rutherford