ITEC 800 Week 6 October 7, 2007

We started class by viewing a short video about Simon Foreman’s art exhibit titled “Scared Sacred”. Simon is Dr. Foreman’s son and his website is “simonforeman.com”.

We reviewed the cognitive process and had a discussion of meaningful learning. Learning is meaningful when you need or want it and often comes from real life situations (experiential learning). Several people in class shared some meaning learning experiences in their lives.

Different learners have different ways to get motivated. Some people want to know “why”, while others want to know “what”, while still others want to know “how”.

We then discussed behavior theories again and stated that the behaviorist approach looks for a change in behavior. The cognitive approach looks for a change of knowledge structure and a change in memory. The constructivist approach looks at what you learn and the experience of learning. This is where meaningful learning applies most.

Dr. Foreman then shared a story of a bird that she had and of taking care of a friends dog (this story didn’t end well for the bird). She also shared another story of her bird in which after years of Dr. Foreman making breakfast and attempting to wake her son up for school by calling out to him, the bird associated the sound of coffee being made with her son.

The class then split up into groups and worked on schema theory examples. Group 1 used Airplanes as the basis of their schema, group 2 used trees, group 3 used witches, and group 4 also used trees.

After the break, we discussed pattern recognition and moved into another exercise. Dr. Kim selected 6 people to leave the room and then told the first person the story of Yi Song-gye. The story was then told by the first person to the second and so on. As the story was retold, unfamiliar portions or items were forgotten. We realized that the existing schema has much to do with the remembrance of important details as schema works to try and make things meaningful. When people can’t anchor items to existing schema, people forget.