Week 2

This week's lesson is abt understanding learning theories. It initially seemed like rather abstract concepts but however, when explained in layman's terms, these theories can be identified by our past experiences, especially in our growing up years.

Behaviourism
This theory is rather straight forward as it propogates the most traditional way of learning - get it right, you get rewarded or a pat on the back; get it wrong, u get nothing or a smack in the head.

This approach is very close-ended and I believe can be rather effective in driving across correct and undisputed arguements to learners. Other than academic learning, the theory is also applicable to the world of business, in my opinion. One example would be Consumer Behaviourism. Marketeers and advertisers constantly send messages to their intended audiences, illiciting responses, mostly positive ones from them. And over time, such responses will be translated into perceived needs for the products/services that marketeers are selling. The moment the consumer sees the advertising message, his response will most probably be, "i'm gonna get that product."

Thus, even though some people actually argued that this theory is outdated in our current context, as we are living is such an information-rich age where we can choose to learn selectively on what we want to learn, i still do believe somehow, Behaviourism is an embedded trait in human beings, and we will naturally "behave" and "respond" in a certain way.

Cognitivism
This theory believes that learning takes place when the learner adopts an individualistic approach, thinking, interpreting and making sense of the information he or she is exposed to, through a complex, cognitive process.

The first thing that came to my mind was a term which I heard very often while I was serving my national service - "A thinking Soldier".

Well, there is this notion of moving away from "traditional" approaches towards military training in this current generation of soldiers. Gone are the days where we simply listen to orders and do whatever our predecessors had done. Instead, we supposedly, are to internalise what we had learnt, look at our task at hand, look around for available resources and combine these things to generate a viable solution to curb the problem. I believe this is a rather effective approach towards learning as it trains the mind to treat every important task individually and somewhat forces the mind to think deeper into generating solutions to problems. And thru this, the learner will have a deeper impression and better idea of whatever he had learnt from this experience.

Sociocultural Approach
Do we learn things for the sake of the common good? Well, instead of individual learning, this approach believes that only when a collective unit of learners learn together, then learning is considered to take place.

I'm somewhat apprehensive of this theory, as also mentioned in the lecture, that it assumes everyone in the same collective community is willing to share and commit their learning for the bigger cause. I guess it will only work when everyone in the community is passionate about the subject at hand. I suppose a vague example, if I may draw, would be the Open Source community. Programmers from all over the world, program and code softwares to share with each other. They leave the sources open so that should a fellow programmer discovers something new, he/she is free to edit and then, in turn shares his/her new discovery with the entire community. And together, they learn something new.

Well, not sure if the arguments above make sense. Do hope to hear some comments!

cheers!

Week 1

This is the introductory lecture for this module. Even though this module is not one of my first choices, I would say that it seems rather interesting thus far. We get to learn abt things which we have been going the past few decades - Learning! And for the most part of it, learning the electronically way.

One thing though, that this module seems a tad too heavy with all the weekly assignments. But overall, just hope that I'll learn as much as i can from this module. =)

Hello World!