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A Visual Primer On Learning Theory

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Educators are always striving to find ways to make curriculum relevant in students’ everyday lives. More and more teachers are using social media around les

“Metaskills are abstract skills which have to do with other skills. For example, an autodidact is a person who has the metaskill of being able to self-teach him or herself new skills without an outside teacher. A teacher is a person who has the metatalent to teach skills to others; here I speak of someone who is a teacher of a wide variety of things, not necessarily a teacher who focuses on one single topic. Teaching one single topic, like calculus, is a skill, but the ability to learn an arbitrary skill and then teach it to others, that is a meta-skill. Generalization is a metaskill where you look at a wide variety of skills and figure out the common underlying patterns. Specialization is one where you can take a skill and focus it more precisely, to get a new skill which is a special case of the broader original skill.

Training a metaskill is the same. Just because a skill is meta, doesn’t make it any different from any other skill. The difference is that we don’t usually consciously train our meta-skills because most people don’t even recognize them as skills. Besides that, training a meta-talent is more difficult than training a skill, because you can’t as easily fall into a pattern of repetition. Whereas you can do basketball training by throwing a basketball through a hoop a whole lot of times, you can’t, for example, teach yourself calculus a whole lot of times. In order to train the meta ability of being an autodidact, you must consciously seek out new things to teach yourself. If mastering chess requires playing ten thousand games, then mastering autodidacticism requires teaching yourself ten thousand different skills.”

In a previous post, I talked about the difficulties in making predictions in online learning. Bearing in mind the hazardous nature of this endeavour, here are my predictions – or perhaps better, I should say ‘forecasts’ – for online learning in 2013. The percentages are not probabilities in a statistical sense, but an estimate of the proportion of institutions in Canada that will move in these directions in 2013.

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Around the world, governments and businesses face a conundrum: high levels of youth unemployment and a shortage of job seekers with critical skills. How can a country successfully move its young people from education to employment? What are the challenges? Which interventions work? How can these be scaled up? These are the crucial questions.

See on Scoop.it - Blended Learning Lab

Visual, aural, verbal, physical, logical, social, solitary. As an online educator, teacher, facilitator you probably wonder what kind of the 7 styles of learning are the most effective for your students, learners.

No matter what industry you’re in, your company can’t survive without technology. And these days, even non-technical employees know that technology goes way beyond desktop computers and networks. From smart phones and tablet computers to mobile apps and cloud-based technology, there’s a plethora of technological advancements to not only keep track of, but also to profit from. To stay competitive, your organization needs to anticipate the most significant technology trends that are shaping your business and then develop innovative ways to use them to your advantage, both inside and outside of your organization. Remember, if it can be done, it will be done. If you don’t use these technologies to create a competitive advantage, someone else will.

Over the next five short years the following game-changing technologies will transform how we sell, market, communicate, collaborate, educate, train, innovate, and much more.

There are a lot of dangerous stereotypes out there. “Asian students are always better at math.” “Boys are always better at sports.” And perhaps the most dangerous of all: “The current generation are all digital natives.”

It is easy to see the danger in the first two stereotypes. They tend to influence the way teachers, parents, peers and society in general classify, justify and treat whichever group is represented by the stereotype. I’m not sure enough people give enough thought to the third, equally dangerous, stereotype.

Helping students and empowering teachers—for real—breeds great businesses, say Wikispaces cofounders

Most of today’s education technology startups are doomed to fail. ”But wait!” you say. “It’s 2012 and edtech startups are sprouting up everywhere, pushing real innovation into a slow-moving yet vitally important market, gaining traction, getting funded!”

Recently, one of the teachers who is participating in our district’s 21st Century Learning grant project came to talk with me about assessing 21 century skills – one of the expectations for teachers in this project. Her observation was that students frequently practice the skills when engaged in research or project based learning. The thing she was struggling, with, though, was how to “grade it.”