COLLABORATION

31.05.06 notes on the first session with Allan on ICT in Education.

“We were making the future,” he said, and hardly any of us troubled to think what future we were making. And here it is”

-The Sleeper awakes, H.G. Wells

We are looking at using the computer as a tool of learning.

How can we use computers in an effective way in the learning process for the human species from 0-12?

With this question was introduced the constructivist theory of education based on Piaget's philosophy and observations of children through to young adults:

Each person builds his own knowledge.

Children are fundamentally not adults and go through a development in four stages that demand a different approach to the learning process according to Time:

0-2 Sensori-motor Stage: a time when the child masters his own movements: to grasp, to sit, to rise, to sound, to walk a.s.o. He becomes aware of him self as separate from his surroundings and the surroundings as separate from him.

3-7 Pre-operational Stage: Now the child can name the world around him and make himself understood through language.

7-11 Concrete Operational Stage: during this age the capacity for logical thought is born. The young person can begin to make discerning judgments based on his thinking processes.

This is an appropriate time to teach the child about time and number.

In our tutorial we had an enjoyable moment when we put into practice this concrete learning, gathering in groups (Vygotsky) around a heap of corn kernals we had to figure out a pattern to make clear the difference between prime and even numbers. this was a display of creative teaching for any age group but in particular for the above one.

12-15 Formal Operational Stage: extending into adulthood, the ability to think abstractly is possible. Perceiving others' thoughts and the consequences our thinking have on our world can now come into play.

Albert Einstein, mentioned as the greatest genius of his era, encouraged the human being to construct his own understanding of a situation, instead of filling the empty vessel with unfiltered information as if you were “braindead” (Allan). I might be allowed to add here that the good Albert also said “Imagination is greater than knowledge”

ICT consiousness need to foster responsibility in its use and the ability to make moral and ethical decisions.

The Russian psychologist VYGOTSKY is also to be studied with the view that we learn all through our lives in a social context.

Our task is to produce a creative weblog making use of all our skills from the previous course: multimedia form(?) Allan wants no boring old essay but we should be able to express a critical perspective from our own point of view in an academic manner.

I will conclude this summary of our first session with Allan with the pertinent statement from our shared time: We do not learn in isolation, we learn with each other and through each other.
"Life loves learning. Learning loves life." Rudolf Steiner