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Learning Addiction - The Scientific Explanation
Continuing the theme of ‘learning addiction’ I have been developing (1, 2, 3, 4), it is interesting to see medical science furthering our understanding of why our brains are wired for that (Seeking: How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting. And why that’s dangerous). I guess it should be no surprise […]
How Podcasts and Other Media Feed Learning Addiction
In a recent series of blog posts (1, 2, 3) I talked about the concept of ‘learning addiction’, and that for some people, it can be very tempting to continue acquiring vast quantities of knowlege far and beyond any practical abaility to apply it. Unfortunately, I guess this hilights a problem with podcasts – there […]
Research Shows Multitasking Makes you Dumb
I think I can now shed a little light on part of a quote from this previous post (from a Time Magazine article): …students remember just 20% of the content of class lectures a week later… It seems that research has revealed that multitasking makes you dumb. Once you have read the quotes below, you […]
European vs US University Philosophies
My last post (on some US university curricula becoming more applied) reminded me that there is quite a different approach between European and US universities. European Universities which, by extension includes many Commonwealth countries, (including New Zealand, where I have experience), tend to specialise far more quickly in a chosen major, often having to strategically choose […]
Application of Knowledge Increasing at Universities
When I was looking for an online reference to the quote in my last post, I came across another blog post quoting it with interesting relevance. It discusses a recent article in Time Magazine about the curriculum in at least five US universities changing from pure aquisition of knowledge to emphasising the application of knowledge. I’ll use the […]
Learning Responsibly, in the Context of Bahá'u'lláh
This ‘last post’ thing has become a bit of a habit, but for better or worse, I am about to do it again. Ah well, at least someone comments on my posts 🙂 My last post was talking about a feeling of responsibility to learn with a purpose, rather than learn for the sake of […]
Learning Addiction in the Context of Greek Philosophy
In my last post, I mentioned the idea of ‘learning addiction’: …with the continual increase in knowledge (and technology) production, and such ready access to it (via the internet etc), I am seeing a form of ‘learning addiction’ arise, for example, in people that are subscribed to 600 blogs, or in my case, a ‘healthy’ […]
Figuring out This World, and Another, and Another
I just listened to a free Audible interview with Ben Bova and Orson Scott Card, in which something interesting bubbled up that seemed relevant to my last post. A third party had made the comment that Science Fiction is “a fringe genre read only be teens and techo-nerds”, which prompted the question “do you think […]
Does School Miss the Boat?
I was recently told of some interesting research in the BBC documentary ‘Child of Our Time‘. As they put it, the rate of learning in the first 5 years is phenomenal – far more than any time in the future. Children will learn more in that time that at any other time in their life. So then, […]
More on Motivation
After going through the archives of podcasts at EdTechTalk, I recently listened to Women Of Web 2.0, Episode 7. 56 minutes in, they have an interesting discussion about intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation related to the concept of Locus of Control. As this is related to two of my previous posts (here and here) I though it was worthy of mention. Being a podcast, it is hard to give you a simple reference to the discussion point, so […]