Learning in Waves

Nope not google wave,

The concept is old but I thought I would do a bit of reflectiveness on the subject for my own benefit.  In the old classroom when a student would learn a bit of information, the wave of retention would begin.  Reinforcement would start the process again, in the old days and still to now this would be achieved via homework.  This would carry on until either it dissipated or the barrier broke and it entered the long term memory.

Nowadays people are thinking about how they can support the student to create their own wave.  Formally this occurs using groupwork or now socially.using social network sites.  We can support this by creating social learning tools or by creating social learning areas (SEA) within our learning centres.

E-learning can be seen to strengthen the wave by creating bursts at different intervals.

Constructivism occurs in a similar method, by planting the idea or item of knowledge within the subject the item can grow and change according to how the subject views and changes much like a tree with branches.

Liasing with students

This is more of a question of sort, I was wondering how many people liase with their students union, especially with regards to rolling out large central student software.I think this is something that we could do a bit better to gather a better feel of what the students are missing or want.  Or should this communication always come from the lecturer and if is the communication getting through?

For example, do you put forward your proposals to the students union and gather their feedback or do you rollout large services from the top down?

Changes within our Educational Development Unit

Well I thought I better blog on some changes going on within the department and how that is going to influence the University.  The department now sits at a healthy 7 developers two co-ordinators and one manager, for us this is a big step up with regards to the services that we can offer.  

Without going into to much detail the teams where split with 4 in one department and 4 in another.  This caused direction problems which we are no trying to fix.  

We have setup several roles within the team which will focus on certain aspects of the development.

Software / System / Application developer

Courseware / Interaction / Graphics developer

Server / Database administrator

Project / Service / Resource Manager

Business Analyst / Customer Advisor / Solution architect

and

Split these roles into 

Bespoke Content Development

LMS

END User Tools

Assessment

All developers where allowed to choose where they wanted to place their skills and were most evenly distributed, this resulted in an empowerment of the developer and refreshes the interest and focus of the team.

Dopamine and Education

While we are all running about trying to getas many e-learning applications out there, a method to think about is are we producing e-learning materials that are enjoyable and educational.

After all whoever says education is dull is obviously not learning as much as some who is enjoying their course.  Dopamine is the neurotransmitter which tells our body to experience pleasure among other things and it is noted and researched that we can trigger these dopamine transmitters by challenging and rewarding students on an action, the question is by how much should we reward someone? and everyones threshold is different.  

How can we bring excitment and change to an e-learning application after all, the real world outside education is all about change.  In order to prepare the mind for the outside, after all not every job you get a month to research.

Here is some research on parkinsons disease and learning 

"As it turns out patients with the higher levels of dopamine learn better from positive stimuli and patients with lower levels of dopamine learn better from negative stimuli. Although I was hoping for something a little more exciting, in the case of this experiment a positive stimulus was "Correct!" printed in blue, negative was "Incorrect!" printed in red."

Question is how do we determine whether a person has high levels or low !