DB/13

What I thought was really neat and viable was electronic training jackets and cognitive science and neuroscience contributions. These two seemed to be more realistic than say nanotechnology and cybernetics. The idea of smartcard technology is here so more applicable to my lifetime. Perhaps this could be used for medical history and only certain people identified via thumbprint or retinal scan could access it. The brain is so powerful and really only the surface has been scratched. Think of the applications for this if we could learn more about memory and neural activity related to certain actions. Perhaps certain parts of the brain could be stimulated to improve learning and/or retention. Of course, as the authors point out we may need to pay heed to ethical and legal issues related to this topic.

I think my favorite activity for this semester was the blog/webpage building and the social networking. As I have mentioned before these two aspects of technology I will use regardless of getting back into teaching or not. I think these are relatively easy applications and you can be quite creative. Also screencasting seems intriguing so I definitely am going to try to do this for my project if I can everything to line up right.

DB/12

I really enjoyed reading this chapter because it provided some insight into how learners learn! What good is using rich media if it doesn't enhance the learning process? I feel that the area of cognitive processes of learning is so important because instructional methods of instruction depend on it. I will use a couple of ideas from this chapter. I have always used the seven plus or minus 2 chunks of information. Ever wonder why we have 7 digit phone numbers? Because that is all we can remember in our short term memory at a time! Anyway I will continue to use that. I will also use the attention, activation of prior knowledge and motivation because these must be used to be an effective teacher. I was/am still a proponent of the activation of prior knowledge because this is connected to long-term memory. Every lesson I taught was somehow connected to prior knowledge even if it was something we just learned. Some of the evidence the authors used to support and improve learning was pretty obvious like "students learn better from words and pictures than from words alone" and "students learn better from animation and narration than from animation and onscreen text". For me it was intuitive because as a student it was so much more interesting if their was pictures or a video.