Here are four thought-evoking highlights I’d like to shout out:
- Cathy started with such a simple but vivid description of an experiment, exploring how we learn to recognize what is important and deserving of our attention and how that affects us later in life. As soon as I stretched my leg getting relaxed, thinking “Alright, nothing new, another article about neural science”, she called me out– stepping one foot further, she redefines children who have learning disabilities, that it’s not the kids, but rather the teaching techniques that are outdated and need to evolve. So many different types of argument sources from anecdotal to clinical and psychological are quoted to showcase by using changed teaching methods, students with ‘learning disabilities’ have flourished.
- She points out that the current education conducted in a traditional way, is preparing young people for the past, not the future.
Not only is she hammering the obsolete tested assessment methods, but she also disagree with the formalized learning environments. I indeed do see eye to eye with her that we need to “question whether the form of learning and knowledge making we are instilling in our children is useful for their future” when the new “mass collaboration” modes of working is inevitable and necessary.
- She uses technology as an analogy for the human mind, and that the brain is like an iPhone.
“From contemporary neuroscience we know the brain is a lot like an iPhone. It comes with certain basic communication functions bundled within it, and it has apps for just about anything… These iPhone apps represent the things we pay attention to, what counts for us, what we are interested in.”(p 14) What she was trying to do is showcasing how mind and technology can meet, with the latter becoming an extension of the mind, not simply a lifeless tool but an assistance to the mind.
- Cathy puts forward is “mass collaboration by difference”. I consider she is
suggesting that it is no longer as important what you know as who you know, and we can distribute various parts of any given task among others who are dedicated to the same task with all kinds of social media technology’s assistance. She applies analogy of mass collaboration with basketball game, that “it is learning to work in which one is always aware of context and competition, in which one leverages one’s own abilities in a given situation with others in that situation in order to succeed. As the situation changes, other abilities are needed–yours, those of your coworkers–and what also changes is whom you work with and how you work together. It is always situational. Always contextual,and always about moving, sometimes with the ball, sometimes without.”(p 225)
So now, I start to question: Are we studying what we are going to use in the future?
There is this video showed by at least 3 hosting companies in the beginning of their own UD information sessions. As one of the attendees, I can’t help but took it personally and felt really offended. Bearing in mind Cathy’s fresh, revoluntionary ideas on teaching, working and learning, what do you think of this video?–