Sunday, December 15, 2013

Fitting the Pieces Together

It is hard to believe that I am coming to the final stretch of my EDUC course - Learning Theories and Instruction.   As I reflect back over the past seven weeks, I am amazed at how much information was packed into such a brief timeframe.    One of my first assignments in this course was to identify what type of learning theory or style was most applicable to me in my own learning.   I did this early on in the course as I was just beginning to study the behaviorist, cognitive, and constructivist theories.     

Originally I identified with cognitive theories since they stress being able to build upon prior knowledge and the acquisition of schema.   I have always taken an active role in understanding my environment and have applied various strategies of metacognition.    One of my tried and true strategies is to break difficult information down into more manageable chunks so that I can begin to grasp and understand it.

As the course progressed, we continued to learn about these theories as well as varying opinions and assessments of them.  We also studied connectivism, social learning theory, sociocultural theory, and adult learning theory.    Each new theory I found applicable to me in some shape or form.  The self-direction and self-motivation of adult learning theory sounded very familiar as I realized that when I am motivated by something important to me, I am able to be quite disciplined.    Social learning theory reminded me of all of the interactions I had growing up, throughout school and life and how those experiences with others and imitating their examples helped shape the person I am today.  I can see from a constructivist perspective how concepts I learned during my undergraduate study of education 25 years ago have evolved as I am reintroduced to educational concepts in this master's program.   Experiencing connectivism by setting up a blog with links and RSS feeds from sources related to instructional design was eye opening.   I feel like I have discovered a new way of learning.

In summary, I still think that my own learning is most closely tied to the cognitive theory but I am very excited to see where connectivism leads me.   I feel that this is such a new concept and with our ever changing world of half-life of information,  one statement captures the essence of what the future holds.   "The capacity to know more is more critical than what is actually known." (Siemens, 2008)