Instructor Broadcasting: courses about participants, not instructors

Nice and short from George Siemens (http://www.elearnspace.org/) in talking about Stanford U. (http://www.ai-class.com/) massive open AI course.  His point is not so much about the specific course, but about the overall direction of course design.  Or, to paraphrase another famous quote: "it's the learner, stupid"

"Quick advice to Know Labs: whatever your platform becomes, design it to optimize learner sharing of their sensemaking artifacts, not instrutor broadcasting. It's an obvious statement, but if you want to unleash the creativity of participants, tools need to be designed for them, not for instructors"

Spaced Repetition and Retrieval Practice (a.k.a. making students work to learn)

Nice to see some real innovation in learning discussed on the main thought pages of a major newspaper.  It's this kind of research, and this kind of information sharing, that can make a difference in the work of schools and teachers.  This seems like common sense, doesn't it? 

"When we first acquire memories, they are volatile, subject to change or
likely to disappear. Exposing ourselves to information repeatedly over
time fixes it more permanently in our minds, by strengthening the
representation of the information embedded in our neural networks."

and...

Every time we pull up a memory, we make it stronger and more lasting, so
that testing doesn’t just measure, it changes learning. Simply reading
over material, or even taking notes and making outlines, doesn’t have
this effect.

and...

When students can’t tell in advance what kind of knowledge or
problem-solving strategy will be required to answer a question, their
brains have to work harder to come up with the solution, and the result
is that students learn the material more thoroughly.

In recent years, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists and educational psychologists have made a series of remarkable discoveries about how the human brain learns. They have founded a new discipline, known as Mind, Brain and Education, devoted to understanding and improving the ways in which children absorb, retain and apply knowledge.

Mind, Brain and Education methods may seem unfamiliar and even counterintuitive, but they are simple to understand and easy to carry out. And after-school assignments are ripe for the kind of improvements the new science offers.

Thanks to Annie
Murphy Paul: Teasing the brain to make homework count | Dallas Morning
News Opinion and Editorial Columns - Opinion and Commentary for Dallas,
Texas - The Dallas Morning News for good work in bringing these small but important findings to the fore.