Teaching and Learning

with Technology

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Teaching and learning involves guiding students into comprehension. We must take students from the known into the unknown - making sure that each succeeding thought is comprehensible, rationale, and memorable. We must also make sure our concepts are compounding-that they build upon one another so that those learning have a sense of continuity and of making progress in their understanding of our ideas.

When we're successful at doing this effectively, the quality of a student's comprehension isn't left to chance. We don't just start throwing information at students and hope some of it sticks. This is the approach of traditional education and training takes and its results are mediocre at best. The performance results of all participants generally forms a normal (Bell) curve with some students passing and some failing. If business operated this way losses would always water down profits.

Instead we must leverage technology to take a new approach with students so that no student in the group gets left behind intellectually. Instead of leaving comprehension to mere chance, we must flip our standard practices upside down so that we ensure that a student can build from the understanding he or she currently has to the understanding that we would like a student to have. Notice that this is no one size fits all approach. Every student's pathway to comprehension can, and by definition, will be different.

In guiding comprehension, we must understand the best ways to approach the psychomotor, cognitive and affective domaines of learning.

When we think about learning, there are a few categories that come to mind. We can learn physical skills such as typing, playing a musical instrument, or playing a sport. We can learn knowledge like facts, figures, or history. Finally, we can learn things related to ideology such as attitudes, values, or beliefs.

To successfully instruct students in the cognitive and affective domains of learning, the methods of instruction should be interactive.

Rather than the transfer or injection of knowledge into the student's mind through an inflexible mechanicsm such as a lecture, the instructor is more effective when an interacive process is employed. This occures when the instructor and student collaborate to find the best strategy for producing meaningful insight in the student's mind, and this is the essence of cognitive constructionist theories. The meaning that is formed in the student's mind is not an exact duplicate of the meaning that the instructor was conveying. It becomes something different in the mind of the learner based on how the new information mingles into the learner's existing knowledge structures.