Mood:
not sureNow Playing: Mere Makhna Meri Soniye (Baghban)
Topic: Seminars
Went to a seminar by Prof. John Mason yesterday. It was quite interesting ... he was talking about examples and trying to find in my own words ... a 'perfect example' ... one that inspires the theory or concepts being illustrated. He also mention something brilliant to me ... something called an 'example space' ... basically everyone has an example space, and it is your duty as a teacher to increase that example space ... or fill it up ... but I am guessing it is distended like the universe. But he says, that as you increase the example space the student is able to increase their creativity more.
I guess this is where the bidirectional learning occurs through inductive or deductive methods. But one of his theories (or was it one of his colleagues) says that learning is actually about discernment. Now this is interesting (I actually had a talk afterwards) and we were talking about what is actually learning and how we can measure it ... and I raised the question of these LSI and ASI ... can't remember his response ... but I think it is a philosophical debate on the approach to take to measure the 'learning' or discernment of a student from linear programming software (yup told him my research too - and said it was still being fleshed out).
In his speech, he said the best way to determine if examples are useful or students are discerning are by using research probes, because you want to know if students are not just regurgitating the last examples they learnt but able to create ones for themselves and draw their knowledge to the real world. So these research probes go like this by asking students:
1. What is a good example of .....?
2. What examples do you recall off .....?
3. What is a misleading/ poor example ....?
Anyway, he said to contact him a few weeks and we can discuss this stuff .... love this place for that being able to discuss stuff with people and get input! So, got to flesh out the problem more and see what happens. Plus, got to get some research questions for James and Doug for my meeting tomorrow. I hate having our meetings on Mondays, since I got to send the Agenda out on Thursday ... that leaves three days bwt the meeting, in which I could have done something!
