Sam's Blog

Link to family finance resource

Dear Zhongjie, Haozhi, Shaafi and Guancong, I had the opportunity to review your Learning Resource. Family finance is an important topic that often lacks attention. Many of us students will spend a substantial portion of our lives working, so having a foundation of personal finance knowledge is an effective way to ensure that the time we spend working can result in rational purchase decisions such as investing in our first home or in the stock market.

My first constructive piece of advice is that images that help describe your learning activities might be beneficial to enlivening your project. This is just a suggestion, but a few (cited) stock images could go a long way. Pexelsis a site that I often use to find free online images. 

(source Pexels)

It’s a great idea for your learning activities to be done on EXCEL. Although I have never used the Portfolio system myself, It seems like an accessible way to track personal finance. I imagine that there are lots of online tutorials explaining the Portfolio system online as well, in case your learners want to dive deeper into those systems. In terms of accessibility, I am wondering if EXCEL will always be accessible. Will they need to have an Office 365 account? Will they have to have a Windows computer? Alternatively, would your learners be able to use Google Sheets and generate similar results? 

This resource has a great structure, and I really support the topic! The course aims to provide a diverse learning experience to a variety of users; I liked that there are multiple lessons which are available within various learning contexts, such as high school students, adults and employees. Your resource makes great use of technologies like BrightSpaces, Zoom, Excel and Pocketguard too! 

Thanks for reading,

Sam Jensen.

Hi, again Derek, excellent overview of experiential learning. The abstract conceptualization component is so crucial to overlaying one experience into another. It seems daunting to have a “step” of experiential learning be the need to abstractly relate it to larger concepts and fundamental understandings of the world around us, but the good news is that I think primarily our subconscious is what does this job. This is to say, we don’t have to take what we’ve learned in experience and manually try to think of all our other experiences it relates to; instead, our brain is actively trying to draw those connections itself to make sense of the world.

On the side of the learner, the active experimentation step is seemingly the part that takes the most work. The learner has to put themselves into a learning situation that allows them to creatively apply previous experiences that they’ve learnt from and interrelate them into their ‘active experiment’. Thank you!

Hi Derek, in your explanation of behaviourism, the students would participate in behaviours such as recycling or composting that are in line with sustainable action in order to integrate their own lives into learning about climate change. In the cognitivist approach, the learners would recall the difference between a pot that boils with the lid on versus the lid off to use it as an analogy for what climate change is. Your last approach, constructivist, would allow the learners to use their own inferences from an experience to then learn how climate change works: the thermometers in two different jars. 

Thanks for your post; it helps me decipher the differences between these 3 approaches! Take care, Sam.

Accessibility – how do we move beyond text and videos in low-engagement circumstances?

Hi from POD 5. Our interactive learning resource will be a comprehensive guide to sustainability while living in Victoria. For one of our learning activities, I plan to show our learners a couple of Youtube videos outlining the problem with recycling in general (often, products just get downcycled). In the same lesson, I will explain some unique attributes of the recycling system in Victoria and talk about some general info about our waste system. To make this learning activity, I plan to have text and videos, but for the assessment, I plan to integrate a voice memo option to describe aspects of Victorias waste system and list some general ideas that were surprising or interesting to the learner. Likewise, our learners will be asked what one thing they would change within Victoria’s waste system if they had the chance is. I am particularly excited about this last question because it will hopefully engage the learner to reflect on their own potential to make a change if they think there is a problem they could help fix.

I hope to push further into the accessibility of this lesson as we create our draft. One of the significant inaccessibility of online education is that it can be boring, and only encourage low-level thinking and reading. I think the face-to-face online discussion is one of the best ways to create engagement between learners, but this isn’t always an option. Our learning resource is made to be asynchronous, so it will be difficult to have any real-time conversation. It also depends on the types of learners are taking the online course; if the learners are simply trying to ‘check a box’ on their transcript, then it might be more difficult to engage them wholeheartedly. In contrast, if, for example, the learners is taking the course out of interest or because they want to work in a career related to the field, it might be easier to see the direct value of the course they are taking.

I think this problem of engagement is a critical one, and strongly pertains to the topic of “accessibility”; if learners have a hard time concentrating or motivating themselves to work, an online resource which is asynchronous may simply not be the best option. Alternatively, if barriers are present for in-person engagement to classes, then synchronous online classes, with real time engagement such as polls and conversations, may be a better choice.

Great post, Amber! I appreciate how you adapt your teaching methods to different types of students and find the behaviourist approach effective in a classroom setting, but also incorporate elements of constructivism and cognitivism. Your point about engagement being a challenge in behaviourism and finding ways to focus students is valid. Your emphasis on recognizing different learning styles and individual education plans shows your dedication to providing a fair and quality education.

For this blog post, I’m going to explore the video of Destin from Smarter-Everyday in his journey to ride the backwards brain-bike (BBB). This video is an excellent insight into neuroplasticity which I define as the context of mind in which we are able to best learn new information and make new connections. 

After watching Destin’s attempt on the BBB, I watched a follow-up video where Destin challenged another Youtube creator named Mike Boyd to attempt to learn to ride the BBB. Boyd’s Youtube channel centers around his undertakings to learn new hands-on skills. Boyd has successfully learned many skills from unicycling, to juggling, to spinning a basketball on the tip of his finger! Sure enough, Boyd was able to learn how to ride the BBB in 1 hour and 29 minutes whereas It took Destin 8 months (on-and-off) to learn to ride the bike.

We could say that Boyd is trained in learning new skills; he can curate neuroplastic mindsets for learning. When we are young, our minds are less habitualized to functioning in a certain way, and this is a reason that we can pick up new languages quickly. On the other hand, when we are young, we have not developed the skills to know how to teach ourselves, so much of our learning is dependent on the resources given to us from the outside environment. As people begin to know themselves, they can understand the particular methods that are effective to optimize their own learning.

The book “thinking fast and slow” by Daniel Kahneman talks about “system 1” and “system 2” as two different parts of our learning systems in our minds. System 1 is the part of the brain that automatically responds in the way it thinks is right whereas system 2 is the part of the brain that uses critical analysis to make decisions. In simple, learning must take place through system 2 and then once a skill is learnt, it can automatically be used through the system 1. In a video called “The Science Of Thinking”, Veratasium says that “For most of us, thinking is unpleasant, we try to avoid it when possible”.We are all familiar with the frustration involved with learning a new topic. A lot of the time it is easier to ‘pretend we know’ exactly what we are learning so that we don’t actually need to learn.

Till next time,

Sam.