Monday, 27 February 2012

Serendipity in Learning


There is so much information in the world and there are so many leads that you could follow that accidents are often the best way to make connections between ideas.
I let Amazon suggest books to me based on the books I have bought. I have a rather eclectic reading list and so I get some quite wacky suggestions which sometimes I follow and sometimes I don't. You get suggestions of books that other people who have similar book interests have also liked or bought. Occasionally this means I get some very odd suggestions and sometimes these are just what I am looking for. My Chemistry Prof. said it is sometimes the article before the one you went to read in the journal that stimulates the new idea, rather than the article you went to find. As we construct knowledge there is a random aspect to it.
I also keep a list of the books I have read so that I can try and see how I have constructed my views and to see who has influenced me
The nice thing today was going to YouTube to see the video about student motivation, but on the side as a recommended video was another called The Big Mistake in E-learning and so I clicked on this (even before I finished watching what I should have been watching). It sums up perfectly what is wrong with not just e-learning but with most taught courses, certainly at University level. The focus on information and not on the meta-problem of dealing with that information and creating knowledge.
I think it is a great video.

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