Brain Based Learning

It’s not what you know, it’s how you know…that you know it… (huh???)

What’s an educational technologist to do? Objectivism, constructivism, behaviorism, cognitivism, there are many isms that don’t seem to get along very well. Although each perspective seems to reflect at least some part of reality, there is little middle ground to reconcile all these varied theories. Reality either exists and is revealed to us as we learn, or there is no reality outside of what we think we know. Each theory seems to exclude the world view of the other, yet none of them can fully explain what we actually see around us.

Perhaps the truth, if there is one, lies somewhere in the middle. Perhaps a theory of “discoverism” can bridge the gap between objectivism’s view of one reality and radical constructivism’s view of multiple, valid realities. Rather than having to choose between single or multiple realities, we can postulate multiple interpretations of a single reality, filtered through the understanding of each individual. No one single interpretation is correct, but each describes it in some real way – much like Newtonian physics is commonly understood to be an approximation of quantum physics. It’s not 100% right, but it’s certainly not wrong either.

Learning is a process, one that does not end with graduation, commencement, or even tenure. It spans our entire lives and our knowledge of the world around us changes and matures as we grow. What we think we know at any one time is some approximation of the truth, and hopefully as we learn more we get closer to understanding how the world really works. Two people may have opposing viewpoints that each hold a sliver of truth – perhaps by combining different pieces we can come closer to a true understanding.

This is one way web 2.0 sources can be helpful. Collective intelligence is more powerful and closer to the “real” truth than one point of view – no matter how credentialed that one point of view is. Each individual is limited by their own biases and temperaments; together it is easier to make those biases disappear. Because of the collective, informal nature of the creation of web 2.0 knowledge, it is imperative to teach students critical thinking skills in order to evaluate new knowledge they encounter once they leave school. Rather than instructing students to ignore an entire source of information it is better to teach them how to properly evaluate it and integrate it with what they already know. This is not to say there is no worth in traditional, peer-reviewed knowledge sources. However, these can best be thought of as forming the foundation on which the critical analysis relies when evaluating web 2.0 sources.

Will we ever discover the true nature of knowledge? Will we ever really know, how we know, and how best to learn and teach? Probably not, but we can still have fun trying to figure it out.

Tags: collective intelligence, epistemology, theories of learning, Web 2.0 Tools