Tuesday, March 29, 2011

What's Worth Learning?

Some blog followers might be interested in discussion-list post “What's Worth Learning” [Hake (2011)].


The abstract reads:


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ABSTRACT: Kenneth Bernstein http://huff.to/gAtYnU has recently reviewed system thinker Marion Brady’s (2010) http://www.marionbrady.com/ book What's Worth Learning. Bernstein quotes Brady as follows:


“Systems are what learners must understand, and that understanding comes from learners themselves investigating many different systems, looking for general principles. This requires (1) noting significant parts of the system being studied, (2) identifying important relationships among those parts, (3) deciding what forces are making the systems operate, (4) noting the interactions between the system and its environment, and (5) tracking changes to the system over time. . . . . . . . If learners apply these five general analytical categories over and over, to systems of all sorts, the categories will give them a mental framework - a way of organizing what is learned.”


For references on systems thinking see “Over Two-Hundred Annotated References on Systems Thinking” [Hake (2009)] at http://bit.ly/9gZdXU (1.8 MB), and Linda Booth Sweeney's website http://bit.ly/goPTkC listing books and research articles on systems thinking for children.

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To access the complete 12 kB post please click on http://bit.ly/fA8aC6.


Richard Hake, Emeritus Professor of Physics, Indiana University

Honorary Member, Curmudgeon Lodge of Deventer, The Netherlands

President, PEdants for Definitive Academic References which Recognize the Invention of the Internet (PEDARRII)



rrhake@earthlink.net

http://www.physics.indiana.edu/~hake

http://www.physics.indiana.edu/~sdi

http://HakesEdStuff.blogspot.com

http://iub.academia.edu/RichardHake


“The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe. . . . . at each level of complexity entirely new properties appear, and the understanding of the new behaviors requires research which I think is as fundamental in its nature as any other.”

- P.W. Anderson in “More is Different” (1972)


REFERENCES [All URL's accessed on 24 March 2011 and shortened by http://bit.ly/.]


Anderson, P.W. 1972. “More is Different: Broken symmetry and the nature of the hierarchical structure of science,” Science 177 (4047): 393-396; online as a 1.2 MB pdf at http://bit.ly/e4Dv8D.


Brady, Marion. 2010. What's Worth Learning. Information Age Publishing, publisher's information at http://bit.ly/fAaI6Z. Amazon.com information at http://amzn.to/hV9irc. An expurgated Google book preview is online at http://bit.ly/hWpklM.


Hake, R.R. 2011. “What's Worth Learning?” online on the OPEN! AERA-L archives at http://bit.ly/fA8aC6. Post of 29 Mar 2011 29 Mar 2011 17:23:33-0700 to AERA-L and Net-Gold. The abstract and link to the complete post are being distributed to various discussion lists.

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