If you click here, you will be taken to a choices page. This page explains how being able to make choices is key in learning and being motivated to learn. It also explains how best to make choices and what the three big choices are that we make that determine how easily and well we learn. The page also indicates enables the brain to experience both pleasure and pain and how this can be used to ensure learning takes place.
If you click here, you will be taken to a misconceptions map page that provides information about and links to pages on the following subjects, 'the school paradox', 'teaching','fear & coercion', 'punishment', 'discipline', 'work & play', 'the fourth R', 'child rights'. My thanks to John Holt for much of this. The information concerning those pages, will be on that misconceptions map page in the same manner as it is on this page.
If you click here, you will be taken to an 'answers' page that endeavors to answer the three questions asked on the home page. These questions are on why children seem to learn better than adults. Why do we have to unlearn some things? Why do we become blocked in learning some things? Why there is a marked falling off in intellectual enthusiasm, venturesomeness and flexibility as children get older?
If you click here, you will be taken to the 'future of learning' page that provides information about an idealized learning future and links to an idealized 'content of learning' in the future page. It also is about and links to pages concerned with the future as related to technology. The pages where this is linked to and expanded on are, 'anytime' 'anyplace' 'mass customizing' 'beforemath' and 'no-matter'.
If you click here, you will be taken to the 'start' page. This page provides information about how learning, like knowledge, is built on whatever was known before. It is not about filling the mind with new, complete, knowledge objects. It is instead the restucturing of existing knowledge through a process of accomodation and extention of existing knowledge by assimilation. Learning only exists in terms of what we already know.
If you click here, you will be taken to the 'contageous' page. This page provides information about how learning is dependent on interlectual contagion and how social contagion functions in producing desire in learning. This page also offers ideas derived from social science investigation, as to how information can be presented in such a way as to make it more likely to cause interlectual contagion.
If you click here, you will be taken to the 'teachlearn' page. This page provides information about how teaching and learning are connected in 3 ways. Learning as teaching is how learners can learn by teaching others. It is a cooperative act involving simultaneously teaching others and learning back from them, and it is what a teacher can learn about how he is improving others in their learning through what he is doing.
If you click here, you will be taken to the 'criticism' page. This page provides information about how knowledge derives and benifits from criticism, and how learning itself is refined and improved by critical feedback. The philosopher Popper gave us the understanding that criticism is the funcion through which knowledge is expanded as each new contributor builds new knowledge by amending what has gone before.
If you click here, you will be taken to the 'failure' page. This page provides information about how failure far from being something to be feared is actuallt essential to the process of learning. This page presents how to overcome fear of failure and embrace failure as an essential and enjoyable part of the learning process. Failure is presented as simply an indication that current knowledge is inaccurate and that learning is required.
If you click here, you will be taken to the 'confidence' page. This page provides information about how confidence in our competence, and more especially our belief in our ability to become competent in any area of knowledge, is essential to the process and success of learning. This page is also about how to cultivate this confidence in our ability to become competent, so that learning can take place without self defeating behavior.
If you click here, you will be taken to the 'fragile' page. This page provides information about fragility of interest when it first appears, and how best to encourage it, so learning will be of widly ranging variety and not restricted to closed off specialities. This page is about how learning should not be about learning more and more about less and less, but rather about learning more and more about more and more.
If you click here, you will be taken to the 'world' page. This page provides information about how learning works. It considers knowledge as having three different aspects or functions in the world. Firstly learning is considered as the improving of a mental model of reality. Secondly learning is considered as an act of creation where knowledge is brought into existance. Thirdly learning is connsidered as updating from our cultural legasy.
If you click here, you will be taken to the 'evaluation' page that provides information about the perils of evaluation and how evaluation can lower intrinsic motivation and destroy much of the desire to learn. It further questions how much evaluation is really needed and suggests how truly useful evaluation could take place based on scientific research. It can tell you how exams tests etc. can be made sensible and effective.