Making Connections

1. Making Connections Building Knowledge Networks

2. Overview: Learning Process

3. Our Students? • “. . . Here and there in the midst of their ignorance, there were small disconnected islets of knowledge . . .” George Orwell The Clergyman’s Daughter

4. Disconnected Islets

5. Novices vs. Experts “One important way experts’ and novices’ knowledge organizations differ is the number or density of connections among the concepts, facts, and skills they know . . . as experts in our domain, we may organize our knowledge in a way that is quite different from how our students organize theirs.” Susan Ambrose et al How Learning Works

6. How Learning Works Novice Learners Expert Learners Novices whose knowledge is “disconnected and lacks coherence can simultaneously hold and use contradictory propositions . . . without noticing the inconsistencies.” “Experts tend to automatically process information in coherent chunks based on their prior knowledge and then use these chunks to build larger, more interconnected knowledge structures.”

7. “Experts tend to automatically process information in coherent chunks based on their prior knowledge and then use these chunks to build larger, more interconnected knowledge structures.” How Learning Works Connected Learning

8. Experts vs. Novices

9. Making Connections “It is not a stretch to say that any neuronal network might potentially become connected with any other network, if that connection is a useful one.” James Zull The Art of Changing the Brain

10. The Importance of Prior Knowledge “We must let our students use the neuronal networks they already have. We cannot create new ones out of thin air or by putting them on a blackboard. And we cannot excise old ones. The only recourse we have is to begin with what the learner brings.” James Zull The Art of Changing the Brain

11. “They [the students] always showed more intelligence when it was a question of making something instead of merely learning.” Dorothy’s Wallpaper

12. Making Connections