How the World Works Confidence Fragile Interest Failure Criticism Teach to Learn Intellectual Contagion
Starting Place Making Choices Learn to Learn Learn the Future Hands On Evaluation
Site Map Site Aims Links Forum Biography

Learning Choices

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 what enables the brain to experience both pleasure and pain and how this can be used to ensure learning takes place.
Hands On Learning

If you click here, you will be taken to the 'hands on' page. This page is about the importance of personal experience. It explains how personal experience by providing concrete examples and multy sensory input provides better understanding and more persistent memory. It also explains that although hands on learning would be impossible for all learning just a small amount of story centered work improves all learning.
About The Future

If you click here, you will be taken to the 'learning about the future' page which provides information about how knowledge of possible futures helps us prepare for whatever future eventuates. It also is about how knowledge of the future enables us to better guide ourselves toward a future that is to our liking and in our interest. Finally is is about how knowledge of possible futures enables us to be more proficient in how and what we learn.
Learning To Learn

If you click here, you will be taken to the 'meta learning' page. This page explains how learning about how to learn makes us proficient at learning. This covers building a box of cognitive tools that are useful in praticing three types of learning. How to form theories, testing them, reformulate them, and accomidate them. How to create knowledge. How to assimilate the knowledge collected by our forbears.
Starting Where You Know

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.
Contageous Learning

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.
Teaching To Learn

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.
Learning From Criticism

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.
Learning From Failure

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.
Confidence & Competence

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.
Fragile Interest

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.
How The World Works

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.
Evaluation

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.