Hey everyone, I'm finally back. Look forward to class on Monday.
The obvious answer would be Yes. Yes, I have learned from past experiences. Although courses are one good example of the situation, it does not cover everything. As we progress further into academia and college, we encounter material that we have faced before. Several classes often have required pre-requisites. Once we have taken a course we are expected to have learned the basics and then apply the knowledge towards the next level. This is a natural progression of learning through experience where the learning can be quantified.
However, more often than not, I notice that I learn from having more experience. For example, after repeated practice in tennis by body takes action in a game before my mind does. The learning come through a mass of experience either through practice or match experience. Another example on a smaller scale and that which is more personal: minesweeper. That's the game that is available on every pc with a Windows OS. In the beginning, I felt that they game was very hard and I couldn't understand some of the nuances. Later, I suddenly found myself playing the game at a rapid pace and defusing the mines using intuition rather than logical reasoning. I became familiar with certain arrangements so much so that I no longer need the reasoning process.
As seen from the previous example, I believe that “learning” does not posses “scale.” Learning can be “transformative” but it is not required to be so. The small things that we experience in life are as important to our learning experience as life-shattering incidents. Everything makes up for who we are. Although, I do not possess a definitive example, many story books often involve characters that have vastly different personalities even with the same background. However, I digress.
The question is whether we can introspectively recognize whether we have learned anything from an experience and consciously “use” your learning, even transfer it. I do not often notice whether I'm actively using a lesson that I have learned from past experience. I feel that it depends on at the point of learning whether I was active or passive. If I came in with the objective of learning, I actively participate in the experience. Then as I become aware of the knowledge gained, it is also easier to pass it on to others. I often help my friends in their class work and evidence of my learning is transfered to the professors through testing.
During passive learning, these are often the skills one refers to when they mention someone with many years of experience. When one collects experience with many years on the job, they sometimes may not be aware of the changes within themselves. In addition, they cannot easily pass on this knowledge to others since they did not amass it as one does in school. I can label this somewhat along with intuition similar to when I play video games. I often make decisions that others might consider as a waste of time simple because after many hours of playing the game I just know when and where to speed up/slow down or to buy/exchange weapons atc. The gaming knowledge is something I gained through experience and not everything is transferable since a mjor portion of it is intuition.
Lastly, I think that everyone judges learning differently. In the class setting, grades often lend themselves as a measure of student learning. However, some students are content with a B, others A and few who strive for the A+. Their standards do not match up amongst their peers. There are also the cases when an engineer in a history class does not desire to learn more that what's necessary to pass the class. The engineer and the history major have different objectives which changes their perspective on learning. So for an engineer simply knowing the year in which the Magna Carta was signed may be impressive, it would be unthinkable for a British history major to not know every detail regarding who signed it, when, why, etc.
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Welcome back. We missed you.
ReplyDeleteIn class a while back, I can't remember whether you were there or not, we talked about learning to drive a car, how initially that required so much concentration that you couldn't talk or listen to music at the same time. But with gained proficiency many of the processes in driving no longer require conscious monitoring. They have become autonomous and self-regulating.
That said, I'm not quite sure what you mean in making the distinction between active and passive learning. What determines which it is for you, the amount of prior experience or something else, such as the tasks you go through to figure out what is going on?
About your penultimate paragraph and learning that occurs slowly with the passage of time, where the experience accumulates and expertise develops, I think you are wrong about passing on that knowledge to others, but doing so is very time consuming. The notion of an apprenticeship is based on the idea of knowledge transfer between the master and the apprentice. Many people believe that is still the best way for deep learning. Apprenticeships are lengthy endeavors and often the apprentice learns from silently watching the master, not from a directed inquiry.
You're right about the transfer of knowledge. What I had meant to say was that the knowledge couldn't easily be transferred in a packet. It would take something similar to an apprenticeship to learn them.
ReplyDeleteRegarding active and passive learning, it is the mentality you possess at the time of learning. If you learn consciously and with the intent of using the knowledge, it would be active. If you just happen to pick it up subconsciously, such as you don't know when you learned it but you happen to use the knowledge proficiently, it would be passive learning.
Active learning is usually when you are taught something explicitly. Passive could be explained as tips you have picked up over years of experience or practice.
From this we can see the method of transferring the knowledge of each type of learning is different. For something that you have learned actively, you can easily teach others the way you were taught. For things that you have learned passively, although it is possible for experienced people to give specific examples or tips to newbies, the majority of your experience can only be shared with time.
Ok - thanks. Just an fyi, the expressions active learning and passive learning have a different meaning to folks who engage in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, where active learning refers to a variety of techniques where students work in small groups and passive learning is a negative term referring to what students do in lecture most of the time.
ReplyDeletePersonally, I've had trouble with those terms for some time because I believe the students can be active during lecture - following the argument and engaging in it fully. However, it is definitely possible for students to use note taking as a way to avoid having to follow the argument - they'll do it later. Then they are being passive.
Nobody but me uses the expression, but what you called passive learning I call learning en passant, conveying the idea that the learning happens during some other activity.