Learning Theories: Back-of-the-napkin edition

I spent last week viewing and commenting on CCK11 blog post, but not really writing much about it. I saw a number of posts on digital scholarship, but I still haven't had a chance to listen to the MP3 file. Hopefully today on the commute home! The speaker has a really soft voice and it's hard to really hear him on the train (perhaps some audio post-processing is in order?)

This week in CCK11 we've got learning theories. luckily most of this stuff is a great review for me since we covered most of these theories quite a lot throughout the applied linguistics curriculum. We didn't much with connectivism though (which is why I am attending CCK11) since that was near the end of the semester.

In any case, there is a a nice ten minute video on YouTube that goes over the various major theories of education. If you haven't heard of educational theories, this is quite a good back-of-the-napkin figure to get you started. If you're in instructional design and you haven't come across them, no need to read several hundred pages of theory just to get the gist of things - view this and then proceed from there with the specifics.

So, have you all heard of these theories before and this is just a review, or is it news to you? What do you think about them?

Comments

Apostolos K. ("AK") said…
Thanks for the link. While I have long been skeptical of the scientific value of educational "theories", something about the tone of Ian Robertson's presentation overcame my irritation and helped me come to terms with them as just frameworks for thinking about education. At this "back of the napkin" level I do think they can be useful - but it seems that the extent of their elaboration in the academic literature is not justified by any association with useful testable predictions.
February 17, 2011 at 3:05 PM
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