This entry was posted on Friday, April 4th, 2008 at 7:53 am by Dawn Poulos and is filed under Industry talk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking about hobbies, liberal arts and knowledge of current events as luxuries, but our minds work better when our learning experiences are broad rather than narrow. Few people would directly argue that creativity be left behind in childhood, but many of the interesting experiences that promote cognitive adaptability have been left out of the workplace, and increasingly out of public schools.
Newburyport, MA resident and president of Newburyport-based Allied Vision Technologies, Inc., speaks out against the removal of foreign language instruction in the local school:
… “Without an understanding of foreign languages, and the cultures learned as part of foreign language education, we would not be preparing our children properly for the future. We are becoming a global society, and without foreign language instruction, we’re leaving our children at a disadvantage. Even having learned just one other language besides English, I find I’m able to understand more clearly separate words in another language, rather than just hearing a continuous stream of sounds.” …
The single-minded focus on achieving some specific, obviously useful result from life and learning experiences cuts off opportunities for people of all ages to discover unexpected talents, like being able to better sound out words in languages they haven’t even studied.
Instruction for young people has long been a mixed front for innovation, but the higher potential of resistance among students continues to force evolutions in education. The integration of elearning technology in grade school classrooms around the world has had the most success when the creativity of the teacher meets enjoyable uses of technology:
… But technology of this kind is not a substitute for good teaching, which is at the core of effective education. Rather, technology provides teachers with powerful tools to enrich and extend what the best teachers are good at: explaining, demonstrating, and involving and engaging pupils in learning.
This is where the argument against technology really begins to fall apart. Young people today have grown up with technology. They respond to technology in the classroom because it feels like an extension of what they do in their free time. To get the best out of pupils we need to do what parents and educators have always done - harness their children’s passions and interests. …
Adult learners are certainly more disciplined than school age young people, yet they still need to stretch their neurons in enjoyable and unexpected directions to get the fullest use out of them. Even grownups can surprise themselves and others with the discovery of new talents and skills. They just need the opportunity to stretch out and try things.
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