Learning Theories

Reflecting throughout my education, it’s interesting to see how the time period (or my age) influence the learning theories adopted by instructors. As children we would be taught to memorize times tables and addition. Although we were young, the knowledge and learning views were rooted in cognitive constructivism. As we progressed to highschool few teachers kept this approach, especially in mathematics. However, most teachers pushed for cognitive constructivism, with some deeply understanding socio-constructivism. In post-secondary I have noticed all instructors primarily apply methods based in social constructivism, and I have felt significantly more engaged in my learning while being able to tackle more cognitively demanding content as a result.

PowerPoint Fails

I am certainly guilty of massacre by PowerPoint. Previously, I viewed PowerPoints as a passive tool to display notes or the occasional graphic. Having limited experience in PowerPoint, and having seen presentations mostly from PowerPoint users of my calibre, I was unaware of how powerful the tool can be. What I thought was going to be a ten minute task turned into many hours of playing with PowerPoint. My main crime was failing to use color, size, and animations to contrast important information. I also frequently would have too much information on one slide. I developed a brief set of slides on running techniques which adhered to the primary principles for PowerPoints: