Tag Archives: education

Pavlov’s Schoolchildren

https://twitter.com/CleighMoores/status/381924304796909568

https://twitter.com/CleighMoores/status/381924903185682432

I laughed at first when I made this correlation, but I suddenly found it a little disturbing. It came to me when I walked past the primary school I walk past every day to and from the train station. The recess/lunchtime bells were probably put in place to indicate the time of day put aside for eating your daily sustenance and getting some exercise, but the subsequent psychology behind it seems a bit off to me. What it mimics is a classical conditioning experiment (see Pavlov’s Dog) that conditions us as schoolchildren to expect food at the sound of a bell. It creates routine, something young minds can easily grasp, yet I still find the idea strange because it’s the same bell sound throughout primary school and high school (years Prep & One through Twleve), at least it was for me.

The same goes for the start and end of the day bell. It makes me wonder what difference it would make if there were no omnipotent bells and the teachers would simply call class to an end and dismiss the children themselves. There would definitely be a more personal touch to it, and the students wouldn’t expect to have their daily routine dictated by an inanimate sound. We don’t have bells in offices or workplaces to indicate lunch times, however we do have them in prisons and military installations (to my knowledge). Perhaps this should be amended, this tradition from an era past. The school bell sounds awful too.

Quick note slash reflection on blogging

So far I am absolutely adoring the blogging platform – particularly as one for education – and I’m definitely enjoying the course so far as well. What I’m quickly finding though is that I still have trouble identifying what I want to write about, if anything at all.

Not because I don’t know anything mind you, I’m still in the habit of not writing things down. As somebody who thinks a whoooooooole lot at an incredibly fast pace (I have trouble keeping up with my own mind sometimes!) it’s a challenge in itself to go, “Oh that’s a good idea, I’ll write about that!”.

At that though I have managed to write posts I am quite proud of and already I feel I’m better at curating and articulating singular ideas within the constraints of a primarily text format.

For some future blog posts I’d love to experiment with more creative pieces – perhals short stories – as I’m far too comfortable writing on the fly and I’ve scarcely ever composed anything, rather creating and publishing it in real time.

On a final note I firmly believe in this whole blogging thing in the course. So far it’s bred a more contextual way of thinking which is far more brilliant than simply remembering and regurgitating information for the sake of criteria.

‘Blogs in Media Education’

Listening music, because what’s a blog without sharing stuff I like. Don’t worry, it won’t always be metal, my musical tastes are eclectic to say the least.

Before I really respond to this particular reading I wanted to remark at how transparent the course’s intentions and material is. Rarely do students even ask (me included) why we study or learn a particular thing, let alone the teacher directly explaining why. I love to see such a straightforward and, really, honest way of delivering the course’s content. Continue reading →

Blogging for the modern day lunatic

Blogging is generally a more alien thing for me. Over the course of my formal education at Primary and Secondary level the standard of archiving information was analog – paper, books, pens, pencils, filing cabinets, textbooks (redundant editions) etcetera etcetera – and with very limited motor skills in the handwriting department I became very quickly jaded of writing things down. Towards the latter end of High School I was long past sick and tired of having to manually scrawl out 2000 words using the diminishable and lossy medium of pencil and paper, where I could type the same 2000 words at least twice as quickly, ultimately leaving me more time for proof reading and editing. Unfortunately that was the standard, and it put me off my learning just a weeny bit because of it.

This left me with a rather sour habit of not taking notes on a regular basis, and subsequently, it’s made me very mental, quite literally. I think fast and talk fast, so analog inscription is insufficient for note taking or writing. Unfortunately, I have also neglected a digital medium to achieve this. 

How does blogging come into this then? Well after about 6 or 7 attempts at it, all eventually failing by the ways of quiet starvation I feel this current blog – as a requirement to pass the subject, hence the degree, and I do want to pass spectacularly – will finally kick me in the arse and prompt me to properly articulate my ideas in the form of media be it the English language, visual, or aural media. Ideally this will encourage me to be more thorough with any ideas I have, and decide to capitalise on; blogging then, I feel, is the perfect medium for me to properly articulate them, share them, and best case, receive feedback and criticism, which encourages further refining of the original idea.

Likewise I am very glad that RMIT in particular is embracing a more digital mode of teaching – such as the recent addition to the system allowing us to print from any device to any printer – which simply gives us more freedom as students. A strong, multi-block wi-fi signal is immensely useful when outside of class for communication, and I would love to see the Blog become a standard for personal academic notation and discussion across all subjects, as to replace some more basic marking systems like weekly reading logs to force students to engage with readings, rather than encouraging them to relate it to their own knowledge.

Edit: I noticed after writing this Adrian poses reasons for using blogging in education (in a much more articulate way) and it’s benefits in his article Blogs in Media Education,