Yesterday education.au hosted a seminar in Sydney with Professor Martin Westwell titled Mind Over Matter. Professor Martin is Director of the Flinders Centre for Science Education in the 21st Century. The seminar aimed to provide insight into how modern lifestyles and technologies are influencing the minds of the young and old.
During the day, for those unable to attend in the flesh, the event was covered by a “live blog” using CoverItLive.
The archive of the live blog is now available here. It consists of KerryJ reporting on what Martin was saying, access to most of the slides that were being shown, and “conversation” from people who were monitoring the live blog.
There are 3 sessions to read, covering an 8 hour period.
Your comments on the content and the tool we used would be very welcome. You can comment on the original page where the archive is, or here.
In addition Garry Putland, who was attending the seminar “in the flesh”, has written three blog posts covering the 3 sessions of the day.
- Morning session
- Limitisation by Categorisation, Executive Function
- Workplace Learning, Predicting the Unknown
Podcasts and materials from the day will be made available soon on the education.au website.
Meanwhile you might also like to check this out: Interview with Dr Martin Westwell - In this interview, recorded at education.au prior to the seminar, Dr Martin Westwell discusses the impact of technology on the brain.
For me some of the thinking points of the seminar:
- brain connections are strengthened by repetition/practice and emotions
- educational environments need to be multi-sensory - IWBs can contribute to this
- change is a constant condition, the level of change happening in education is unprecedented
- teachers are asked to be experts in everything, in other sectors/occupations people can specialise - we need multidisciplinary teams in schools
- PD that everyone does only skims the surface
- Humans (children, adults) do not multi-task, we apply our concentration in different ways using “executive function”
- our learning environments can actually make concentration harder for our students by over or under stimulating
- we should be careful that the technology does not remove relationships between students and teacher. We have to value the process more than the product
- Martin has serious doubts that specialist schools, streaming etc really work. They can inflate the successful student, and deflate the one who misses out or would never get into the “select” group.
And there’s much more to think about.
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