Models of learning according to Kolb

Four learning styles

The experimenter, like the concrete experiencer, takes a hands-on route to see if their ideas will work, whilst the reflective observers prefer to watch and think to work things out.

Divergers (Concrete experiencer/Reflective observer)

Divergers take experiences and think deeply about them, thus diverging from a single experience to multiple possibilities in terms of what this might mean. They like to ask 'why', and will start from detail to constructively work up to the big picture.
They enjoy participating and working with others but they like a calm ship and fret over conflicts. They are generally influenced by other people and like to receive constructive feedback.
They like to learn via logical instruction or hands-one exploration with conversations that lead to discovery.

Convergers (Abstract conceptualization/Active experimenter)

Convergers think about things and then try out their ideas to see if they work in practice. They like to ask 'how' about a situation, understanding how things work in practice. They like facts and will seek to make things efficient by making small and careful changes.
They prefer to work by themselves, thinking carefully and acting independently. They learn through interaction and computer-based learning is more effective with them than other methods.

Accomodators (Concrete experiencer/Active experimenter)

Accommodators have the most hands-on approach, with a strong preference for doing rather than thinking. They like to ask 'what if?' and 'why not?' to support their action-first approach. They do not like routine and will take creative risks to see what happens.
They like to explore complexity by direct interaction and learn better by themselves than with other people. As might be expected, they like hands-on and practical learning rather than lectures.

Assimilators (Abstract conceptualizer/Reflective observer)

Assimilators have the most cognitive approach, preferring to think than to act. The ask 'What is there I can know?' and like organized and structured understanding.
They prefer lectures for learning, with demonstrations where possible, and will respect the knowledge of experts. They will also learn through conversation that takes a logical and thoughtful approach.
They often have a strong control need and prefer the clean and simple predictability of internal models to external messiness.
The best way to teach an assimilator is with lectures that start from high-level concepts and work down to the detail. Give them reading material, especially academic stuff and they'll gobble it down. Do not teach through play with them as they like to stay serious.

So what?

So design learning for the people you are working with. If you cannot customize the design for specific people, use varied styles of delivery to help everyone learn. It can also be useful to describe this model to people, both to help them understand how they learn and also so they can appreciate that some of your delivery will for others more than them (and vice versa).

See also
Kolb, D.A. (1984). Experiential Learning. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall
Beliefs about people

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts-Enter Jean-Philippe Pastor


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Philosophy with e-mails

As a university professor, how do you use the new media and hypertext with your students?

David Kolb - I’ve used several kinds of media in my classroom. I am teaching a philosophy course after all so I am trying to encourage discussion and interaction and I do not have huge amounts of information to present. I do not have to talk about the whole civilisation of Greece; I want them to concentrate on certain texts of Plato. I will send them to the WWW to get information. I have used e-mail, many of the teachers in my college do, we set up e-mail discussion groups and demand that the students send e-mail to everyone else in the class once or twice a week, commenting on each other’s work. You can also use newsgroups, Usenet newsgroups, which provide ways for students to comment on other students in a rather structured, hierarchical manner. I have experimented further with actual hypertext.

I’ve done it in two ways. One is to use the program Storyspace because it allows you to make comments in many directions and to have a map of what is going on, what is linked to what. It works very well, if the students can use the program. But the program is not terribly easy to learn, especially for students who are not familiar with hypertext structures. I’ve used that in Greek philosophy mostly to have students comment on some texts and on other students’ comments on the texts. I think I’ve thought of a way to do that on the Web using forms but I am still working on that. I’ve also simply offered students the chance to write hypertexts instead of writing normal terms papers in the classes.

And finally I’ve taught courses specifically about hypertext where that is what the students do, write hypertexts of various kinds. My experience at the moment is that if the student is offered a chance to write a hypertext term paper in a course which is about something else, Greek philosophy or philosophy of art, mostly they will not take the opportunity. They already know how to write term papers; they are very busy; they do not want to take on the extra burden of learning how to do the hypertext. They will do e-mail because they are quite used to that and they’ll do things with the Web, but Web authorship is a little more difficult.

But in the class which is specifically about hypertext the students get very excited and they are quite willing to devote themselves to it, usually in a fairly literary fashion. There we get a lot of participation and considerable invention, and since we’re all learning together and there are no fixed rules, I am not quite the teacher in the same way, and that is very refreshing.

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PHONEREADER Library - - Jean-Philippe Pastor

Web and basic knowledge

In a direct challenge to the conventional school syllabus, Tapscott argues that although it is still important that children have certain basic knowledge, the details, such as the date of the Battle of Hastings, are less important when they can be accessed instantly on the Web.

This is controversial thinking with far-reaching consequences for the way young people are taught and employed. But the book aims to tackle Internet prejudices head on. His conclusion is that "the kids are all right." The best managers and educators will understand that there is much they can learn from this cohort, as well as the other way around. His seven guidelines for managers include a recommendation to "rethink authority," giving feedback where it is needed but remaining open to learning from young employees.
Other guidelines include encouraging employees to blog and avoiding bans on access to social networking sites. Instead, managers should work on ways to harness these technologies to promote better collaboration.

The book is a thoughtful antithesis to entrenched and sometimes alarmist managerial opposition to Internet-influenced behaviors. Read it next to the computer, scanning, flicking through and annotating it as a valuable addition to the Internet knowledge that is revolutionizing our world.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts -
PHONEREADER Library - - Jean-Philippe Pastor

Google Knol is now live

Google Knol is now live.

It's like Wikipedia, only written by experts and pwned by Google. Check it out!

Also, I happened upon Everything2, this other weird & interesting hypertext community where anything goes, not modeled on an encyclopedia.

Not necessarily by experts, as I'll be writing a few, but there will be known authorship. It's more a moderated version of Wikipedia. For instance you'll always have nutters who think Buffy is better than Sabrina, but now they won't be able to vandalise the article with sentences like "Buffy shows more more character development in a world where goals are earned rather than the simplistic wish-fulfillment of Sabrina" because I'll have to approve them before they get added to the knol.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts - - Jean-Philippe Pastor

Of course if you do disagree, then you'll be able to make your own entirely separate Buffy knol, which would be a blow if a special interest group wanted to police an entry.

One shot Learning

Training nets to model aspects of human intelligence is a fine art.

Success with backpropagation and other connectionist learning methods may depend on quite subtle adjustment of the algorithm and the training set. Training typically involves hundreds of thousands of rounds of weight adjustment. Given the limitations of computers presently available to connectionist researchers, training a net to perform an interesting task may take days or even weeks. Some of the difficulty may be resolved when parallel circuits specifically designed to run neural network models are widely available. But even here, some limitations to connectionist theories of learning will remain to be faced. Humans (and many less intelligent animals) display an ability to learn from single events; for example an animal that eats a food that later causes gastric distress will never try that food again.

Connectionist learning techniques such as backpropagation are far from explaining this kind of ‘one shot’ learning.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/

See that post with different algorithms in metabole

See the journal French Metablog with today different posts