U-Blog 5

While doing research for assignment 7.3, I came across an article discussing 'Social Development Theory'. http://www.learning-theories.com/vygotskys-social-learning-theory.html

The article talks about the social learning theory, which was theorized by Lev Vygotsky. It has its basis in constructivism, and the article discusses three major themes

"1. Social interaction plays a fundamental role in the process of cognitive development. In contrast to Jean Piaget’s understanding of child development (in which development necessarily precedes learning), Vygotsky felt social learning precedes development. He states: “Every function in the child’s cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological) and then inside the child (intrapsychological).” (Vygotsky, 1978)."

I may be reading this incorrectly, but this seems like the idea of monkey see monkey do. Before a child (or any learner, really) can have an internal dialogue about what they have seen, they have to see an external interaction about it first.

"2. The More Knowledgeable Other (MKO). The MKO refers to anyone who has a better understanding or a higher ability level than the learner, with respect to a particular task, process, or concept. The MKO is normally thought of as being a teacher, coach, or older adult, but the MKO could also be peers, a younger person, or even computers."

In this case, the MKO is the website I got the information off of. The MKO is generally who the learner will learn from - I was the learner in this case, and the website was the MKO

"3. The Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). The ZPD is the distance between a student’s ability to perform a task under adult guidance and/or with peer collaboration and the student’s ability solving the problem independently. According to Vygotsky, learning occurred in this zone."

This is reflective of a hand on approach. There is a certain period of time that working with something under supervision gives you the most learning because you have something to fall back on if you can't figure it out.

U-Blog 4

For my Wiki assignment I was assigned to research cognitivism. This brought back some memories of one of my favorite freshman classes, Psychology. I really enjoy the study of the brain and the way people react in any given situation, and cognitivism is, in my opinion, particularly interesting. Cognitive psychology focuses on the internal processes used in decision making by a person. I'm not going to rehash what my Wiki article already says, but I do want to talk about the assignment in general. This is the first time I've done a wiki, and I can really see the potential for this in business.

One use for a wiki in the business world would be as listed here, for training. A knowledge base built around wikis would be very useful because multiple people can work on it and contribute to the wiki and write about whatever their particular strength is. I've done things like this similar in the past - putting a word document on a file server and letting several people edit it. The problem with this is the inability to easily access revisions to the file and to find out who made these revisions. A wiki fixes this by letting you easily go back and forward through different revisions. You can also see who made any edit with just a few clicks.

I can think of several other reasons: work logs, document creation, etc. The primary problem I would see with implementing a wiki into a work environment would be people would not treat it like a wiki and use it like a more traditional document. For instance, deleting a section of text that has been recently added and saving a new revision rather than going back to a revision before the edit was made. If an administrator can find a way to convince people to use the wiki correctly though, then this could be an efficient way to share information in a team