Information Age Education Blog

I moved into a modest-sized retirement home (the Eugene Abbey) about four years ago, shortly after my wife died. These two events caused me to start paying more attention to my quality of life (QoL) and the quality of life of others. While living in this retirement facility, I began to explore what I could do to help improve the QoL of the residents. Over the past four years I have helped improve their library, computer facilities, outdoor garden and lawn area, and entertainment facilities. I am pleased by what I have been able to do. (Note: I now live on the Oregon coast, but maintain a small apartment in the retirement home.)

I have put my greatest emphasis into the computer area. Here is a recent note I received from a resident:

A constructivist theory of learning posits that we build new knowledge on (by tying it into) our current knowledge. That is, our brain finds a pattern match (makes a connection) between what we already know and the new information we encounter. This is a type of analogical process that goes on in a learner’s brain.

Quoting from Robert Sylwester’s article, The Central Roles of the Varieties of Analogy, (Sylwester, September, 2013):

Each Tuesday I have lunch with some of my retired colleagues from the University of Oregon College of Education. Recently I posed the following question to them:

This morning I read the news on my tablet computer, listened to the news on the radio, and read a few miscellaneous magazine articles. Essentially every news item fell into my category of “doom and gloom” or I considered it to be relatively inconsequential. I asked my colleagues to share some of the happier and important news they had encountered so far in the day.

All the world’s a game,
And all the men and women active players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And all people in their time play many parts…
(Dave Moursund, adapted from Shakespeare)

The title of this IAE Blog entry is the same as the title for my newest free book, Learning Problem-solving Strategies by Using Games: A Guide for Educators and Parents (Moursund, January, 2016). Most of the content of this blog entry is from that book.

Brain science research, and applications of this research, continue to make amazing progress. I have seen estimations that the amount we know about the human brain has doubled in the past five years, and that 90 percent of our brain knowledge has been discovered in the past 20 years. Quoting from Hanessian (1/21/2016):

Brain scans and longitudinal studies have revealed that neglect, abuse and early chronic stress damages the developing brain and primes people for addiction, disease and premature death.