MSU2011: Stories of Understanding

Stories of understanding.. a personal story about having understood something, something that at some point in time moved/changed you deeply. That's today's topic. Based on three readings about understanding the students share many personal stories with each other. Some funny, some serious and some emotionally. From the stories several important aspect came up for me: understanding takes time, it happens when you get a new perspective on something or it will lead to a new perspective on something, and if you understand something everything around you changes and can be seen in a new light (and of course the word 'everything' has to be seen in perspective too).

example of creativity & understanding..

Understanding something is nice and gives you a good feeling. Or as Punya wrote: "We love to understand because it gives us pleasure. I think that we often ignore this aspect of learning", and integrating this idea in education he said "Teaching is about two things. 1. making the familiar strange; 2. making the strange familiar".

Today's topic relates to many of the discussions from the previous days: to misconceptions and the way our brain works, bur also to motivation and knowing your students and their current level of knowledge. And of course it also related to the use of technology in education. Using technology could (could! not necessarily always!) help in understanding things. Simulations of difficult processes is one example of using technology to support understanding as I wrote about in a previous post.

The students have to do something different to process the topic of understanding and to combine this with all the other things that they have learned and discussed. They have to write a grant proposal that presents how they would like to use new technologies to help develop student understanding within a specific subject area in a transformational way. While writing this proposal they have to use the TPACK framework. Until now TPACK has not been discussed.. but as I wrote before, the ideas behind TPACK are fully integrated in this course!