You are currently browsing the tag archive for the 'purposeful learning' tag.
Again, I have not written for a few days.
Before I went to get my convocation gown, I had gone to the school office to ask a few questions, and I had run into one of the instructors. A small conversation was revealing of how cultural expectations and differences are so entrenched in our mindsets: a trip to Europe seems to mean mostly traveling rather that going to simply see one’s family, some members of whom I haven’t seen for four years. But there you have it.
It appears that this summer will be quite hot, and that adjective does not refer to the weather conditions, but to job hunting techniques and professional networking—the latter concept being a nagging keyword in our profession. But what can you do?
I have noticed that, since I have written less frequently in this diary, my vocabulary suffers enormously. To keep on functioning, my brain needs a continuous lexical input, preferably arranged in some form of thoughts. Otherwise, it runs idle, and when I need to articulate something, those thoughts come out in basic words. This state of mind reminds me of that one of the main character in “Flowers for Algernon,” who becomes smart at one point, but, after that, he slowly and painfully loses his IQ.
I have just finished reading a few articles on representing meaning through conceptual mapping. What that means is, for example, being able to summarize a text, or a book, using a conceptual mapping procedure (we learned something similar to brainstorning techniques in writing). The most difficult part is to find the main idea of the text and then represent it in concepts and propositions (categories of concepts), using relationships. I have thought of a text, which I just finished reading, which I will use to build that map. Apparently, conceptual mapping proved to be a useful tool in learning meaningfully rather than rote learning. It seems that there is a continuum between meaningful learning (learning purposefully by using a variety of scaffolds) and rote learning, rather than two completely separate approaches of learning.
