An e-book is not an electronic form of a book.
I first encountered the iTutorial when I was a LLM student by distance learning by the College of Law. They are professionally presented, but I suppose that is neither here nor there. I like television news generally. The reason they work is that it’s possible to replay parts you don’t understand, and the ‘quizzes’ are very helpful to check progress.
That Jon Harman, Director of Learning at the College of Law, is interested in gaming is of no surprise. Jon is remarkably astute at environment sensing, which is the hallmark of all exceptional innovators. And “gaming”, and the approaches exemplified through the TED demonstrates, is what innovation is actually about. The success of any innovation is ultimately determined by its ease of use, how easily it can be explained, and how much people enjoying the innovation. It’s ideally meant to be an ‘easier’ way of doing thing, and the ultimate nirvana in education is for students to feel as if they’re learning for themselves in a relatively effortless manner.
This is where I feel gaming should perhaps come in, and Jon and Scott may in fact be ahead of their time. My own training was at Cambridge in neuroscience, and for a brief period in academic neurology, before I took a brief necessary detour in legal and business legal education. I am therefore concerned about how the brain works in practice. We have 1000 billion neurones, many of which make connections to one another, some functional, some not. The brain, in a way that a supercomputer might hope to be, probably has exploded in size in evolution due to the way in which combines information through ‘oscillations’ of neural activity. It’s long been of interest to Prof Horace Barlow at Cambridge, now retired but indeed Prof Colin Blakemore’s supervisor (Prof Blakemore has now head of the physiology department at Oxford for a long time), why the human brain often does functions which are subserved much ‘lower down’ in the animal kingdom, such as the fly’s eye.
The clue to this, I believe, comes from the design of the brain. The brain has rather specialised areas involved in planning, working memory, different types of factual memory, all the five senses (including especially vision), and of course movement. But sitting under the brain is of course the brainstem, and this has a fundamental role in motivation and arousal. And somewhere in the brain, probably near the front, is the part most connected with emotion (though it’s probably fair to say that the emotional state is spread quite widely throughout the entire body).
Learning is not just about learning a series of facts (or cases). Your state of mind, and indeed your mood or alertness, can both have significant effects on ‘how much you take in’, how much you are able to think on the spot, how much you are able to filter appropriate and inappropriate information, and how appropriate your solutions are. I think it is utterly reasonable for Jon and Scott to take this approach to how students can benefit from a learning process, and to think about how their learning materials can bring out the best in their students. That they have effectively come from the starting point of how the human brain actually works is of course a big honour to my own particular origin of my own learning, which are the fields of neuroscience and neurology.
