Attention is important

Free Super Bowl tickets here!  

There, now that I have your attention, I can only hope that you will stay to read the rest of my blog.  Yes, I agree that was a cheesy approach to an age old problem.  How to get the attention of students so that they can learn the presented material.

I have been thinking about this alot this week and chose to research this further with articles about how information is processed in "chunks" and that may lead to better understanding of how our short term memory works.  George Miller did an interesting article about Information Processing where he explains that the human mind's, short term memory, can only hold information in bits, or "chunks" as he calls them and that "5-9 chunks of information can only be housed in our STM at a time."

This has to be meaningful information such as visual stimulus, faces, game pieces, puzzle pieces, etc..., whatever is right in front of them at the moment. That means that we need to make sure we have the attention of the individuals, present material in a meaningful way so that the stimulus is received and in their working STM and then work on moving this to LTM through other various methods. 

These other methods are all part of how humans process information, encode it, and the retrieval process.  All extremely important in the learning process that designers must think about all the time.  As instructional designers, it will be up to us to be able to teach in the most valuable way for our students and make the most impact.

George Miller wrote this over 50 years ago but it is still relevant and I highly suggest taking the time to read this informative article.  

And on to new trends to teach old and seeming forgotten social skills.  There is a new game now that is "teaching" dinner etiquette to people called the "Phone stacking craze".  To learn new behaviors of actually sitting and talking to one another at a dinner engagement, all guests must place their phones on the table in a pile and the first person to look at their phone picks up the check for everyone! Brilliant way to have fun and get back to social behaviors that seem to be preferred by more in our society than previously thought.  Play this next time you go to dinner with friends and see how easy it is!   See the link below for the Trending Now blog.

Here are the website for my articles:

Miller, G.A. (1956)
http://uqu.edu.sa/files2/tiny_mce/plugins/filemanager/files/4052486/information%20processing-adel.pdf

Yahoo Trending Now blog.
http://uqu.edu.sa/files2/tiny_mce/plugins/filemanager/files/4052486/information%20processing-adel.pdf

Training through Instructional Design

Hi,

I have been looking at Instuctional Design websites and found some interesting information that I want to share with you. 

The first site I found was at http://debseed.wordpress.com/2011/12/31/693/
This blog discusses different design issues and is from a women in the U.K.  The different issues she discusses area all about developing technology for the enhancement of instruction and links go over things like the filtering of noise on websites, designing interactive Word documents, video feedback , eportfolios,and alot of other cool topics.

The second blog I liked was http://ideas.blogs.com/lo/instructional_design/ which is Instructional
Design for eLearning Approaches and has a plethora of great information.  This blogger, Ferdinand Crouch, goes over his presentation of a pharmaceutical project.  What I find very interesting in the different phases he goes over is the practice phase where studnets, after being shown the course or project objectives, have a chance to practice putting together the different drugs via the interactive web training as a way to better retain the information.  I find this approach very interesting and hope to learn more on this subject.  This would be a very handing tool in developing my animal handling training.

The third blog I found for today was Internet Time Blogs.  There is some very relevant information that I found as a studnet to Instructional Design to be very helpful.  I liked the different tips that can be found on this site.  Basic information that is understandable and then there are also more complex learnings found also. Under Best Practices there is a list of how people best learn and the 20 or so bullet points such as the learner knowing what is relevent to them and what they will get out of it and understanding what is expected of them to name a couple. 

Have fund looking at these and stay tuned for more next week.  Take care! 

Since I am going to be using this site to eventually educate children on the how to care for their pets, I am researching different education and instructional design blogs to get some great ideas.  I will be posting them for everyone to read as I find them.

The benefits of having animals in our lives.

My name is Kathy and I am an avid animal lover.  I hate hearing all of the animal abuse stories that seem to be occuring more frequently in the news and I am wondering what I can do as one person to educate more people on the positive effects of owning and ccaring for a cat or dog.  I live in Phoenix, AZ where there are over 4 million people at the last census count in 2011.  That's a lot of people with a lot of pets!

I have had the normal number and types of animals as pets growing up;  turtles, a bird, a frog, 3 cats, and 3 dogs.  I cannot imagine live without sharing it with an animal.  They all were members of the family and it made me a better person sharing my life and my home with them.

The care for pets is something I would love to share ideas and best practices with other loving pet parents.  Anything and everything from the best boarding facilities to the favorite dog shampoos should be shared openly among pet lovers.