Week 2 Theories of Learning

Still rather in the gong xi fa chai mode so I will keep this reflection brief without compromising the contents.

Behaviorism is when the educator is deeply involved in shaping and influencing the minds of its' subjects. Studies revolve around the subject, usually a person or an organism, responding to a given stimulus and the theories of learning summarises that learning takes place when the subject changes its behavior for more benefits or to decrease its losses. In this sense, the environment shapes the behavior of the subject.

One particular example that jumped at me from Wortham's article was the example he drew to the book, "The Selfish Gene" about evolutionary biology where in all its essense, talks about how everyman, or rather, every gene, is out for itself to pair up with the best gene to minimize any possible losses - survival of the fittest.

Cognitivism revolves around the subject trying to assimilate and accomodate in response to the stimuli in its learning process. The study of cognitivism as a learning route recognises that for a subject to change, or in this case, learn, the instructor has to influence changes deep within the subject.

Sociocultural takes into consideration the subject's environment, system, technology etc in the process of learning and the first thing that came to mind was the Systems Theory where everything is inter and intra dependent on each other in a system. The study of socioculturalism will not be as complete without the influence of the other elements in its system and this I felt was a pre-requisite to the study of Cognitivism. We take in elements in our system, our society, and then we assimilate and accomodate which aspects of learning we want to absorb and practice.

My personal "favorite" (if I may say so) of these learning theories was Cognitivism. I felt that it was the most useful and applicable in the 21st century whereby it is most obvious hohw we satiate our inquisitiveness by directing our own research in areas of interest. Technology and the WWW has definitely made learning more accessible, whilst giving users more control. And also because it has always been my philosophy that change and learning comes from within, no one should be coerced in any way into accomodating anything that conflicts with their own beliefs.

I quite enjoyed reading about the sociocultural aspect of learning as well and my realization of how it has influenced my learning route as a Resident Assistant in my on campus accomodation but as time is running short (11:32pm, gasp!), that will come another day.