Class Post #2

How do people learn in the real world outside of school?

I think people mostly learn in the real world by doing the things they want to learn, physically doing them. Whether it's walking, learning to make food, or learning how to tumble in gymnastics, the person learns to do them physically, not by reading chapters in a book. Some teachers do incorporate physical activities for the students to learn their material, but another big thing about learning outside of school, is that the person learning is intrinsically motivated. When you are a baby you see everyone else walking around you, and you want to learn to walk too. When you're a little older you want to be Miss Independent and learn how to prepare your own food. When I was in cheerleading, seeing a bunch of girls running around doing tucks and layouts made me want to learn how to do them too. It is different in school. It is much harder to be intrinsically motivated in a subject which does not appeal to you, and it's hard for teachers to give you that sort of motivation. People in the real world learn things because they want to learn them, and they will spend time practicing what they want to learn until they do.

How do people learn from and through technology in the real world?

Technology makes obtaining information easier. A student can hear about some topic or other in one of their classes, and they can come home and google it, and from multiple cites they can learn a bunch of different information on a topic. There are not only document or article based information, but images as well. The student could have a history class and they could be talking about the different battle gear and weapons used in war, and the student can go online and look at a picture of exactly what this was supposed to look like. If you have a friend who lives on the other side of the world, you can use the internet to communicate back and forth and learn what is going on on that side of the world. Television is also another form of technology that transports a bunch of information to a million television screens. Movies are awesome because they can teach you about things you might never have thought about before in an entertaining way. They can inspire new ideas and evoke new opinions about certain things that are not as easily grasped in a classroom.

What are the implications of that for what teaching and learning could/should look like?

This would imply that learning from a teacher should be just like learning gymnastics,  learning how to skateboard, or learning how to make a sandwich. A teacher should somehow inspire intrinsic motivation, and sometimes through the use of technology, a teacher can accomplish this.