Refection Graphics’ take on @eric_mazur keynote at #uLearn17 @ulearn17 pic.twitter.com/OoHREOE0SA

— Becky Hare (@BeckyHare26) October 11, 2017

@eric_mazur keynoting at #ulearn17

Who is Eric Mazur

“Teach by questioning rather than telling.”  Socrates

Ulearn began today with plenary speaker Eric Mazur speaking about shifting the focus from delivering information to teamwork and creative thinking and how this greatly improves the learning that takes place in the classroom and promotes independent thinking.

Takeaways against the Ulearn Strands

Learning digitally

• Change the idea of delivering and transferring information for your learner
• Transmission of knowledge vs construction of knowledge
• Interactivity in learning
• Give students more responsibility for gathering information so we can better help them assimilate it
• Better understanding leads to greater problem solving

Learning in communities

• Education is not just information transfer
• Get learners to convince others if they have a different opinion
• The learning happens in the discussion.
• No chance to sleep because your neighbour will talk to you
• Two way flow of information.
• Feedback of the learning to the students.
• Personalised the learning by learners helping each other.

Learning for success

• Give the learners an opportunity to assimilate information outside of the context they have learned it in and the assimilation of information is the key to learning success
• Teachers are becoming better at assimilating knowledge rather than just transferring information
• Getting the brain engaged and not the fingers on on the device.Technology can be abused
• Turn the out of class component into a social activity
• Reawaken the curiosity of the human mind and reactivate the human scientist to awaken innate curiosity
• Learning is about inspiring students to be curious and then letting them “get fired up”

Once you learn something, you forget the difficulties of learning. Rediscover the thought process of a beginning learner.

• Question
• Think
• Poll
• Discuss
• Repoll
• Explain

Using this way of learning resulted in doubling and and then tripling of success rates and the learners had a higher retention rate.

Be cautious about the best way to transfer knowledge. For example watching videos can involve passive learning

• Transfer pace set by the video
• Viewer passive
• Viewing /attention tanks as time passes
• isolated/individual experience

Note from Sonya: however knowing youtube there are ways to activate clickable moments for a poll, or adding a chat comment. Also rather than watch a video, create a video of your own learning, even better co-create a video and crowd source components from your collegues.

Books

• Transfer pace set by the reader
• Viewer active
• Still is isolated experience
• No accountability
• Every student prepared for class without having to put in more hours

We were introduced to ‘Perusall’ and shown how students highlight and add chat transcript. Asynchronous discussion happens. Note from Sonya: the system is free.

Take aways

Education is not just about

• Transferring information
• Getting learners  to do what we do or want.
• Active engagement both inside and outside the class is imperative

We want our learners to stand on our shoulders, to tackle the wicked problems that we cannot solve.

Other links to check out

https://perusall.com/

Alan November

I found Eric’s opening plenary thought provoking, visible and I loved that straight after the session his presentation was available for us to rewind.

 

Thank you, #uLearn17 attendees for making the morning so wonderful! Here are my slides #noClickerNeeded! https://t.co/TOOD95PUrn

— Eric Mazur (@eric_mazur) October 11, 2017

You can read more about Eric’s presentation here on EdSpace.