Educational technology that is designed “with the brain in mind” can be a catalyst in facilitating learning.

On today’s episode, Dr. Michelle Miller draws from her research in neuroscience and cognitive psychology and shows us how to facilitate learning for minds online.

Podcast notes

Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology
How do we use our memory resources to process information
Study of human cognition and thought processes

• What College Teachers Should Know About Memory: A Perspective from Cognitive Psychology (June, 2011)
  Journal of College Teaching

For the Internet generation, educational technology designed with the brain in mind offers a natural pathway to the pleasures and rewards of deep learning. Drawing on neuroscience and cognitive psychology, Michelle Miller shows how attention, memory, critical thinking, and analytical reasoning can be enhanced through technology-aided approaches. (Book description)

Effective teaching

Becoming an expert in a discipline, that journey from novice to expert… (Dr. Miller)

• Not just facts; rich, interconnected network of knowledge
• Skill acquisition
• Motivation: Can’t separate motivation, emotion, and cognition

Technology in education

• Avoid the gadget-based approach
• Interleaved learning: Mix-up the topics you’re assessing…

Applied memory findings

• The testing effect
• The interleaving effect
• The spacing effect

Minds Online

We made the internet to satisfy our needs and desires…

The myth of the tech savvy student

• Students differentiate technology use
• Skills and abilities from one domain don’t always transfer over to another domain very well
• Emphasizing why we are using a particular technology tool

Memory in the Internet age

Expertise and knowledge cannot be fully separated

• Needed for problem solving
• Speed necessity
• Ability to perceive the connections

Motivating online students

• Face-to-face context builds our skills and approaches to heighten motivation
• These techniques are missing in the online environment
• Procrastination is an even bigger factor
• Distractions abound

 [Motivation] is not all about the points [in the online environment]. (Dr. Miller)

Recommendations

Bonni recommended Dr. Miller’s book (Minds Online) and ClassTools.net’s Fakebook tool to create a fake Facebook page/timeline… Going to teach business ethics next semester and have students create one for the Enron crisis.

Michelle recommended the following books:

• Smarter than you think
• The Invisible Gorilla
• James Lang’s Cheating Lessons and other books
• Scarcity

Closing credits

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