This is already my second week in the new winter term. Today, I will analyze my week of learning activities based on “Didaktics of Media” course.
Summary
The last week was mostly about the introduction to the term of Didaktics. This week, I learned about special theories in the Didaktics research area: the constructivsm, behaviourism and last but not least the cognitivism.
I learned about the main idea of constructivism. It is about the learner as a subject who constructs his own knowledge or truth while the teacher gives him the “material” to do so. The teacher also gently tries to push the learner into certain directions. So that also means that there are multiple truths and there can’t be exact one truth at all.
This “gently push” is the biggest difference between the constructivism and the behaviourism. Behaviourism is about the idea how people can be pushed to show some behaviour. You use the methods of positive reinforcement so that the subject notices that his behaviour matches the expectations of the teacher. You can use negative reinforcement to remove unpleasant things which influence the learning process in a negative manner. Also, there are methods of positive and negative punishment. Positive punishment means that the teacher does not want a certain behaviour. So he uses methods that the learner does not like (spanking for example). Negative punishment means that some pleasant thing (in the perspective of the learner) is removed, such as a toy.
I also learned that the behaviourism does not always work as expected – the experiment in our lesson failed because of the missing eye contact between our professor and the learner.
Cognitivism is the theory that describes the learner as an endpoint of a “instruction”-based teaching process. He kind of consumes instructions – usually bound to a special curriculum. It is about information that is processed by the learner and not about the the learner as “developer” of the information himself (constructivsm) nor the learner as beeing influnced from outside (behaviourism).
For myself, I really like the constructivism theory because it mostly matches what I expect from my studies. One should construct the knowledge him- or herself. This can be inforced by “learning-by-doing” which is an important topic in universities of applied science. Now, I know that I’m more responsible for the creation of my truth than the teachers (professors) are.
Goal for next week
The goal in the last week was to improve the creation of my learning diary. So I sat back and thought about how the learning diary can improve my learning process. I concluded that it’s mostly about the act of writing about what I’ve learned. So I should think less about the the formalities and more write fluid texts about the learning contents.