De Bono's Hats

I loved learning about De Bono’s six thinking hats. What an ingenious method to stimulate lower order of thinking up to high order of thinking in the one scaffold. By completing this task definitely stimulated a positive response in my behaviour. This design allows anyone from inexperienced to experienced people to give their viewpoint or opinion. De Bono’s thinking hats touches on all four learning theories. I think Siemens (2004, p. 2) noted that “connectivism presents a model of learning that acknowledges the tectonic shifts in society where learning is no longer an internal, individualistic activity.” I have never heard of this type of scaffold and I will be working with this resource to support my teaching field.

There are many avenues of learning as well as different type of learners; e.g. visual, auditory, and kinaesthetic to name a few. “Behaviourism, cognitivism and constructivism are the three broad learning theories most often utilized in the creation of instructional environments” Siemens (2004). There are visible elements of the three learning theories that can be associated with the profile wiki activity. These learning theories were my first introduction and my response was mostly positive. Learning works for me when I can break content down into steps and I tend to draw on my own experiences first as in constructivism. "Learners construct their own reality or at least interpret it based upon their perceptions of experiences, so an individual's knowledge is a function of one's prior experiences, mental structures, and beliefs that are used to interpret objects and events" (Jonasson, 1991, as cited in Mergel, 1998, p. 8). Sweller (n.d) suggests that the cognitive theory is more associated with memory and recalling of material. In the hope that students would be able to recall particulars only after a few times of reading their profiles, cognitive theory would challenge the students to recall information rather than the convenience of the information being readily available. Recalling short-term information seems to be a challenge amongst us all for example how many times do we forget people’s names after first being introduced for the first time? Perhaps elements of the wiki and eventually the wiki itself could be eliminated from the activity to encourage memory and recalling skills.