Thursday, December 18, 2008

The end of the beginning

I've enjoyed reading all of the summations on my colleagues' (classmates') blogs, and I wanted to do something spectacular for refdeskpaul to celebrate the end of the semester. But this is not the end, merely the beginning, for refdeskpaul, and it seems kind of silly to list each of the 23 things and what I learned from each of them during the past 16 weeks.
I am, however, so very glad that I have learned the hands-on basics for web 2.0 by actually doing each of the 23 things: I learned the theory of web 2.0 in other classes, but this has been an exceptional learning experience because I have had to actually apply what I have learned. Being a Piagetian constructionist at heart, I firmly believe we learn best by coordinating sequences of neuronal firings in multiple parts of the brain simultaneously--employing motor neurons in hand-eye coordination, exercising verbal (and actual speech) neurons in constructing letters and symbols and words, neurons in the corpus callosum that coordinate the two hemispheres of the brain and allow cross-talk to happen between the left and right brains, etc. That happened in this class because of the "realness" of blogging for each other in real time. We all had to use parts of our brains in new ways. Now that we know how to do all of these things (way more than 23 things), we'll continue to build new learning on top of the base we constructed in this class. So I intend to continue blogging on RefdeskPaul. This is only the beginning....

1 comment:

Biblioteca Chica said...

Hi Refdeskpaul! I couldn't have said it better myself! What classes are you taking this semester. I'm taking a management class with Pat!