Personal Learning Theory

What does it mean to know?

At some point I read or heard that the human brain (mind?) has finite capacity for remembering, making the “use it or lose it” maxim true. What you learn, but don’t need, or don’t occasionally exercise, is forgotten to free up space. It doesn’t need to be useful, but it will have meaning to you. My ninth-grade Honors English class had to memorize the first and last stanzas of both “The Raven” and “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Forty years later, I can recite them. They thrilled me. But geometry formulas? Gone. For another person, those will be flipped. 

But that’s just remembering. Knowing, to me, is being able to encounter new thoughts, ideas, and experiences with an intellectual foundation that is strong enough to ask more questions. They can be your own thoughts, ideas, and experiences, or someone else’s. 

How do we come to know the world around us?

By looking, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling, and questioning. By testing the world around me. By testing myself in the world around me, and noting the interplay between me and everything not me.  Another but more difficult way is being willing to change how you see yourself in the world. The Blade Runner 2049 video speaks directly to that.

What is knowledge and how do you define it? 

I define knowledge as the uncovering of life’s mysteries. Babies are born without knowledge. What knowledge they gain and how they gain it depends on forces, people, and environments beyond their control. As we age, we acquire more agency to discover — but many people stop, by choice, when they’re young. Some are interested only in what has already been discovered by people before them, and that is the job of the school system. Some push to discover what no human before them has been able to answer, and they are the scientists. Some invent tools and structures to make lives better, safer, or easier; they are the engineers. Some translate the human experience and imagination into original forms; they are the artists. These three groups continually push the limits of knowledge and push the human race forward.  

I do believe knowledge is a human affair, though crows may convince me otherwise. 

How could I test this theorem? 

I don’t know that I can. How can anyone’s personal definition of knowledge be proven? It’s my belief system. I suppose qualitative studies. Comparative studies. Looking at what I wrote, there seems to be an unnamed splitting point between those who are satisfied with what they’ve been told and those who keep searching. The test would have something to do with that splitting point.

Looking at the personal learning theories map, Bloom’s Mastery Learning is the one that suits me. The map also makes me realize two misconceptions of mine: first, that this is a theory at all and not something obvious to everyone, and second, that the Bloom in question is not Harold Bloom. I googled to see if it was the same Bloom as the Taxonomy (it is) and that’s when I learned it’s a Benjamin, not the Harold. Bloom’s taxonomy was the only thing that stood out to me while going through teacher certification training two years ago, and I see signs of it in the first chunk of this blog entry. 

Both in teacher training and at teacher work, we are told exactly what and how to think about teaching and learning. I’m a rebellious sort to begin with and that doesn’t bode well. This week in LTEC has helped reassure me that I might be in the right place.