Stephen Hasenick Week 2 Reflection

Reading Reflection


My first notion of the Cone of Experience was that it is some logical steps or order. Throughout the article, Dale seems to be one-step ahead of me. He covers many of my question or thoughts. I tried to reason repetitively that direct experience had to be the best. Learning by doing uses more senses, so it must be a better way. Besides, symbols have no real meaning without adequate foundations.

I start wondering if I am wrong, with Dale’s difference in difficulty between a photograph of a tree and a dramatization of Hamlet. He continues to push me with contrived experiences of a steel plant. He is right, that it would be too complex, big, and deafening. So some complex tasks could be learned better by ‘editing of reality’ and leaving out ‘unimportant and confusing elements’. My logical rank order falls apart even more with mention of limits of space and time. I am unable to go back in time to learn history or travel in a spaceship to distance stars.

I still try to believe that direct experiences are at least more motivating. Yet motivation and imagination go hand and hand. Dale argues that students learn more imagination at higher steps on the cone. Siegel states imagination flourished in movies when control move to the artist. Yet I do not see artists spending more time at higher steps than engineers do?

The final straw is the use of symbolic experience in mathematics. A lot of higher-level math cannot be done on lower steps. The comment not to mistake the Cone device for exact rank-order finishes it. Obviously, I am not the first person to try to rank the cone.

Lesson learned, I will pick the steps, which give the best kind of experience to the student, and vary the experience as needed. ‘The question’ stills remains, what step is first, the picture or the word?


Questions

1) Early Impressions of using a blog and RSS reader: Setting up the blog was straight forward and about like setting up any new online email. Using a blog seems easy enough. Type up your paper or ideas in Word and paste it over. Finding classmate’s blogs would have been tougher, if not for Dr. Horvitz handy links. Outside of class, people would have had to email their web addresses or belong to a group. Blogs themselves are like any other source of information. Is the information truthful, fact based, and real?

The RSS reader seems to be just an extension of blogs. It makes gathering blogs easier to use. Like any new program, it has a slight learning curve to it. What I like about reader is that it searches for new blogs and keeps track of blogs I have read. Another nice feature allows re-naming blogs to keep them straight.

2) Which part of the cone: So far, blogs are just written words, like newspapers. The written words are verbal symbols at the top of the cone. I have not tried it yet, but I am thinking there has to be a way to capture pictures in your blogs also. Does U-tube have connections to blogs? The RSS reader appears able to link to things other than written blogs. The reader does not seem like a step on the cone, but more like a tool to gather different parts. These parts could fall in many steps in the cone. It is best setup for updating blogs, but just a link to a PowerPoint presentation would fall into Visual Symbols, Still Pictures, and even as low on the cone as Demonstrations. Many of the middle steps seem available for new technology improvements that readers could link.

3) Imaginative uses of Blogs and RSS reader: Creative uses would be to move Blogs out of the higher steps of the Cone of Experience to lower levels. Video conference would work better, but blogs and reader could be combined to simulate a scenario-solving group. Like Dale talks about many ideas do not fit just one area. A scenario could be setup by a teacher and students could role-play by blogging about ideas to solve the scenario. RSS Reader would allow a group to easily keep track of other blogged ideas and expand on them. This could be done in any field of study. It would be an excellent way to learn problem solving.