Research on the brain and information processing

This week I will be reviewing 2 articles regarding the brain and learning, and on information processing that occurs during the learning process.

http://pequotlakes.k12.mn.us/userfiles/file/aep04_2_6-1.pdf

This article is entitled Brain Based Learning - The wave of the Brain written by Ruth Palomba Weiss in 2000.  She talks about how the 3 pound brain has over 100 billion neurons and each one has 10,000 synaptic connections to the other neurons.  She goes on to talk about how the brain works and its different parts.  She pays special attention to the thalamus and states how it is responsible for attention.  She also talks about memory, recall and information.  Overall, the article was very well written and had some analogies that helped understand.

http://www.utpjournals.com/jvme/tocs/303/226.pdf

This is an article titled Problem Solving Techniques and Theories written by Laura E. Hardin in 2002.  She talks about problem solving components and knowledge that students must have to complete problem solving.  She also outlines the historical progression of problem solving theories (behaviorism, cognitivism) and expert-novice problem solving theories (chunking, schema, metacognition).  I found this article to be very informative regarding the techniques and theories.

Welcome to my blog!  I am going to review a few blogs regarding instructional design and learning theories and give my reviews below.  Enjoy!

http://christytucker.wordpress.com/2010/07/06/instructional-design-and-e-learning-blogs/

In this blog the author, Christy Tucker, lists several blogs designed by instructional designers, e-learning developers and workplace learning specialists.  This will be very handy for me to look over as I am starting my education and career in Instructional Design.  She also links that tell what an instructional designer does, career tools for Instructional Designers and how to get into Instructional Design.

http://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.com/2012/03/blog-marathon-50-blogs-on-learning.html

Donald Clark, the author of the blog has listed at least 50 sites that have information on different learning theories.  The contents of his blog has the leaders in the learning movements and the theorists who have made giant contributions in learning theory.  This is a great blog for me because I will be learning how to educate others by these theories.

http://www.mikahjenae.blogspot.com

Mikah Pritchard, the author of this blog is an instructional designer.  Her blog has ideas on how to create blogs, ideas about learning theories, web instruction, and lists instructional technology and its uses.  I enjoyed her blog and found it very educational.  Some of the instructional technology that she has mentioned have been useful for me.