Week One: An overview of Knowledge/Education and Leadership

I must admit I was a little distracted at the first session of Mindlab this week - we had trouble connecting to the internet so I was trying to catch the eye of the elusive tech assistant and in front of me was a bag of yellow playdoh so I was nervously wondering what task lay ahead.

There were two main concepts that we were starting to explore:

1. Knowledge which then relates to the purpose of education

From the Videos and notes I learnt that

Epistemology is the study of knowledge. Traditionally this was content learning but today it is more active/problem based learning.
Ontology is the nature of being and reality
Axiology studies what is valuable in our existence and in our world

How does a person get to know something?

Empirical knowledge is input from our senses, experience and observations
Rational knowledge emphasizes reason as the basis for justifying beliefs.

3 main aspects of knowledge production:

-genetic (cognitive development (Piaget), sensory motor development)
-social (cultural factors, access to learning skills)
-formal (mathematical logic, computing, linguistics)




The purpose of education was represented in a diagram by G Biestra











Frances Valintine, the founder of Mindlab, emphasized the learner in knowledge production: what will engage the learner, build resilience, help the learner collaborate better, and equip with skills to problem solve.

As a group we discussed what we thought knowledge acquisition was and we made a poster and video.
A group of awesome teachers -Carolyn, Mark, Daniel and myself.

The video was posted on the Google+ community page.






What I learnt about making a video:
My phone is not a quality recording device. It would have been better to use my ipad.
When making a recording in a classroom there is a lot of background noise which drowns out the speaker's voice.
I learnt how to download music tracks from Youtube and add them as background to my videos- I was pretty pleased about this!

2. Leadership

In the second part of the evening we were asked to "raise your hand if  you are a leader" I hesitated to do this because I am not in a leadership role at school nor do I have an extrovert personality. I do realise that we use leadership skills in the classroom though and that as a teacher I influence my students.
There are lots of good questions to think about in the coming weeks..
What do I want to lead?
How do you get to be a good leader?


Now onto readings for Week 2..