Intro to Expansion

This is a blog mostly for my graduate course in principles of learning. It's primarily for myself, but a big part of this class is sharing our knowledge with others, so I thought I'd make it available for others to read (because it's going to be SO interesting). I just wanted to have it in a notebook, but I'll end up typing it up for my final... so this is the best way. We have been learning about the fourfold way of learning - basically a way to organize information so we can capture it (understand and remember). In a neat little square divided into four parts we put down 1) the question at hand, 2) the answer to the question, 3) what evidence there is for the answer, and 4) why we care. It's a pretty cool way to take notes, and I've tried it in a few of my classes (there's an expansion right there). It's a little difficult sometimes though - teachers don't always teach in this way, and it can make for some pretty ugly notes (I hate leaving big spaces or having no room to write). After a successful capture, a successful Learner/Teacher (L/T for short) will expand on werf's knowledge by applying it and perhaps researching it more in-depth. The important part about expansion is that it expands knowledge (okay, that was a "duh" moment). To fully learn something, one must then teach others, and finally, evaluate whether or not the learning was worth it.

So, in class we've been discussing in class how learning is like a gospel ordinance (the logic here is that to be saved we must obey the laws and ordinances of the gospel (AoF 3), and being saved can mean being exalted, and being exalted means learning a lot more than we do now, so then learning must be either a gospel law or ordinance). We did this activity called "sacramental learning," where we try to act Christ-like in the roles of learner and then teacher (while we learn from and teach each other). While I was participating I felt good and like this was the best thing since sliced bread, but looking back, I'm not sure if I learned anything. It was like very nice-looking verbal spewing. So I'm skeptical of this whole method. I believe that the Holy Spirit can help us learn, but I don't believe it can instantly make a teacher out of a learner.

I also wanted to mention how I've been telling lots of people about the things I've been learning in this class. I've been reading Human Competence, which theorizes that competence is not a function of human behavior alone, but that competence is a function of worthy performance, which is a function of the ratio of accomplishment to behavior (wP = f(A/B)). I conveyed this message to a friend of mine and also my mentor. They weren't as excited about it as I was though. I should have explained that since competence can't be measured by behavior alone, that things like achievement tests are going about measuring things in the wrong way. In order to measure a person's competence, you can't just have him fill out a few bubbles - there are too many things that could go wrong to give a misrepresentation of his true knowledge.

I also gave the FHE lesson on Monday, and I wanted it to be about how the learner as an agent chooses what he will learn, but I'm not sure if I got that message across. I started out talking about how we can see different things in art and in the scriptures, and it's because we're different people looking for different things. I didn't go into agent learning at all though, primarily because the discussion took a turn to how common scriptures have sometimes come to mean different thing to each of us.

As I've learned about expansion, I've been trying to expand my knowledge about it my expanding my knowledge in other classes. It's actually something I've liked doing for a while, but I called it "overlearning." I would mention a particular expansion I'm working on but sadly, it would compromise my identity.