Thoughts on Learning, Teaching and Life
by Leo Casey
How to be successful as a college student
This is a quiet but busy time in National College of Ireland semester one exams are now in progress. We are encouraged to keep as quiet as possible as each room on the campus is now used to its fullest extent to facilitate the process. There is always tension associated with exams. Students of all…
New Year’s Celebration fireworks at Carton House, Maynooth Happy New Year! It’s the start of 2011 and last night we celebrated as we said goodbye to 2010 and welcomed the turn over to a New Year. At New Year and perhaps birthdays or other recurring significant dates we often conduct a self-appraisal and make decisions…
Read More “What are New Year’s resolutions and why they seldom work” »
I met Sugata Mitra at On-Line Educa in Berlin two years ago and was very impressed by his research work and his thinking on how children learn. This most recent presentation at the TED conference opens up a timely debate on the role of instruction in education.It is easy to be sceptical about the findings…
Have you ever heard of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi?Pestalozzi was a Swiss educationalist – he had interesting ideas for progressive education – at the start of the nineteenth century he was advocating an enlightened approach to schooling. Perhaps in a future blog I will further discuss Pestalozzi but the topic I have set out above is…
If you are thinking about taking a course, for example any of the NCI courses in the prospectus, you may see in the entry requirements that it is necessary for students to have a specific level of degree (e.g. honours degree) or a certificate or diploma to gain entry. These conditions are necessary so that…
Read More “Course Entry Requirements – Recognising Learning from Experience” »
Mention plagiarism to any third level academic and you are likely to be greeted with groans and laments.This is one topic that gets into people’s hearts – it leads to animated discussions and hard views. It is unwise to be regarded as soft on the issue. It is annoying, very annoying to be reading something…
I attended an excellent workshop today on the topic of assessment and learning. The workshop was delivered by Professor Sally Brown of Leeds Metropolitan University in the UK. The attendees consisted of a mix of our own faculty at National College of Ireland and teachers from some of the other colleges around the country as…
Adults learn what they want to learn and what they perceive as useful to them;Internalisation involves the construction of new meaning based on passed experience and new stimuli;Learning can be understood as always involving cognitive, psychodynamic and societal/social aspects;Communities of practice embody all three of these aspects and as such are powerful drivers for adult…