Week 3 - CIP and Learning

What is learning?
I'd really like to start off this week by saying that I was very surprised with
how much I enjoyed the miller article.  I enjoyed the writing style, the subject
matter, and the way it made me reflect on the learning process.  I suppose that
what really stuck out for me was the idea that we can effectively learn in bits
of 7 and 7 groups of bits.  The research done originally was with sounds.  It
was shown that research participants were able to discern between 5 and 7
pitches.  Any more than that and we apparently can't handle
the differences.  However, if there are more variables thrown into the mix like
volume, then we do better.

What I really enjoyed was the comparison between that concept and language.
Obviously language is more complex than 7 bits of information, but the author
was able to show how language can often be shown to be groups of bits.   Put in
another way, we don't recognize entire sentences or even words, but rather
groups of individual sounds or letters that we learn to group together.

Another comparison is faces.  We can recognize thousands of faces.  This is not because
we can actually memorize entire faces, but we can recognize a grouping of individual
features such as the length of the nose, eye color, hair length, facial hair,
glasses, and other features.  This grouping of features gives us enough
variables to work with that we can discern individual faces.

Anyway, this article really caught my interest.  It really makes sense to me how
learning in the CIP point of view is the coding and structuring of information
in a way that we can recall and reuse it effectively later.  I can't completely
reject some behaviorist ideas, but the CIP model really works for me.

I guess I see the instructor in a similar way as in the past.  That is someone
who helps students to build learning onto existing knowledge, hopefully in a way
that they can use it later in a practical setting.  This seems to fit more into
my way of doing things.  I'd rather think of adding to knowledge than think of
molding/manipulating behavior.