As obvious as it may seem, understanding how the brain learns is the first essential task for those who are designing DLE. Whatever the Learning Action or Learning Experience, it needs to work “best” with our brain’s functions.
As with all DLE design, the challenge is we have a moving target; brain research is ongoing, and new tools to use arrive daily. We’ve discussed here the efficacy or lack thereof of popular brain tools such as “Lumosity”.
Here’s an article that mentions brain exercises in a positive light for increasing general capability not just skill specific, but perhaps designed differently than Lumosity.
Also curious: Reportedly, walking outside in a complex environment is as important as the exercise itself. The brain while “out for a walk” is stimulated in such a way as to promote positive brain states for further learning, or so the theory goes.
This is news to me, although it has been “common knowledge” for a while that exercise supports brain function. Brain research is going to challenge our conventions and open up a lot of new opportunities to support learning in ways we never previously imagined. Unavoidably, this is probably going to involve some new perspectives that strike us as just plain weird. =^)
[gview file=”https://publicservicesalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Five-ways-to-improve-your-brainpower-Life-and-style-The-Guardian.pdf”]
One hastens to add, that we at PSA are not brain experts, have no medical or scientific training in the field, and that we will continue to be dependent on the quality of our sources, such as we can find. Science reporting suffers from many of the veracity and reliability problems of reporting in general today. And the history of “big discoveries” as reported by science includes notorious errors and downright frauds as well.
Cold Fusion anyone? So we need to be open minded, but also skeptical. Optimistic but realistic. Since those pairs aren’t easy to accomplish, it’s more likely we’ll proceed by trial and error, and find that some of our PSA enthusiasms prove helpful over time, and some prove mistaken. Such is the way of the explorer.