Session 13—Cognitive Flexibility Theory

I’m really glad that I could have a chance to really experience a CF project as a student. Although I had basic concepts from the readings of this week as well as last week; however, I was still not so sure about how to design a learning module based on this approach. After this experience, I realized how “cases” work in the module, and how the knowledge of a case could be applied to another related case.

In Jonassen et al.’s article, they talked about lots of instruction was oversimplified in order to teach beginners the basics, but the knowledge could not be used in the complex real-world situation. I cannot agree more about this “normal” phenomenon in language classrooms. After 20 years, when being asked in English, “How are you,” I can still hear kids in Taiwan answer confidently, “Fine, thank you, and you?” But how many American people say so? At least, from the very first day I was here, I have never heard it even once. The English textbook for beginners were oversimplified the greeting situation. That is why I didn’t know how to answer the questions of “What’s up?” and “What’s going on?” when just arriving here two years ago. Thus, I think learning language within a context is very important, for instance, students should learn vocabulary and grammar in the context of a conversation or a situation instead of reciting list of vocabulary or a list of sentence clause.

I really like this approach because it included so many cases in one project that students can gain lots of insights and/solutions from other people’s experiences. I think learning from other people is the fastest way to learn things. Besides, the way how students apply knowledge from A case to B case is exactly the way how people using their prior knowledge to deal with new problems in the real world. Students cannot only learn the subject matter from the course, but also how to solve real-world problems. Moreover, this approach encourages learners to find the information they need in different cases and/or different kinds of sources, which allows students to learn by doing as well as thinking. Through this approach, I believe that what they learned definitely not inert knowledge.

The biggest barrier of this approach, undoubtedly, is that teacher needs to find or create a huge amount of cases that are all interconnected for instruction. In addition, I think the explicit explanation of how to use the module is extremely important for this approach. Students may have never heard about this approach, so they feel lost easily when seeing the unfamiliar interface of the computer system. If there is no appropriate guidance of this module, you will lose students’ interests of the subject even you have great content and representative cases. But I think it takes time to make students be familiar with the module; however, it seems like there is always not enough time for teaching all course content.

It’s obvious from our activity for CF activity that it is possible to implement this approach online. I really think the document viewer is very very cool! But I have no idea where did it come from and how it works, I think this is my extra homework to figure it out.