I hear ya. As a visual communications professional, it stands to reason that I am a visual thinker. Yet I'm perfectly comfortable reading a book, listening to a lecture, taking notes, hearing a song, interpreting a graph, or role-playing a scenario (well, maybe a little less comfortable with that last one). For me, in the end, the reward is the knowledge obtained; and I will do the work necessary to obtain that knowledge if it is of use to me and worth the work. In all of this discussion, we have left out one of the more obvious causes of… >>>

Thank you for your feedback, Dr. Meers. I think that, by virtue of the kinds of personalities that are drawn to education in the first place, our tendency is to do anything to make sure all of our students "get", and, hopefully, master the material we are presenting to them. After all, their success is our success. So, when presented with this model of "learning styles" and specific intelligences, we want to tailor our teaching to each and every one of them. As I've lamented in previous comments, however, this presents a potential multiplication of our workload by...4, 5 times?… >>>

I ran into an article on the New York Times website (in the "Views" section, but still...), entitled "Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits" [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/07/health/views/07mind.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1]; it addressed many of the issues we've seen so far in these modules, including the effectiveness of changing the settings in which teaching/learning take place, as well as the importance of testing. Even more intriguing to me, however, was one of the studies cited in this article: originally published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest in December 2008, this review of previously published studies calls into question the existence of… >>>

As was brought up by the moderator and participants (in another discussion in this forum), too often online learning ignores some of the learning styles and multiple intelligences of its students. One could argue that even this course in which we are all participating could apply to even more of them than it does(although the thinking breaks, quizzes, and good ol' Max Knowlton do mix it up from time to time). So how could we get online learning to work for the kinesthetic learner? For the auditory learner? For the emotionally intelligent? For the existentially intelligent? And so on... In… >>>

For discussion's sake, I'm going to play devil's advocate here: while it is all well and good to accommodate different learning styles and to assist and encourage students with learning disabilities, I would argue that there are some students whose ambition outweighs their ability and potential. While they can, with great effort and time, learn the same materials as their peers and perform the same tasks at them, once they are thrown into the professional environment and these educational accommodations are removed, they are at a great competitive disadvantage. And, having (most likely) paid for their career educations with student… >>>

There is another aspect of working with language/writing issues that, working in an urban environment as I do, I encounter on a regular basis: the student who is a native English speaker, but whose spoken language is so far removed from academic, business, (so-called) proper English, that they can, for practical purposes, be considered an English as a Learning Language student. It could be persuasively argued that, in order to succeed in an academic setting and in (most) professional environments, they will need to learn the English language anew. The instructor must impart unto them the professional jargon and technical… >>>