As thinkers continually monitor their attention, focus, and results, it may become necessary for them to make changes in beliefs about their level of attention, abilities, and the value of contributions being made. This process of cognitive restructuring
DOI: Cognitive Restructuring
As the thinker works to generate and refine knowledge, it is vital that he or she remains in control of both behavior and commitment to a task.
This is very interesting. I think that the "commitment to a task" is indeed vitally important because it shows that creative and critical thinking are much more difficult than one would first think them to be. It is much easier for someone to give up on the creative process or on a new idea because they've hit a "road block". I think of how many times I have told my students to "Be Creative" as a direction on a project. One does not simply, be creative.
Schutz indicates that their responses were immediate: “beard, sandals, dirty, unreliable, late reports, never there when you want him.” Their responses to “uncreative” were: “neat, on time, prompt reports, reliable.” At the conclusion of the discussion, the executives decided they really didn’t want more creativity.
I can't believe this isn't highlighted more. I think this explains the who education system we have in place here in the US. We (our executives) don't want creativity at all, they want robotic and reliable "people" who produce results. However, this most definitely does not inspire innovative practices.
The more we learn about them before we design the instruction, the more we can match their interests and concerns in the instruction. If the learners are anonymous, then we lose this tailoring of instruction to their interests.
There are lots of connections made to this sentence. I think that is because every educator that I know realizes the importance of building a relationship with the learner. It opens up many opportunities like most have mentioned here before me. Most schools would refer to this as "student-centered differentiation". However, is it really student centered if we are still basing everything on the content itself? With most teachers, the goal of learner analysis becomes an attempt to make the content relevant to the learner. Is it really personalized learning if the content is irrelevant to the learner?
Situated Cognition/Constructivist/Anchored Instruction crowd
DOI: critics of instructional design
If everyday design were ruled by aesthetics, Iife might be more pleasing to the eye but less comfortable; if ruled by useability, it might be more comfortable but uglier. If cost or ease of manufacture dominated, products might not be attractive, functional, or durable’. Clearly, each consideration has its place. Trouble occurs when one dominates all the others. (Norman, 1988, p.151)
This reminds me of our module 1 discussion regarding the definition of a 21st century learner.