Thursday 4 April 2013

How can we use Spaced Learning?

Have you ever heard of spaced learning? Wiki it! Essentially we are talking about modeling learning after the way long-term memories are created. In practice, this means learning for 10 minutes and then jumping into another thoughtful activity aside from the task itself like juggling, sudoku, or standing on your head. Ok, maybe not standing on your head but the image made me laugh and it is Friday morning.

Preparing for take-off...
Whether fruitful in practice or not; the research is there. I read an interesting case about a high school in the USA that practiced spaced learning. The results are interesting…


http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6007908 and they suggest that the students learned better in their two-hour spaced learning session than they did in 4 months in a tradional classroom. Now that is efficient.

Neuroscience has finally gotten a choke-hold in education. How can we embrace this more? What would accountability in spaced learning look like in organizations?

Personally, I am looking at its affordances with big and shiny, wide eyes. Here is our virtual training loop. Let’s be engaged with content and method for 10 minutes online and then move onto something else. Are you the person with a million browswer tabs open? Brilliant. Are you the person who listens to music, talks on the phone and answers emails all at once? Fantastic. The future of learning is upon us. We gap our lives in such a way… why wouldn’t we try to do the same with our learning experiences?