December 16, 2006

Research Directed Learning

The Redile System is getting closer to implemented reality. Redile will pilot the current system this winter/spring by supporting a knowledge contest in environmental science, the Canon Envirothon. The 2007 contest will take place in Oregon at the Oregon Garden in Silverton in May and for the winners, nationally in New York in June. Five member high school teams testing and making a presentation on current concepts on bio-fuels and energy options. To participate - sign into yourclassroom.com as a student and enroll in the free general information course. We will also help train adult support mentors, so this is not a youth only program. The costs will be low, but there will be some costs.

The Redile system has a reliance on reteaching, which is a vague concept for most. If you have to teach a topic to others, it requires reenforcing what you know. The teacher does not have to know everything, but the students have to be able to ask that one question that tells each one that the expert knows what he is talking about and can be taken as truthful in context and valuable in skill. There also must be an off-line hands-on application of learned concepts, that reenforce the mechanism for use of the newly learned information.

There are many concepts of science that do not play in other fields of academic endeavor, though i don't understand why. Science is almost a micro-religion that requires firm believers with a fixed criteria of acceptible truth, with many fields of shade greys and conditions where the grey shades lighten or darken and turn useful. Reason and logic are applied concepts in modern science, but i wonder whether ethics was lost. You know what you know and build a system of knowledge based on stacked proof, but when an explanation requires undoing accepted belief, you must reinvestigate the assumptions and correct deeper that just the experiment of the moment. While the form of science application differs by field, the substance is mutual common ground.

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