A Self Managed Law house dedicated to applying advanced learnign techniques to Law school. Constructivist and memnonic learing techniques.
1] http://www.supermemo.com from Wired Magazine: Want to Remember Everything You’ll Ever Learn? remember this Algorithm
Here’s a great–and very readable–article in Wired magazine about how your memory works. Part of the article focuses on the work of Piotr Wozniak, a Polish memory researcher (yes, they have those), and his memory software app, Supermemo. The man and the application are brilliant, and the app works unbelievably well, helping you to memorize large amounts of material (such as GRE/SAT vocabulary) with minimal effort and holy-moses-that’s-amazing effectiveness. Unfortunately, the software is unfriendly, byzantine, and downright ugly. Enter Mnemosyne; a kinder, gentler program that does the same thing without the pain, and it’s not only free, but opensource as well! http://www.mnemosyne-proj.org/
2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructionist_learning Constructionist learning is inspired by constructivist theories of learning that propose that learning is an active process wherein learners are actively constructing mental models and theories of the world around them. Constructionism holds that learning can happen most effectively when people are actively making things in the real world. Constructionism is connected with experiential learning and builds on some of the ideas of Jean Piaget.
Seymour Papert defined constructionism in a proposal to the National Science Foundation entitled Constructionism: A New Opportunity for Elementary Science Education as follows: “The word constructionism is a mnemonic for two aspects of the theory of science education underlying this project. From constructivist theories of psychology we take a view of learning as a reconstruction rather than as a transmission of knowledge. Then we extend the idea of manipulative materials to the idea that learning is most effective when part of an activity the learner experiences as constructing a meaningful product.”
As Papert and Idit Harel say at the start of Situating Constructionism, “It is easy enough to formulate simple catchy versions of the idea of constructionism; for example, thinking of it as ‘learning-by-making’. One purpose of this introductory chapter is to orient the reader toward using the diversity in the volume to elaborate—to construct—a sense of constructionism much richer and more multifaceted, and very much deeper in its implications, than could be conveyed by any such formula.”
2,A] http://nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=8751190 learning is most effective when part of an activity the learner experiences as constructing a meaningful product. Specifically a set of new materials will be developed for learning science in elementary schools. The materials use a new cut across science, organizing many traditional concepts under the heading of motion science, information science and color science. The materials will be designed to make better use of the level of computers presence that is now becoming common in schools. The design of the new materials pays special attention to the role of affective, cultural and gender-related facets of learning science. The materials will be developed in an inner city public school in Boston and evaluated in a number of test sites at associated schools in several states for dissemination to schools covering the full range of socio- cultural variation in American education.
