The Seminar 5 task was to:

  1. Read both the Sweller and Chandler (1991)1 and Vygotsky (1978)2 readings, along with Chapter 4 of Churchill et al. (2013)3. You may find it useful to refer back to Chapter 3 of Churchill et al. (2013)3 (already read).
  2. Reflect on my learning experiences.
  3. Identify one learning/experience that I had difficulty with.
  4. Write out the sequence of schema (knowledge or thinking) I think I needed to master that learning experience.
  5. Identify what learning/experiences I missed out on that effected my successful mastery of the learning.
  6. I may wish to discuss this with a Critical Friend. A significant part of teaching is to review the prior knowledge/schema of a student to develop the next lesson in their learning journey. If I can analyse my own thinking by thinking about my thinking (meta-cognition), I will be empowered to improve my own learning.
  7. Record my thoughts in your e-portfolio.

The experience I had difficulty that I thought of was when I was first learning how to use git, I was wanting/ trying to contribute to a project on GitHub. But in order to do so I needed to understand how git worked, and I was having alot of trouble, because I had never used it before. To overcome that and manage to get a working knowledge of Git, enough to contribute meaningfully to the project I wanted to contribute too, I needed:

  • To have an understanding of what Git does — to understand that is stored diff files comparing versions of files, essentially.
  • Within Git I needed to understand what branches were and how they worked — that they separated parallel chains of development.
  • I needed to understand how merging and fast-forward worked — that one branch can easily be merged onto another and that if they haven’t changed any of the same things this is trivial, the diffs of one branch can simply be layered on top of the diffs of the other.
  • I needed to understand how push and pull work, how multiple git repos could be syncronised by sending information between them.
  • Finally, I needed to understanding rebase, and how version history could be re-written in a useful way to simplify the log.

I managed to self-learn most of the above schema, but I ended up getting stuck understanding rebase, as when I tried to put in a pull request to the project I wanted to contribute once I had made all the changes they wanted they asked that I cleanup my version history before they finally merged the changes, and I didn’t understand that to do this I needed to use rebase. I had a friend who helped me understand this, and once they explained to me that that is actually the function of rebase, I got un-stuck, I looked up the documentation for rebase, learnt how to use it, and completed my contribution. But without my friends help I would have really struggled to discover that the functionality I was looking for was called ‘rebase’, I had no schema from which to build that knowledge.

References:

  1. Sweller, J., Chandler, P. (1991). Evidence for Cognitive Load Theory. Cognition and Instruction, 8(4):351-362. ↩

  2. Vygotsky, L. (1978). Interaction between learning and development. Readings on the development of children, 23(3):34–41. ↩

  3. Churchill, R., Ferguson, P., Godinho, S., Johnson, N. F., Keddie, A., Letts, W., Mackay, J., McGill, M., Moss, J., Nagel, M. & Nicholson, P. (2013). Teaching: Making a difference. ↩ ↩2