Week 5 - Resource based learning

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This week’s lecture was focused on the usage of resources in order to improve one’s learning process. If someone was to be effective when he is studying it’s imperative that he has to use as many resources as he can. The resources that can be used in such a way can be categorized in: Textbooks, hand-out materials, open-learning packages, libraries, journals, computer-based/audio-visual resources, e-mail and the Internet.

There was an in-class discussion about the usage of resources in learning and we tried to understand what each and every of us uses in order to improve our own learning.

Personally, I am fond of using the Internet and online libraries in order to find more resources for my studies or any essay I have to write. Although, I have to add that I am not extremely fond of using more “classic” or old-school methods, like going to the local library or searching through journals.

Most of the people in class used a similar way of resource usage and in my opinion this will become even more common in the following years. That is a fact that will lead to the eventual abandonment of the traditional resources and we will see a turn towards more “IT” resources. If such a thing occurs only time can tell if that would be the best choice. </FONT>

Week 4 - Note Making

This week’s lecture was about something that is extremely common and at the same time extremely underused, Note Making. The art of keeping notes is about writing down the things that we consider important during lectures, quotes from famous personas or even our own ideas. The main reason of keeping notes is the fact that we as human beings have a tendency to forget so that’s one way to avoid forgetfulness. Besides that, a reason for keeping notes is the fact that when it comes down to big amounts of information the most effective way of actually learning anything is to write down the important parts and focus on them.

One of the most important parts of the lecture was breaking down how the memory actually works. The memory process has two stages, the first one is called encoding and is used for saving the information, while the second one is the retrieval part which is about retrieving the stored information.

In general, what I learned during this class was already known to me and I always tend to keep notes in order to improve my studies, however I found the lecture quite interesting and I was introduced to some Note Making styles that I could adopt, like making a circle in the paper and entering the main theme of the lecture and from this circle to start drawing branches of the main themes and so on.

The conclusion that I reached after the end of the lecture was that no matter how basic one might think of Note Making it actually is not. Note making is an art that needs to be refined and perfectioned.