On monday the 8th of February we had our first guest speaker in to talk to us. Her name was Geraldine Gray and she is a Lecturer from the Dept. of Informatics at ITB so lucky for her she didn’t have to travel too far.
Geraldine was in to speak to us about learning styles that are appropriate to studying in digital media. She explained that there are different ways in which people take in information and that we fall into certain categories. These are some of the learning styles she spoke about:
1.Learning Channels: How we take in information
2.Cognitive Strengths: How we commit information to memory
3.Personality Type Influences: How you personality affects the way you learn
4.Manner or Style of Learning: How people process information to understand it
5.Types of Learning Behaviour: Different types of intelligence
The learning channels are broken up into 3 channels which are visual, kinaesthetic and auditory. Everybody has a method which allows them to learn more efficiently and in this case I found my self to fall under the kinaesthetic more so than the others. By this it means I learn by actually doing the task and by interacting. It’s probably the case for me because I tend to go into standby mode when I’m not actually active.
Cognitive strengths are different ways we manipulate information in our heads. We use linguistic, non linguistic and affective methods of doing this. Linguistic would be communication, non linguistic would be mental images, smell, taste etc and affective is out emotions and feelings.
The personality type was the most interesting because people are always interested to see if their ways can be grouped accurately. By using 4 categories people can be split into one of 16 types. I felt i was in the ENTJ group which means I’m extraverted, intuitive, judging and a thinker. I feel it represents me quite well except for the ‘forceful in presenting my ideas’ but perhaps I am and I havent noticed.
This is what my personality type means (taken directly from www.myersbriggs.org):
ENTJ
Frank, decisive, assume leadership readily. Quickly see illogical and inefficient procedures and policies, develop and implement comprehensive systems to solve organizational problems. Enjoy long-term planning and goal setting. Usually well informed, well read, enjoy expanding their knowledge and passing it on to others. Forceful in presenting their ideas.
Frank, decisive, assume leadership readily. Quickly see illogical and inefficient procedures and policies, develop and implement comprehensive systems to solve organizational problems. Enjoy long-term planning and goal setting. Usually well informed, well read, enjoy expanding their knowledge and passing it on to others. Forceful in presenting their ideas.
Styles of learning again break us up into different categories. This time its one between activists, reflectors, pragmatists and theorists. I fit into the activist class as I learn by doing and by having new experiences.
The types of learning behaviours are an expansion of the usual mathematics or languages skills. For example there skills such as interpersonal, musical or naturalistic.
Overall I enjoyed the lecture and it was interesting to see there were others in the class who learn just like me. It helped explain why certain people are better at doing different things than others and it will help me focus more on how i learn and hopefully will make college that bit easier 
