A Tale of Willy Wobble

No, I'm not being rude. I'm at a conference for a couple of days and the delegates in the first session of the day were shown a film of a one-year-old baby who had learned to swipe her finger over her father's i-Phone to cause a progression of photographs to appear. This is how youngsters these days are brought up to have no fear of new technology and to interact with it from as soon as - no let's make that before - they can walk. Someone else suggested in a session that it may be taken as proof that the human brain now learns in different ways from the way human brains learned in those dark dark days before computers. I disagreed.

In a room full of strategic managers from colleges and the great and glorious from government funded support agencies I told them about the rattle toy I had as a baby that was called Willy Wobble... I kid you not. I pointed out that as a child with a rattle stuck by a suction cup to the tray of my high chair I learned that :

(1) by striking it sideways it made a noise that I found pleasing

(2) that it didn't hurt, and

(3) if I did it enough my Mum got annoyed at the row and removed it.

Therefore I learned to draw a balance between how often and how violently I wanted to make it rattle and how little I needed to do it in order to keep the use of it. This caused much hilarity in the room...

Since then people have come up to say how much they enjoyed my input.

How do we learn then? Well I think we learn from absolutely everything we do. We learn from experimenting, we learn from playing, we learn from people telling us stories; whether in person or from books or now from a web browser.

If anything has changed in the short time that computers have existed it is not the human brain because I don't believe that evolution is as rapid as all that. I think it is more in the way that opportunities are presented to us or kept from us and the ways in which, having tried something new, we enjoy it, or appreciate it. That can be a good or bad thing.

In the far-away past before books, we were told "facts" by people in authority over us - the Church, quite often. We didn't know enough to challenge them. When handwritten books came about, they were mostly religious and created in scriptoriums and had to be read to us by people with that skill, who could put whatever spin they wanted upon the contents. Then when printed books and education in reading became the norm, it was still quite a job to be published and you had to jump through a number of hoops so in the main text books were written by people who were well informed and other people checked and edited content before publication.

Now we can all be publishers because of the wonderful world of blogs. It's easy to learn what we like and therefore we look for more. But it's sometimes less easy to know what's truth or what's accurate and what's twaddle or even deliberate misinformation.

I need to get back to another session now though other stuff is bubbling in my mind. More later perhaps, but for now - thanks for reading my twaddle...

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