Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

This learning theory was created in 1943, and he talks about a five-stage model that is about deficiency needs vs. growth needs. When explaining these levels, he talks about how people will always have needs and want them to be met, but a lot of the time they will deny them or hold them off until it is a good time for them to fill that need. Maslow says that when we push these needs to the side, we are only making the desire to fulfill this need even stronger. Like for example, when we have an itch and we try and forget about it and just move on, the desire to itch that spot grows more and more the longer we try and not scratch it. This is what Maslow is saying about life, that we all have desires even if we try and overlook them or forget about them but the longer we do this the desire to fulfill this need will only get stringer as time goes by.

Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning Domains

Bloom’s Taxonomy was created in 1956 under the leadership of educational psychologist Dr. Benjamin Bloom in order to promote higher forms of thinking in education. They identified three domains of educational activities which are cognitive, affective, and psychomotor. With these three groups each one is seen almost as levels that you have to understand and master before moving on to the next level. All three are very important for the human body, cognitive is for the comprehension and intellectual skills which helps you remember and understand things that you read and the things that are said to you while in a conversation. Within affective, this domain is important too because this is the part of the brain that deals with emotion and how we handle different situations that go on throughout or everyday lives. Without this we would either be emotionless, or we wouldn’t be able to control what emotion we give off with certain situations. The last and final level of the learning domains is the psychomotor domain which deals with our motor skills. This is important because without this we wouldn’t be able to interact with one another, we could not walk, or go from place to place with ease like we do now.

What is Backward Design?

This learning theory talks about how school curriculums are set up and how they could be changed to better educate children on the things they actually need to know rather than what the school board thinks the kids need to know. In this article it says that in school the teachers and the school board teach it backwards from the goal and what they need to teach and how they are going to end the school year. After the teachers figure this out they then go on to test the students and see if they are fully comprehending the information they are being taught in class and to see if they have enough validation that the student has a good enough grasp on the information they are going over in class that day or week. After that step is complete, then the teachers and the school will go over what activities the students will need to do in order for them to pass their tests or quizzes and achieve the desired results the school and the society is looking for. With this backward teaching theory, the teachers have a plan for the entire year, rather than having to come up with activities or lesson up on the fly on their own. They can have specific lessons and activities that the school board and the teachers have reviewed and are confident that the students will fully comprehend the information taught in class each week.

A little about me before we start is that i love being outside and doing different things, whether it is playing sports or just walking around. This blog is going to be about the things I do in the Tech for Leading and Learning class I am taking at USF.

Gordon Moore was the creator of Moore’s law theory in 1965, which is very interesting to me because he thought that integrated circuits would change the game on how we see the pricing on electronics. Meaning that with each year or two we will see that the technology we have will become faster and better, while also decreasing the price of the devices.

Buckminster Fuller was a brilliant mind who created many things to help revolutionized the world since the 1960’s, one of his most brilliant works was the Geodesic Dome. Fuller created this structure because he has always believed that we can create things to do more with less, this structure is seen everywhere from kids’ playgrounds and then huge building in California and in Africa too.

Ray Kurzweil has the same kind of idea that Moore’s does but what Ray see’s that everything is gradually going to get better over time because we are growing as a population and getting smarter every generation almost like evolution. Ray says that with every generation is left with the past generations best ideas to work with almost as steppingstones to work and make their ideas even better and then pass it to the generation after that and so on.

Peter Thiel is the co-creator of the online banking service called PayPal and is the creator of Thiel’s Theory. Thiel has the idea that the new generation that we are in right now does not have the minds for innovation like we did in the past, which this is why we haven’t made any new things like flying cars, underwater cities, and the cure to all the different types of diseases and cancers. He also mentions that he thinks this is because of the fact that we are getting comfortable of where we are and that the children do want to be good in school but they only want to be better than their surrounding classmates rather than to try and learn everything there is to learn.

There are a few similarities and a few differences between all four of these theories that make each one unique. Some similarities between the first three theories is that our technology is only going to rise with each generation of life we have like a steppingstone for the generations to come, but while we grow our technology the price for this technology will decrease making everything less expensive. But there is also a big difference of one from all the rest which is from Peter Thiel that contradicts everything that the others are saying because he thinks that we are running out of brilliant minds and innovators because we are not challenging our children to be the best but to just be a little better than the people around them.

There are a few aspects from these four articles I looked at that really surprise me because I would have never thought of these things or looked at it in the perspective that they are. The biggest one that surprised me is Thiel when he mentions that we need to stop creating these little things and start reaching for more and exploring what we know and what we don’t know. This is true because there is so much on this Earth that we still do not know or understand, but it seems like we just have given up on exploring our boundaries because we are just comfortable where we are at as a civilization. One big this for me is that we have only discovered a very small percent of the ocean and the species in it, just imagine if we even just discover 20 percent more of that area of the world how much we would figure out about our planet.

This is an example post, originally published as part of Blogging University. Enroll in one of our ten programs, and start your blog right.

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