More on grasshopper minds and a few resources to check more closely

My daughter in law replied to the posting on "Grasshopper Minds" and the reference to "age +2". She said:

"The "age plus 2" is based on Sousa's research on the primacy/recency effect of memory. The following link has information regarding this. Centre for Teaching and Educational Technologies".

A few days ago I received the latest issue of Techology in Education from Edutopia. There was a article entitled. "Multimodal Learning Through Media" with a link to a white paper by Cisco Systems called "Multimodal Learning Through Media: What the Research Says". One of the major points of the paper was clarification of the Cone of Experience Theory (we retain "10 percent of what we read, 20 percent of what we hear, 30 percent of what we see, 50 percent of what we hear and see, 70 percent of what we say or write, and 90 percent of what we say as we do a thing"). Incorporating interactive elements are more important when addressing applied skills than with basic information. How many times have we seen interactivity thrown into a class (academic or workplace related) that seemed to be rather useless as tool or means to reinforce learning?

I was led to a 2001 article on "Information Literacy in the Workplace" by Jan Oman from eLearning Technology . There is a quote from the article defining information literacy:

"The definition that is most widely accepted, and that forms the basis of subsequent definitions, comes from the Final Report of the American Library Association Presidential Committee on Information Literacy, 1989 ([Online] Available: http://www.ala.org/acrl/nili/ilit1st.html.):
"To be information literate an individual must recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate and use effectively the information needed. Ultimately, information literate people are those who have learned how to learn. They know how to learn because they know how information is organized, how to find information, and how to use information in such a way that others can learn from them. They are people prepared for lifelong learning, because they always find the information needed for any task or decision at hand." "

Sounds to me like an excellent reason to develop a Personal Learning Environment!