Deconstruct #1 - Green means go

This is my first entry for Dr. Kim's class where we are to "deconstruct" something once per week. I'm not exactly sure I got this right but this is going to be my first stab.

I realized the other day when my son said, mom the light is green, go that he had learned both from reading "Go Dogs, Go" by Dr. Seuss and from observing us in the car that green means go and red means stop. As I was thinking about this I wonder, why. Why and who associated green to mean go and red to mean stop. And as a society we all know this and we learned just by being exposed to it as kids, then anxious drivers, confirmed in drivers ed etc.

It makes me think of how many other things we learn by being members of a society and a culture. We never sit down and say ok, green means go , red means stop, now take a test and make sure you know it, I'm going to drill you. Sure, we take a drivers test, but we have learned long before that that green means go and red means stop. To brainstorm a few other things like this we "group learn" (borrowing "group think" from MM which was introduced in our last class). Shaking hands, greetings, opening the door for people, common manners, not saying you hate a christmas present you don't like, how to be a host, to bring a host gift to a party. All of these things we all do and don't think about are second nature to us. We have learned them so well and they are so engrained in our life, I bet most of us can't pick out exactly when we learned these things. We probably mostly learned them by example and by being immersed in situations where different people did all of these things. If we take these same concepts of learning something so well we don't even think about recalling it and apply it to other situations where does that bring us? The word immerse makes me think of immersion schools, which of course brings us to language and I think most people agree that immersion into a different culture and language is the quickest way to learn a language. I happen to have experienced that as did my husband. I did an exchange to the University of Oslo in college where all 3 of my classes were all in Norwegian. I had taken some Norwegian languages classes but was by no means fluent or even close to being fluent. After living there for 5 months, I could comfortably converse, read, write and understand the language on a simplistic level. QUite amazing, actually.

So this makes me think of the examples above, we probably didn't even know we were learning most of these things, it was just surrounding us at different times and in different ways and we absorbed it by being present and probably aware of the situation. So this to me screams "AUTHENTIC LEARNING" where the environment is real, you consiously and subconsiously pick up on all kinds of things and learn to do things or not do things based on the social interaction. Conforming probably becomes a discussion point as well. Why do some people choose not to conform, they still probably know what is "right" and "wrong" but choose not to comply. That is a different tangent I think.

So if I apply this to my environment of professional development and technology training. Things that should be present in a favorable learning environment.
* Authentic (or simulated) environment for how the product will be used
* Group interaction and involvement
* Consistent exposure of people using the product correctly, examples
* Interested participants
* IMMERSION

That's all for now