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EDP 610 is not my first course using the online Adobe Connect format.  I have found courses that meet online to be complicated and riddled with technology issues; however, I can appreciate the need for such courses.  An online course allows my classmates who are on internship outside of the area to participate in a class and allows me to keep an eye on my toddler if I need to do so.  Overall, I tend to lament the time lost to "can you hear me" and "my website crashed," but the format affords an amount of flexibility that a traditional classroom format cannot. 

The exercise we did in class with Jonny and Monte was interesting.  As we read the Jonny story, I was immediately pulling out information that would be important for me as a school psychologist in assessing what could be going on with Jonny.  I have done many case studies throughout graduate school that sounded very similar to this story; therefore, I had a significant amount of knowledge and familiarity to draw from.  When my classmate began reading the story about Monte, I started to wonder if she was reading the wrong story.  I thought maybe the link did not work correctly and we had ended up in the wrong place.  However, she said the dog's name and I realized that we must be in the right place.  I continued to wait for something to happen in this story that had something to do with humans.  Once the story was finished and the question posed, I realized what to goal was of the activity.  Of course, it is easy to start making hypotheses about what could be going on with Jonny.  I am filled with advise about next steps for helping a student in his situation.  However, my first reaction to Monte's story was to seek out someone who has some level of expertise in working with dogs.  Not only did this activity remind me of how I use my own experience to make judgements and find answers, but it also reminded me of how we tend to seek out those we deem as experts to help us with problems we do not understand.  Humans tend to develop areas of specialty; therefore, when we encounter something outside of our own expertise, we seek out someone who may know more.

The story of the Mullah is very similar.  It points out how we tend to look in the safe and familiar place for answers to questions.  For example, in the story about Jonny, no one in my group discussed a physical problem for why Jonny could not learn.  However, some sort of physical problem is probably just as likely.  All of the members in my group have been trained to look for emotional and psychological problems; therefore, we highlight potential sources of stress, diagnoses, or other emotional issues.  We looked in the light first, even though the answer could have been in the dark. 

Overall, as I enter a class on theories of learning, I am eager to learn more.  As I said when I introduced myself in class, I believe that knowing how people learn is not only applicable for helping teachers in the school setting.  I think knowing how people learn is important any time I am in a situation where I am looking to change a person's behavior, help people understand more about how they process emotions or think through problems, or in a meeting with parents trying to help them understand a new diagnosis given to their child.  Learning is one of the most important things we do as humans.  It is essential to our survival and our understanding of the world around us.  Therefore, understanding how these processes work only enables me further to maximize learning for myself and those that I work with.

The excerpt from the commencement address discussed the human default.  I think the idea that a default is to be annoyed, stressed, and believing that we are the center of the universe is accurate.  In the times of my life that I have been the busiest, I find that I go back to my default where every little thing is just so inconvenient that that only reaction is to be frustrated.  It takes effort to come away from the default.  Just like I mentioned above with the story about Jonny.  My group went to our default.  In this case, to look at emotional and psychological issues that could lead to Jonny's behavior.  However, in the case about Monte, our default was different.  We had a consensus to seek out an expert on dogs.  Our default is the light in the Mullah story.  It is the area we are comfortable and have more experience to pull from.  Moving out of the default takes effort, but it can lead to a broadening of our experiences that is often quite worth that effort.