I have passed my statistics exam! There were only two students who took the exam: myself and a woman from Rumania. The exam was conducted as a joint oral exam. Prof. Quednau asked the other student several basic questions until she got stuck and then encouraged her to consult her notes. For me, he asked me to construct (on paper) an R program that would calculate the one-tailed test using the binomial distribution. It was challenging to remember all of the commands without the history to scroll back and look at.


I attended the final lecture in the Programmed Instruction class in the morning and the last E-Learning class in the afternoon. I didn't take the exam for the Programmed Instruction class, but I did for E-Learning. It was important to the instructor of the E-Learning class that you remember her diagrammatic details regarding her theoretical structure of E-Learning, for example, "Electronic Instructional Systems" have "Goals" and "Instructional materials" that "Students" and "E-Instructors" interact with. You had to include "Goals" -- that was very important because it contrasted with a "programmed instruction" model that didn't include goals as one of the components.

I was kind of stunned while I was in the Programmed Instruction class until I realized that it was an openly behaviorist model of education. In the US, behaviorism has been largely or wholly rejected as a model for education. Not only was there a class on programmed instruction, the E-Learning class presented Programmed Instruction, Cognitive, and Constructivist approaches as three alternative ways to approach teaching. It was pretty clear which approach the teacher favored however (coughBehaviorism). For me it was an exposure to a whole literature about which I know almost nothing, however. In the US there are a lot of faculty who approach teaching from a largely behaviorist perspective, but only because they have no background in pedagogy. It is very interesting to have informed discussions with people about their pedagogy who come at phenomena from a different perspective: both groups are looking at the same phenomenon, but recognizing a completely different suite of salient features.

After class, I went to a restaurant with an Esperantist from Bosnia Herzegovina to chat and have a beer. At Esperanto conferences in the US, I've occasionally met Esperantists from a range of different countries, enough to know that Esperanto "works". You wish you could grab people and show them: "Look! We have Albanians, Belgians, Bosnians, Bulgarians, Czechs, French, Germans, Kroats, Hungarians, Poles, Rumanians, Slovaks, Spaniards, Swedes, and even an American and Look! They can all talk to one another!" Unfortunately, you just can't show people. To them, it just looks like a bunch of foreign people all speaking some foreign language. It's not something you can understand if you've only ever learned a foreign language. When you try to learn a national language, it is a terrible struggle to say anything and there is always the feeling that for the other person it is effortless to speak, but a struggle to understand you. In Esperanto, that doesn't happen. It is relatively easy to speak and understand one another. Not as easy as one's own language, but relatively easy. Unfortunately, it's just something you have to experience for yourself.


StevenBrewer