from Doctor Zen

You’re not a peg to be shoved into a hole. You’re not an interchangeable widget. You’re an individual.

Katelyn Cavanaugh’s project is all about those special little differences that we all have that separate us from the rest of the crowd. She’s studying how the way you learn might be different from the way that I learn, or that Katelyn herself learns.

The question is whether accommodating those differences in how people learn makes a difference to people’s learning or not! Does it matter if you can go backwards and forwards on a test? You might want that option, but maybe it makes no difference on average. After all, if people were good at predicting what will help them learn, teachers and schools wouldn’t be as necessary as they are. The research on this subject so far is contradictory, so new experiments are needed to sort the whole mess out.

Katelyn’s project will be doubly indebted to the crowds. Not only is she getting the money for her project through crowdfunding, she’s finding her subjects by crowdsourcing. Let her explain:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPoGETjgaNk?rel=0&w=420&h=315]

What I love about this video is that it could have been deadly dull: a talking head. But Katelyn describes her project so cleanly, so smoothly, that it just flows by. The proof? As of this writing, Katelyn is 85% of the way to fueling her project! You could be the one to put her project past the post!