The efforts to harness computer technologies to enhance learning began in the 1960s with pioneers like Atkinson and Suppes (Bransford, Brown and Cocking, 2000, 154). However, since that time remarkable new technologies have been developed that not only allow us to better understand how the brain learns but ones that also enable us to enhance the actual learning process. New computer-driven technologies like PET scans, fMRI, and qEEG are dramatically transforming the way we study learning as it unfolds in the brain. These technologies have enabled researchers to uncover three fundamentals of the way we learn that were unknown only a decade ago – learning is: modular, distributed, parallel and heterarchical (New, 2000, 1).
Topographical-like maps are generated by such technologies. These maps show that the brain learns in complex, distinct ways. For example, we learn how to pronounce “dog” in a different module of the brain than we learn to write “dog” and in a different one than we learn to hear “dog”. Each individual learns differently. Some individuals have modules of learning that react more or less than others during similar learning exercises. For example, someone with perfect pitch demonstrates a different kind of brain activity when hearing a symphony than someone who is tone deaf. Further, the maps of brain activity during learning change over time. This means the brain switches from using one set of modules say for the novice, while another set of modules is used by the brain of an expert. New technologies like these have dramatic implications for learning and teaching. They demonstrate that, “the size of an individual processing module can grow and others can shrink with experience, even in adults...and individual brains differ from each other not in a general ability (like IQ) but in many different kinds of specific abilities” (New, 2000, 1).
...