About the Project

Tools for Skills

Project full name: Tools for integrated training of language and ECVET defined vocational skills in mechanized forestry
Project short name: Tools for Skills
Project initials: TfS
Project number: 2012-1-SE1-LEO05-11672

Project Summary
Creative learning!!!
Let the students invent how they want to learn and tell you about it!

Project Summary

European forestry has gone through a rapid change during the recent decades. Manual work of unskilled staff with chainsaw has been replaced by modern computerized harvesters, forwarders and skidders. This development has increased the request for competent and well trained operators of forest machines as well as the demand of mobility of such work force.

The increasing mobility is partly a result of frequent storms throughout Europe causing large areas of storm felled forest in a random distribution between countries. English is the most commonly used language in manuals, spare part catalogs and computers; therefore, it is necessary to have a basic level of English to operate a forest machine and to work in another country. Service staff is a special case that sometimes without forestry experience must communicate with the drivers and understand the situation be able to order the spare parts in English and in another language.

Project results and outcomes

Integrated language and professional teaching material for forest machine students needed in English
Agreed learning outcomes for the training of forest machine operators in UK, Germany and Sweden
Multilingual glossary, forestry related

The partnership of the project was selected with regard to the nature of activities of each organization focusing on vocational training. Each partner has an established contact network with vocational colleges, universities, professionals in Forest Industry and SMEs, managers and decision makers in its country as a result of many years of experience and participation in various national and international projects in the field of Education, Forestry and Wood Industry.

The project aims were achieved through the development of useful training tools to fill in the gaps in English language training within the system of vocational education and training, and provide language skills responding to the current needs of the Forest industry.

The project products and results can be applied in vocational college schools, universities and any short-term or long-term vocational training of forestry company staff and as training materials for lifelong learning for individuals employed in the forestry or the woodworking industry sector.

Creative learning

It is known for quite some time that humans use a tiny portion of their brain. Various studies have reported that between 5 and 10% of the brain is utilized.

⁪

Still, some people have been born with the powers or have trained their mind and/or body to do amazing things, for example, calculate calendar dates, speed memory (memorize digital numbers which they have seen for a few seconds), memorize random numbers, solving problems in record time, withstand physical pain, etc.

Recently, these powers have become the subject of scientific investigation, in hope to discover how these people can do such feats, and the underlying physiological mechanisms or methods used by these geniuses.

One of the best and oldest known random memory challenge is pi (3.14159...) memorization, i.e. memorize most pi places within the shortest time. The world record is 67,890 places within about 24 hours, followed by 43,000 places within 5 hours, or memorizing and reciting 100,000 pi digits in 16 hours. Although some people may find these challenges absurd, others have called the memorization of pi as the "religion of the Universe". From 1991 memory sports have been developed and international championships organized with various disciplines.

It turns out that none of these people were born with ⁪ supernatural powers, but all of them are using various mnemonics devices, i.e. methods or systems to help them memorize the seemingly random digits. The best known pi mnemonic is a poem or a novel, in which each word has the same number of letters as the respective pi digit. Many such poems exist in English, and similar ones have been developed in almost every language of the world.

Similar memorization devices have been developed in many more fields, such as in Chemistry for memorizing the chemical elements within each group of the Periodic Table, in Biology for the order of taxa, in Business and Economics for the rules of professional conduct, in Astronomy for the order of planets of the solar system, in Medicine for remembering bones, nerves, differential diagnosis, etc. In recent years, the nomenclature of Internet sites is based on DNS (Domain Name System), which associates the IP address of each website (e.g. 173.194.116.18) with a domain name (e.g. www.google.com); the reasoning behind this association is that human brains have a limited capacity for memorizing meaningless numbers, but they are quire good at memorizing meaningful collections of words.

Contrary to the proverbial "use it or lose it", which is commonly what happens with rote memorization, properly constructed mnemonics can have a permanent effect; i.e. the information can stay in memory practically for life and can be instantly and correctly retrieved anywhere, anytime without any loss and without any further refreshing or repetition required.

Coping with Information Overload

On the other hand, it is recognized that students learn too much. This does not mean that we have reached the limits of the human brain or that we are perpetuating a cruel educational system, but simply that the educational system does not provide the information in an appropriate way for the brain to absorb and retain it. The new learning approach is that people of any age can learn much more if the information is provided to them in an appropriate format, or if people learn to make associations between seemingly irrelevant facts, using humor, short stories, songs, positive thinking or whatever else they might find useful.

In the case of in class training, mnemonics devices for vocabulary building discovered by some trainees are immediately announced in class and distributed to peers, who can build upon them or customize them to their own personality or needs.⁪

It is well known that pressure has negative effects on student academic performance. Sometimes students crack under the enormous pressure of upcoming critical exams; as a result, their brains shut down, they decline to absorb material and they may reach extreme reactions, such as suicide. In today's European Union with sub-replacement fertility (1.2 children per woman compared to 2.1 children per woman required to maintain a steady population) and facing a huge demographic problem, this is simply unacceptable. Similar trends have been reported in Japan, Korea and other countries around the world where children's depression combined with demanding educational systems and crucial exams have caused teenager suicidal rates to increase exponentially.

For this reason, several European countries, including France, Germany, Sweden, etc have been testing for a while a new system where exams have been replaced by one-to-one student-instructor interviews and discussion on a previously assigned homework project.

College drop-outs

An interesting but meticulously overlooked fact about the modern educational system is the list of successful high school and/or college dropouts. Teachers and educational system decision-makers should be particularly concerned about the numbers of school children who feel disappointed or annoyed by the school environment and they decide to look for prosperity in other ways.

If we continue to use personal wealth as a measure of success, this list includes individuals like Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, etc, but also modern times moguls such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Richard Branson, Michael Dell, etc.

To put all of that into perspective, from the 234 individuals whose fortune is tracked by Forbes magazine, the vast majority have a formal education and earned an academic degree; 100 have some kind of advanced college degree, but an amazing 18%, or 41 of the 234 individuals in the list, have never finished college.

Amazingly, however, if you factor out Bill Gates, the richest man on Earth, worth about 60 billion US dollars, the average college dropout on the Forbes list is worth 5.3 billion US dollars, compared to the 2.9 billion US dollars of the average college graduate on the same list!

And Forbes magazine concludes:

... if the goal is to become rich, years of formal education may simply be a waste of time. (http://www.forbes.com/2000/06/29/feat.html)

Education cost is another major factor of dropping out of college or not even starting college at all; it is currently estimated that the average US graduate of a 4-year college will have a 120,000 US dollar student loan to pay after graduation. And that figure does not include expenses for going to Graduate School.

The Challenge: Teaching English to non-English speaking Forest Workers

images/speech-motor control_centers_500w.png

Teaching English as a second language is a daunting fact in the case of forestry workers, due to the fact that two different sets of brain centers, each controlling a separate activity, are involved: sensory perception and language processing. Traditionally, forest workers have a very good eye-to-hand coordination, controlled by sensory centers responsible for visual input, motor skills and coordination (red dots in the picture). Language learning involves language comprehension & speech production, which are activities controlled by entirely different brain centers (green dots). The human brain is known for its plasticity, i.e. its capacity for developing new connections or exchanging information along alternative routes between previously unconnected areas; this information exchange is faster in young individuals, and decreases with age.

One of the underlying aims of this project was to find and promote ways of learning more, faster, easier, more permanently and, most importantly, in a way that would be fun, and apply this in the case of forestry workers. To be more specific, give learners the tools or basic instructions of how to learn, and let them improvise on their own to master the material and improve their learning method. In other words, we fully endorse the view "Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for life".

Learning tips & tricks

Break stuff in chunks

Alternate intense learning periods with relaxation

The human brain has a short attention span (approximately 8 minutes). Break the material in chunks, and study each chunk hard for 8 minutes; lift your eyes from the material for 1-2 minutes, and repeat. Repeat the cycle 3-4 times and take a short break.

Make your own story chain

Several thousand years ago, ancient Greek orators were noted for their ability to give hours-long speeches from memory. After all, there were no teleprompters or Powerpoint then, nor even any practical way to write down a long speech. So how did they pull off such astonishing feats? They invented a visual imaging technique where thoughts were mentally captured as images in the mind’s eye because images are much easier to remember than words. They then placed these mental images sequentially in imagined story chains. Thus, they could give their speeches as if they were reading a list of bullet points, but it was all done in their brain as visual imagination.

This approach works because the human brain is wired to construct and remember stories. If you have any doubt, just think of the popularity of the movies, TV dramas, and novels (some 100,000 in English each year).

So, next time you want to remember something, be creative and write your own story...

Learn while Playing

From a purely biological point of view, learning starts early on in the childhood of every living thing: Cubs learn how to fight by playing with their siblings, birds learn how to fly by jumping in their nest, sheep learn to avoid poisonous plants, humans learn to avoid snakes, etc.

The trainer as the mentor

Instructors working at any educational level and/or institution are urged to motivate students to discover their own learning ways. This is not an easy task, but should be a core priority of every instructor. For example, about 70 years ago, a young, self-taught teacher in devastated, post-war Greece came up with a rhyme for an elementary school student who was having trouble learning the alphabet. The entire class was signing the rhyme loud while walking in sync back into the village from the fields where they were having their daily lessons. By modern day standards, the student would have been diagnosed probably as having learning disabilities, and would have been sent to special education school. This might be an acceptable practice in large city environments, where people don't know their neighbors, but in small rural societies the stigma remains for life. The teacher's persistence paid off, the student carried on and graduated from high school, while avoiding marginalization from the small local community.

Efficient Learning

Another example of efficient learning comes from the study of ancient Greek language spelling. A nightmare all high-school students have to go through is to learn and remember the words that take a thick spirit ("δασεία"). Words taking a thick spirit were pronounced with a rough breathing, sort of a light "h" sound uttered before the initial vowel of the word.

There are about 135 words with rough breathing, and the usual approach of tackling the problem is by rote memorization. Unlike learning to ride a bicycle, where if you learn it once, it stays with you forever, rote memorization has the disadvantage that sooner or later the information is forgotten, and it has to be repeated frequently to stay in memory.

Alternatively, some mnemonics have been developed in the form of poems with rhymes of questionable usability and quite hard to memorize. The easiest way to deal with this problem, however, is a very simple rule: "when an aspirate word is combined with a preposition, the end consonant of the preposition switches to its fricative form" (e.g. ἁγιάζω --> καθαγιάζω, ἁλάτι --> ἀφαλάτωσις, ἡμέρα --> καθημερινός, ἥσυχος --> εφησυχάζω, etc). A simple rule applicable to all 135 words, and, most importantly, no exceptions. Similarly, all aspirate Greek words that have been transferred to English, have converted the rough breathing of the initial vowel to an "h"; for example, ἡμισφαίριο --> hemisphere; ἥλιος, ἡλιοκεντρικός --> heliocentric; αἱμοσφαιρίνη --> hemoglobin; ἑλικόπτερο --> helicopter; ἡμέρα --> ἐφήμερος --> ephemeral; Ἱστορία --> History; ὁρμόνη --> hormone; ἑκτάριο --> hectare; ἑκατόμβη --> hecatomb; ἁπλός, ἁπλοειδής --> haploid; ἡδονή --> hedonism; ἑξάγωνο --> hexagon; etc. Again, no need to remember 150 unrelated words, just do a quick memory search for some commonly used English words. And also, an example of how languages are related, and how some features abandoned in one language have been transferred and saved to another.

(For more information see https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Comparative_Teaching_of_Old_Greek_and_Latin/Lesson_01_Part_1)

Be creative

In conclusion, think out of the box, and look at the big picture. Don't consume yourself with trivial details, but look if you can find a more general rule. And remember, creativity has no rules: Alexander the Great did not untie the Gordian knot; he sliced it with his sword. Your mind is your sword. Don't waste it! Sharpen it and use it to cut the knots.