Prof Frank Voon
CNational University of Singapore, Singapore

Title: The neurocognition of reflection: The mystery in learning, the essence of teaching, from mystery to mastery.

Abstract

Recent advances in medical and information technology have provided us with an insightful glimpse into the processes of the mind and the cognitive functions of the brain. Technology is also changing the way we learn, making everyone both a teacher and a student at the same time. The interesting challenge of teaching newer generations of students 25 years and younger is becoming increasingly multidimensional. These online citizens have grown up in a dominantly technological environment that has undergone rapid change in the 21st century. In addition, both the generation of online data and the ease of anywhere, anytime, mobile cloud computing with 24/7 wi-fi cell phone access to multimedia content has shifted the paradigm from teaching to learning, and from information creation to knowledge curation and distillation. This keynote presentation focuses on the learning paradigm and bases it on new ideas in the field of neurocognition, from how we can efficiently and effectively think through data to information to knowledge to mastery, through object definition and the experience of reality. There is a way to give a cup of confidence to a student, and it stretches from understanding to practice coupled along the course with an intellectual appreciation of symbolic representation (pattern formation) and teaching to learn based on question formulation rather than answer routines alone. All these have great implications for both students and teachers of Mathematics, in relating relevant new principles of Innovation, Numeracy, and Distraction and Differentiation to good practices in the classroom.