Fictive learning is actually real learning

'Fictive learning' is based on the 'what if' scenario-making we sometimes indulge in. As it says in this article,

"fictive learning" experiences, governed by what might have happened under different circumstances, "often dominate the evaluation of the choices we make now and will make in the future, " said Dr. P. Read Montague, Jr., professor of neuroscience at BCM and director of the BCM Human Neuroimaging Laboratory and the newly formed Computational Psychiatry Unit. "These fictive signals are essential in a person's ability to assess the quality of his or her actions above and beyond simple experiences that have occurred in the immediately proximal time."

So for me this tells me that asking students to review what they have done using, among other things, what if scenario-making, is likely to help their learning. Some people are impatient of that kind of thing but it would appear to make sense.
ScienceDaily: Considering 'What Might Have Been' Is Key In Evaluating Behavior

Technorati Tags: learning, fictive, scenarios, teaching

Curiosity and curriculum are antithetical concepts

Enormous sympathy with this. My frustration in the classroom is having to leave good questions aside because we have a curriculum to follow, with standardised tests every so often to demonstrate learning and government league tables related to them and so money and parental esteem etc etc.
"In a classroom, when 30 students each have good questions, 29 of them will be frustrated. In fact, they may all be frustrated, since teachers are bound by the curriculum to march endlessly onward in a very particular direction. But students' curiosity tends to go in directions for which teachers have not planned. In today's schools, teachers' plans are pre-ordained. The curriculum dictates the teacher's plan. The plan, not the individual ideas or questions of the student, dictates how the lesson proceeds. Curiosity and curriculum are antithetical concepts."
As it happens, it's worth looking at the rest of this online book, not only because of the contents but because of the way it is delivered: it's great to follow ones own curiosity about the questions it raises rather than having to follow closely the author's linear development of the arguments. Much food for thought but it's inspiring me.
Curiosity vs. Curriculum:

Sorbonne curriculum change as a result of pressure

Issue no. 28 of the Post-Autistic Economics Review "There has been a PAE reform of the economics curriculum at the Sorbonne (Paris I)
“At our university (the leading one for economics in France) we have succeeded in cutting back the programs of micro, macro and maths, something that would have been inconceivable a few years ago. This is in the aid of an approach more open, more multidisciplinary. The ‘orthodoxes’ have rather easily given way, having, despite everything, interiorized the arguments advanced against them. In the colloquiums and in the press they feel obliged to justify what they do, thereby admitting at least in part the aptness of the ‘anti autistes’ criticisms.” Bernard Guerrien"

This is quietly very significant, imho. Perhaps, also this is the way it needs to be done so that economist [or whoever] are trained into ways that suit what we are learning about the way things are rather than the way that certain theories say they should be ...