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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (621673)	9/10/2004 1:04:23 PM
From: DizzyG	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Just keep telling yourself that, Kenneth. I'm sure it helps you deal with your serious case of cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is a psychological phenomenon which refers to the discomfort felt at a discrepancy between what you already know or believe, and new information or interpretation. It therefore occurs when there is a need to accommodate new ideas, and it may be necessary for it to develop so that we become "open" to them. Neighbour (1992) makes the generation of appropriate dissonance into a major feature of tutorial (and other) teaching: he shows how to drive this kind of intellectual wedge between learners' current beliefs and "reality". Beyond this benign if uncomfortable aspect, however, dissonance can go "over the top", leading to two interesting side-effects for learning: * if someone is called upon to learn something which contradicts what they already think they know — particularly if they are committed to that prior knowledge — they are likely to resist the new learning. Even Carl Rogers recognised this. Accommodation is more difficult than Assimilation, in Piaget's terms. * if learning something has been difficult, uncomfortable, or even humiliating enough, people are not likely to admit that the content of what has been learned is not valuable. To do so would be to admit that one has been "had", or "conned". dmu.ac.uk Diz-

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (621673)	9/10/2004 1:08:31 PM
From: DizzyG	Respond to of 769670

US jobless claims plunge by 44,000 WASHINGTON : US weekly unemployment claims plunged by 44,000 in the week ended September 4, to 319,000, the Labor Department said on Thursday. It was the biggest decline in initial claims since December 2001 and better than the figure of 345,000 expected on Wall Street. The drop was attributed in part to the impact of storms that have battered Florida in the past month and to problems adjusting for seasonal factors, a Labor Department spokesman said. The four-week average of initial claims, which smoothes out distortions caused by weather and holidays, fell by 3,750 to 339,250. - AFP channelnewsasia.com