Part of me would love to just bulk practice my way to swimming success by swimming 2 times per day 7 days a week for a couple months.  However, if there is one thing that 361 has shown me it is that quality learning take TIME!!!!! This is why (and due to injury consideration) I space my learning out into 3 60-90 minutes sessions per week.  While this approach will take me longer, it significantly cuts back on injury risk and will improve the quality of my learning.  Hopefully by applying the techniques I have learned in this course to my practice of swimming I can eventually refine my swim economy and muscle activation patterns, but for now I will continue to push through the learning plateaus of my mediocracy.

To provide an example of this I will use the video linked below, which gives the basic idea of what one of these encounters may look like (I would not recommend watching the whole video as it is a 20 minute encounter).  Let us say that in a typical raid you may have 6 healers, 2 tanks, and 17 damage dealers. As a healer you are tasked with reacting to the incoming damage by casting spells which heal your allies.  In the fight below there is a transition phase in which your allies are taking high amounts of damage periodically along with large spikes in damage from a debuff that is being passed around in the group. You must stay near to the group in order to avoid taking excessing damage and dying.  Now this scenario does not occur in the video, but is a fairly common choice that healers must make: if a group member were to take damage that puts them at risk for dying at the same time you needed to move as a healer what would you consider and what will you do?  There are hundreds of different answers to this due to the nature of the game, but essentially you are tasked with a decision that has 3-4 options that must be made in less than 1 second (the time required for spells to refresh). 

The options are:

1.     Is to use a slow low resource healing spell while remaining stationary to ensure that this player lives and take the damage for not moving on time.

2.     You can use an expensive resource healing spell allowing you to cast while on the move to save the player and stay with the group.

3.     You can just move and hope another healer is in a better position to take care of that player

4.     Move and then heal the player when you have time

There is no right answer to the question in the moment, but a smart raiding team will have a member on it that has hopefully taken 361 and understands response selection enough to know that as S-R alternatives increase our reaction times slow down.  Above I only listed 4 alternatives but there are easily 10-15 combinations that could be considered utilizing allies or abilities on long cool downs. This presents a major problem as the player has at best 1 second to react, but it is likely that this time frame is reduced, or it will be advantageous to move quickly.  The solution that every good raiding team has for these sticky situations is a plan so that healing is delegated to specific healers.  By assigning certain healers to deal with specific sticky spots in a fight the number of S-R alternatives a player must choose from could be cut down from 10-15 to 1-2 which massively improves reaction time leading to a quick and correct response selection.  

In relation to the class I have always found observing the progression of learning to be very cool, but this only occurs if I am able to effectively use augmented feedback.  As we delved into the augmented feedback module, I was really excited to learn better ways to facilitate learning.  I have found on my own that prescriptive verbal augmented feedback after asking clients how they felt on the prior set is the best way of offering advice on technique.  I also observed over the past year that there are many times where if I withhold specific feedback the client will usually correct for the error on their own.  These were the basic observations I had made prior to learning about augmented feedback in the course.  Needless to say, when we got to the augmented feedback module I sat there giving myself a little pat on the back for not steering my clients wrong this entire time.  I find that the principles of augmented feedback in regard to when to give feedback and what feedback to give are extremely intuitive.  After just a brief period of observation I was even able to subjectively notice how impactful augmented feedback is when applied correctly.  Even though I already had the “what” component of augmented feedback down, I needed 361 to help me fully understand the “why” component which I now understand and have found to be very useful.    

Below is a picture of my brother and I when we were both playing on the team together. 

Essentially my mom and/or dad provided a demonstration of the motor learning skill that is eating for my by reaching out, grasping food, and putting it into their mouth.  Going with the mirror neuron hypothesis, my brain was activating the visuomotor neurons that would be used for performing this action while I was simply observing my parents.  The result evidently was me grabbing cake and then, due to a lack of neuromuscular coordination, smearing it all over my face.