Resources

Meta-Learning

Informal Education -- driven by conversation, exploring and enlarging experience, respecting the dignity of every human being

Learning Development Institute -- promotes learning by individuals and by all levels of organizations and caring for the organic integration of the learning environment at large, ensuring its ecological soundness. from Dr. Jan Visser. See also the Meaning of Learning Project

Learning to Learn -- styles, groups, skills, blockages, and cycles. from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Teaching Models --

How People Learn

Learning and Teaching -- theories of learning, by James Atherton

How People Learn, Chapter 2

"Students come to the classroom with preconceptions about how the world works. If their initial understanding is not engaged, they may fail to grasp the new concepts and information that are taught, or they may learn them for purposes of a test but revert to their preconceptions outside the classroom. "

Theories of Learning, Open Directory Project

Explorations in Learning & Instruction:
The Theory Into Practice Database -- fifty theories. by Greg Kearsley

from School of Education, University of Denver:

Time Capsule of Learning and Training. by Don Clark

Learning in Communities

Building Capacities For Community Transformation

Creating Learning Communities

School Reform

The 21st Century Learning Initiative

Learning is essentially a social and meaning making activity that often occurs in spontaneous and unplanned ways.

The Swiss learning researcher Etienne Wenger helps put this into context when he writes, "Our institutions are largely based on the assumption that learning is an individual process, that it has a beginning and an end, that it is best separated from the rest of our activities, and that teaching is required for learning to occur. So we arrange classrooms where students - free from all the distractions of their participation in the world - can pay attention to a teacher or focus on exercises. We design computer-based training programs that walk students through individualized sessions covering reams of information and drill practice."

Not surprisingly, Wenger continues, "The result is that much of our institutionalized teaching and training is perceived by would-be learners as irrelevant, and most of us come out of this treatment feeling that learning is boring, arduous, and that we are not really cut out for it."

Deschooling Society, by Ivan Illich

History of Education and Childhood an awesome resource