What is learning..revisited

So what is learning? Questions, questions, it's always questions!

Here's some of the things people say.......

Behaviourism - observable behaviour which relies on repetition, context, reinforcement and clear objectives

Cognitivism - the thinking mind: the act or process of thinking

Humanistic - human growth; the fulfilling of potential

Social/situation - being participative, part of a community of practice

What is it about?

Curiosity? Discovery?  A change? A product? A process? Internal? External? Conscious? Unconscious? Knowing that? Knowing how? Active? Passive?

What about the ways?

Visual - bodily- musical - interpersonal - intrapersonal- linguistic - logical - mathematical

We have dynamic learners, innovative learners, analytic learners and common sense learners......(McCarthy 1980)

Questions questions questions. It's a bit like trying to define who I am.

It's clear that in many of the explanations there's:

Something about the subject - information or as JSB likes to call it 'niche knowledge. '

There's also something about actions, skills or ability.

Then there's something about the wider world, whether this be liberal understanding or comprehension.

"At one extreme lie those unintentional and usually accidental learning events which occur continuously as we walk through life.

Next comes incidental learning - unconscious learning through acquisition methods which occurs in the course of some other activity...

Then there are various activities in which we are somewhat more conscious of learning, experiential activities arising from immediate life-related concerns, though even here the focus is still on the task...

Then come more purposeful activities - occasions where we set out to learn something in a more systematic way, using whatever comes to hand for that purpose, but often deliberately disregarding engagement with teachers and formal institutions of learning...

Further along the continuum lie the self-directed learning projects on which there is so much literature...

More formalized and generalized (and consequently less contextualized) forms of learning are the distance and open education programmes, where some elements of acquisition learning are often built into the designed learning programme.

Towards the further extreme lie more formalized learning programmes of highly decontextualized learning, using material common to all the learners without paying any regard to their individual preferences, agendas or needs. There are of course no clear boundaries between each of these categories." (Rogers 2003)