Learning Activity – Introduction
As we began to become more experienced in our studies of Self-Organised Learning, three things became clear:
The Meaning – Action – Perception Cycle
- That many learners were unable to appreciate exactly what they were doing and as a result were unable to learn effectively. The MAP way of looking at human activity gave us and them some necessary indications of what needed to be addressed. e.g. the drop in the learning curve diagram
- During our earlier experiments it became clear that many learners were not able to observe themselves in action and therefore experienced great difficulty in improving how they did their tasks. Whilst we were carefully studying what they were doing they often found it difficult to appreciate how our observations could help them improve. Either they did not believe us or they could not understand how or what we were observing related to what they were doing. We gradually began to develop a method among ourselves as investigators which involved the three major dialogues; PROCESS, SUPPORT & QUALITY.
- So together the three themes of the ‘Drop in the Learning Curve’ plus the MAP view of the contributions to skill, together with the PLC enabled us to develop a series of experimental techniques which could be shared with the subjects of our experiments so that they became comrade experimenters with us.
The Personal Learning Contract
In fact the Personal Learning Contract (PLC) was partly developed with the learners as a way of capturing our methodologies.