Guiding e-learning: introducing online informal learning to a global voluntary organisation

The World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts (WAGGGS) is the umbrella organisation for Member Organisations from 145 countries around the world, with a total membership of ten million. While Member Organisations offer training and development within their own countries, WAGGGS offers international opportunities. This project seeks to explore how technology can be used to offer similar opportunities to those provided by the face-to-face courses to a much wider audience, while retaining the community and interactive learning aspects of the existing programmes

Adult Education as Snake Oil under the Guise of Democracy

Based on initial content analysis research into the semiotics of advertising for online learning, this paper extends our understanding of the commodification of education via the web by carefully examining the implications of this marketing on the goals of democracy, the just distribution of education and knowledge as resources, and the consequent impact on social justice and equity

Dewey and Habermas: Re-reading Ethics for Adult Education

The relevance of Dewey and Habermas\u27s ethics for adult education is grounded in epistemology and learning, in particular delineating the centrality of ethics -- normative conceptions of right and wrong -- to how we come to know and understand the world, generate meaning, and hence, learn

Pragmatism, Postmodernism, and Adult Education: Structure and Agency in the 21st Century

This paper develops a theory that interprets the philosophical schools of American Pragmatism and Continental Postmodernism as important, complementary resources for understanding the effects of structure and agency on the possibilities for learning and meaning-making. This type of theory building can provide for practitioners and scholars a useful framework for negotiating the limited battle between self-determination and structural determination

Stealing Our Smarts: Indigenous knowledge in On-Line Learning

Tell me what you know….Knowledge  and knowing can be a very tricky thing.  Reflect on what you are fairly certain that you know. Self-certainty in human knowledge is a function of metacognition primarily.  This paper addresses how we know what we know about the most primal and fundamental functions in our everyday lives, and equates the ways in which technology has invaded such spaces as romance to the ways in which technology has begun to infiltrate our own understandings of learning.  Through an examination of indigenous knowledge, also thought of as folk knowledge, but meaning that knowledge which is resident within the learner themselves, this paper asserts that we need to move to more of a user-design (Carr, 1997) approach to online learning design and development

Massive Open Online Courses and Educational Equality in China: A Qualitative Inquiry

Although Chinese governments are devoted to the improvement of education, considerable defects such as inequality in education and an increase in educational costs exist in the current education system of China. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) assume the hope of resolving the educational inequality in China with the potential of empowering a diverse population with free, open access to prominent educational resources. This qualitative research project applies narrative inquiry to examine Chinese MOOCs learners’ perceptions of their lived experiences and how MOOCs attend to the problems in Chinese education. The inquiry includes triangulated data in the form of interviews, observations, and online posts. The research finds that MOOCs have limited influence on the issue of educational inequality in China. By identifying the perceptions that Chinese learners have towards MOOCs, this study provides significant implications for the adoption and diffusion of MOOCs in China

Profound Learning and Living: An Exploratory Delphi Study

This study, using Delphi methodology conceptualizes the qualities of profound learning, the profound learner, and profound living

Resisting the Pressures of Academia: The Importance of Including Care in Doctoral Study

This study examines the effects of caring relationships in doctoral study. An exploration of the experiences of first year female students showed care facilitated learning

Adult Learning and Pragmatic Identity Theory

The interaction between identity and learning has been under theorized. American Pragmatism offers important insights into identity and learning. With new educational experiences, adults take on new identities. Pragmatic Identity Theory will be an analytical lens allowing us to better understand the identity negotiation within learning experiences

Izkušnje učiteljev v javnem šolstvu s prodornim učenjem

Teachers play a fundamental role in the democratic process by forming an educated populace. Of our many different expectations of teachers, teacher-as-lifelong-learner is among the most neglected. Our basic research questions are: what are teachers’ perceptions of profound learners and profound learning experiences. Through an in-depth focus group with public school teachers, the purpose of this study was to build our understanding of teachers-as-learners by exploring these two questions. Based on this research, the qualities of a profound learning experience include: growing, emotive, disruptive, real, irreversible, either positive or negative, social, opening, and surprising. Profound learners, according to themes which emerged: have depth of thought, are emotionally wise, take life seriously, are adventurous in thought and deed, are unbounded, and are humble. Through a constructivist lens, these qualities direct us to the following findings: profound learning is non-dualistic and holistic, is a cumulative process, and is integral to the complex role of structural identity.Učitelji so bistvenega pomena za demokratični proces, saj oblikujejo izobraženo prebivalstvo. Od številnih pričakovanj, ki jih imamo do učiteljev, je učitelj-kot-vseživljenjski-učenec med najbolj zapostavljenimi. Osrednji raziskovalni vprašanji tega prispevka sta, kako učitelji dojemajo učence in kako izkušnjo prodornega učenja. Namen študije je bil bolje razumeti učitelje-kot-učence, in sicer na podlagi podatkov ciljne skupine učiteljev v javnem šolstvu in osredotočenosti na zgornji dve vprašanji. Raziskava je pokazala, da izkušnjo prodornega učenja zaznamujejo naslednje značilnosti: rastoče, čustveno, pretresljivo, pristno, nespremenljivo, ali pozitivno ali negativno, družabno, odpirajoče in presenetljivo. Znotraj procesa prodornega učenja in glede na teme, ki se pojavijo, učenci kažejo globino misli in čustveno inteligenco, življenje jemljejo resno, so pustolovski v mislih in dejanjih, so neomejeni in skromni. S konstruktivističnega vidika nas te lastnosti usmerjajo k naslednjim ugotovitvam: prodorno učenje je nedualistično in holistično, je kumulativen proces in je osrednjega pomena z vidika kompleksne vloge strukturalne identitete