The Aug/Sept edition of James Morrison’s Innovate is just out, with a range of papers that caught my attention, particularly as they follow on well from an online discussion about what’s needed for eLearning to take off that we’ve just finished in the DEANZ community. Each paper provide a particular perspective on the notion of experiential education, with a couple of special interest to me…

An interview with Steve Eskow sets the scene. He defines ee-learning thus:

“e-learning2” is experiential learning, a pedagogy that uses the everyday world as the scene of instruction.

Eskow postulates on Reschooling Society and the Promise of ee-Learning and argues that this sort of learning will be driven by the demand by learners for learning that is provided in and is relevant to the context of their working lives and in which their learning will be applied.

A second paper by Jack M. Nilles is titled Some Historical Thoughts on the ee-Learning Renaissance reinforces this view by stating that…

The world is not structured into a neat set of disciplines to be addressed sequentially. On the contrary, everything is all mashed together, occurring seemingly all at once. Everything is connected to everything else. Students may have learned calculus, history, creative writing, and psychology, but what’s often missing is a working knowledge of the interrelationships between these areas.

and then discusses how ee-Learning is an obvious choice for addressing this because of the flexibility, learner-centredness and notions of currency and relevance of content that it provides. Nilles concludes by stating;

It is no longer a question of whether the academy should experiment with ee-learning; it is a requirement for survival in the near future.

. Now there’s a serious demand-side response to the question “what’s needed for e-Learning to take off?”