Over the past year we have been publishing extracts from The New Learning Architect. We continue with the first part of chapter 11:
Models are fun. In their attempts to explain the complex cause and effect relationships of life, they encourage us to believe that we can become masters of our own destinies. If we’re discerning, we’ll reflect on the assumptions underlying the model, and test these against our experiences and the experiences of our peers. If the model holds up, it may even provide us with insights, helping to explain why things have happened the way they have in the past, and how they might just turn out in the future, if we were only to make more use of the model as a basis for our decisions.
Having got this far with this book, you may be encouraged by the prospect of becoming a new learning architect yourself (assuming you’re not one already). If so then this chapter is for you. It provides some guidelines for ways in which you can put the model to practice in real situations involving real learners. It will also help you to structure your analysis and your decision making, but having said that, there’s still plenty of work for you to do. After all, every situation really is different and architects are professionals who are used to thinking for themselves.
The process is described below as a series of steps:
- Define the population
- Identify needs
- Decide what must be tackled formally
- Decide what can be addressed using non-formal approaches
- Decide what can be addressed on an on-demand basis
- Decide how best to support experiential learning
- Implement and evaluate
Coming next: Step 1: Define the population
Return to Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10
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