SituatedLearning

quoted from: http://www.telestraininglobal.com/press/media/teles_collings.html

Lucio Teles:

Learning with virtual instrumentation and collaboration: Pedagogy and activities

The combination of self-directed learning, peer collaboration, lab experimentation, and instructors' support is a powerful model that relies on "learning by doing" with an active hands-on component. This model has been named "situated learning" as the context is identified as playing a major role in the knowledge building process.

Brown, Collins & Duguid (1989) developed the concept of situated learning to emphasize the role of the context, the activity, and the culture in the production of knowledge:

For centuries, the epistemology that has guided educational practice has concentrated primarily on conceptual representations and made its relation to objects in the world problematic by assuming that, cognitively, representation is prior to all else. A theory of situated cognition suggests that activity and perception are importantly and epistemologically prior - at a conceptual level - to conceptualization and that it is on them that more attention needs to be focused. An epistemology that begins with activity and perception, which are first and foremost embedded in the world, may simply bypass the classical problem of reference - of mediating conceptual representations (p. 41). The collaborative social interaction that takes place in the appropriate context promotes learning.

Learning, both outside and inside school, advances through collaborative social interaction and the social construction of knowledge… Throughout most of their lives people learn and work collaboratively, not individually, as they are asked to do in many schools (p. 40).