An excerpt from by 2026 book: Efficacious Educational Technology. Find the references in the full version of the book.
Despite educators’ complaints that students are disinterested learners, humans are active learners about what makes them curious. Johnson and Majewska (2022) define and summarize informal learning as a complex and largely voluntary activity that accounts for most of the learning over a lifetime. In2009, then again in 2019, Mizuko Ito and colleagues published Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out a collection of case studies describing how young people, especially, are using technology and digital media to facilitate their own learning. It is reasoned the lessons researchers discover about learning that happens in these settings can influence the formal education that happens in schools.
Rogoff (1990) described guided participation as a method of informal learning that started with highly scaffolded modeling and demonstration by mentors early in the experience, but learners assume increasing responsibility for planning, undertaking, and judging the learning products as they develop greater expertise. The settings of Rogoff’s work tend to be in highly social settings and based in real world problems.
Caine and Caine (2011) proposed guided experience as a pedagogy that captures the nature of learning that occurs in natural environments, which follows the perception/action cycle. The perception/ action cycle posits learning is the continuous process of recognizing a situation, interpreting it according to what it is already known, acting, and then adjusting further perceptions according to feedback after acting. Guided experiences are based on three elements:
- Relaxed alertness which finds the learners motivated and prepared to learn in a stress-free, but high-expectation, environment.
- A complex experience which finds the learners acting in the same manner as experts rather than learning about what experts know.
- Active processing experience which finds the learners thinking about and making sense of their experiences.