TOOLS FOR EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING THE " E 2 LEARNING " APPROACH
"Tell me, and I will forget. Show me, and I may remember. Involve me, and I will understand." Confucius, around 450 B.C. Learning is a complex task where personal, cultural and social factors play a crucial influence in the process's efficiency. Nevertheless, such complexity may be smoothed when learning is achieved through a natural process and thus made more efficient. This is what is intended with experiential learning, the process of learning through experience, actively involving and motivating participants to use their skills in the most positive way to accomplish a set of tasks previously structured through a variety of instructional methods. After an experiential recognition of the path to solve a problem, individuals become more able to make their own reflections and construct different analogies to similar problems. They enhance their global understanding of facts and develop best practices to solve problems in their everyday life. Also, they become more able to communicate and thus disseminate knowledge by discussing facts, problems and solutions within workgroups. This is a whole new level, where experiential learning leads them to the improvement of their capacity to apply what they learned. It may be considered as an integration or generalization stage. We are trying to build e learning tools as complementary elements of experiential learning in the education of 12 14 years old kids, bearing in mind the use of outdoor activities as a motivational driving force to lead the students in maintaining and developing their interest on the subjects being studied. In this document we resume the work being done in Portugal, with a pilot experience that involves the study of geography. We also present WebLets (Web Learning Education Training System) a tool developed as an e learning infrastructure directed to experiential and mobile learning. E Learning Information Systems Since it's beginnings in the late eighties, internet technologies claimed an important role in education, of being able to revolutionise the educational system. This promise was not fulfilled. In fact, more than ten years later, education is probably one of the elements of information society where the impact produced by technology is less visible. The problem was probably not with technology but with the emphasis given to technology itself instead of the improvement it could bring to the learning process. As stated in [3] the mere existence of a tool may not be a justification for its use in particular ways. One reason for the limited success of the hypermedia systems in education is associated with the cognitive overload that results from learners getting lost in hyperspace. Hypermedia is a web of information rather than a cohesive expository presentation. Thus, when used in an educational system, care must be taken with the interface in order to minimize 'disorientation' [2] The number of options available as alternative paths to gather the information and the level of relevance of the information also has a crucial impact in the efficacy of the system. These navigational difficulties may consequently bring frustration to the learner that becomes uncertain of his original learning objectives. These internet based systems also have positive aspects that can be used to give hype to the learning process. The learners have the opportunity to define their own paths in a web full of information, and the system may provide gathering points where different people may interact and exchange experiences. Many approaches to the development of e learning systems made their emphasis in content management. Those systems were developed as particular applications of traditional database backed websites, providing the same type of functionality as most corporate websites. Specific approaches to content delivering based on user progression and evaluation were the "difference" that tagged a system as educational, and mechanisms for user interaction were in most cases byproducts with limited interest. Many of these systems made their way to the present, being excellent applications, great content repositories but failing as educational tools. This happened mostly because this type of systems place the burden for learning mostly in the shoulders of the learner, thus making learning an individual effort that the system helps to measure and define. But, when we think of our own learning experiences we remember not only what we learned but how and where we learned. A very large part of the value we derive from our educational experiences comes socially and informally from the context [1] This is particularly felt when we remember some of our early learning experiences as kids, where the social factor (the relationships built around the discovery process) are probably still present in our memories, and are undissociable from them. When developing e learning tools for 12 14 years old students, we had to bear in mind the importance of these social factors and we tried to design some new elements that could bring the group context to the frontline and reintroduce the experiential phase in the learning (or e learning) methodology. The Virtual side of Experiential Learning The use of virtual learning environments, emphasized the "virtual" i.e. the non real contact with the world, as opposed to the experiential approach that assumes a necessity to participate in active real world experimentations. When we approached the problem of developing virtual learning environments for K12, and assumed as a main objective to develop mechanisms that promote experiential learning, we didn't want to be tied to a particular trend or line of thought that may be subjacent to this term. We're developing tools for kids that will be used as complement for their regular classes and could helpfully bring some themes out of the classroom, creating opportunities for their use (for instance) in experiments, games or competitions. Make those themes "sticky" as stated by Malcom Gladwell in The Tipping Point [4] Therefore, our experiential learning encompasses a broad range of proposal from Kolb's approach [5] to Priest [6] taking in consideration the work that is being done in collaborative e learning, contextual learning and the use of social software as learning tools. We follow the idea that "E learning should be first and foremost about creating a social space that must be managed according to the teaching and learning needs of those inhabiting that space"[1] Kids create a very strong community, which results from most of their daily life being organized around the school and their colleagues. Notice that, this type of community is normally stronger than those normally found in the university, in spite of being short termed. We designed our system as a virtual community, and gave user interaction center stage importance placing it as the most notorious element on the screen. From there it is possible to contact the other elements of the community (colleagues and teacher) and include other elements not directly connected to the school's environment. A class web log (blog) where all elements of the community can post and comment was used an alternative to a discussion forum. The web log works a class diary, which can be used to describe ongoing experiential tasks, the evolution of a "learning competition" or just to help writing the class history. Online materials are present, as in a traditional e learning system, where it's possible to define different forms of content delivery, based on the completion of specific tasks and tests, or freely available. The experiential approach is supported in the form of small tasks proposed to the class, where different groups work together or compete against each other to find the best solution. The fulfillment of these tasks is only possible by experiential activities developed in the real world. The solution of the problem is not automatically obtained after the submission of the group results, there is space for an open discussion based on the results obtained by the different groups and only after an online or in class debriefing the solution is revealed. These experiential tasks may assume different methodologies and are roughly divided in three main types: TPPR Teacher Proposed, Parallel Resolution task SPPR Student Proposed, Parallel Resolution task TPCR Teacher Proposed, Collaborative Resolution task A TPPR task is essentially a task proposed by the tutor, that the different groups of students will try to achieve independently, with limited interaction. The different solutions obtained may be discussed, as after submission, each group may access information regarding the solutions submitted so far. These results are presented anonymously, but they refer the different solutions obtained and the number of groups that supported each solution. These results, which may be pre edited by the tutor, are unavailable for all the groups that didn't submit their solutions. It's possible to re submit a different solution (or not) and information about all group interactions is kept by the system. The second type of task (SPPR) differs from the first in the sense that the some particularities of the task are defined by the different groups. Typically, this activity assumes the form of a competition where each group proposes a problem that must be solved by the remaining groups. These problems are clearly defined under the scope of a specific task, for instance, in the context of our case study, the problem could be to "hide" the treasure, and define its localization using geographic coordinates. The same principles apply in respect to the discussion of results and final debriefings before any final results are assumed. The last type of task (TPCR) is a collaborative task where each group will have a different role in the development of the project. In this case, all the groups are expected to be collaborative in the fulfillment of each oth