Learning Technologies in Support of Self-Directed Learning

Self-directed learning is a continuous engagement in acquiring, applying and creating knowledge and skills in the context of an individual learner's unique problems. Effectively supporting self-directed learning is one of the critical challenges in supporting lifelong learning. Self-directed learning creates new challenging requirements for learning technologies. Domain-oriented design environments address these challenges by allowing learners to engage in their own problems, by providing contextualized support, and by exploiting breakdowns as opportunities for learning. Economies of educational knowledge constitute an emerging concept in which communities contribute toward the creation of information repositories, which can be reused and evolved by all members of the community for the creation of new environments. We argue and demonstrate that domain-oriented design environments can serve as models for these economies, that a software reuse perspective provides us with insights into the challenges these developments face, and that the creation and evolution of these economies are best understood as problems in self-directed learning. Reviewers: Terry Anderson (U. Alberta), Frank Webster (U. Oxford-Brookes) Interactive elements: The WebNet system described in the article is on the Web. From the LAN Design Environment link, you get to a screen image of an interactive Java applet illustrating the WebNet application. A demonstration of the WebNet system described in this article can be found at http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~gerry/WebNet/site/webnet.htm