Clark Quinn wrote an extremely interesting post, X-based learning: sorting out pedagogies and design, on activity based learning. Wanting to see how these different models would interconnect on a mindmap, I started playing with them. That is when I noticed that one of the main difference among them is that some have a known answer and/or the goal is driven by the curriculum, while others have an unknown answer and/or the goal is directed by the learners.
It then struck me that the two primary branches should (could?) be the two main types of knowledge—explicit and tacit:
- Explicit Knowledge is normally easy to articulate to others, thus the models with known answers and/or driven by the curriculum would fall on this side of the branch.
- Tacit Knowledge is normally difficult to articulate to others, thus the models with unknown goals and/or directed by the learners would fall on this side of the branch.
This seemed to give the mindmap a real purpose, rather than just be formal vs. informal, social vs. self, or active vs. passive. Thus the map goes beyond activity based models:
For a larger map click on the image or here.
(note that you can hover your mouse pointer over each concept in the large map to learn more about it)
I'm not sure if I have all the concepts aligned correctly, thus I am wondering what your thoughts are?
Note: I used FreeMind (free of course) to create the mindmap. The document for the mindmap is here - Learning.mm - if you want to download it and revise it. If you have trouble downing it, this is the directory of all the files used to create the mindmap, pictures, and html file - http://nwlink.com/~donclark/learning/pedagogies/. Right click on the file you want to download.
