Andrea Camusi

From Learning Styles to Experience Styles

In this article we propose a cultural framework that allows to go beyond the learning styles and to define the experience styles, i.e. a set of more general styles that are related to: a) individual characteristics, b) the dimensions of the experience, c) the levels of human interaction, d) the characteristics of the educational process.

Re-thinking the Forum

We have re-designed the forum of the on-line environment LIFE to offer a stronger support to collaborative practices and to favor a thicker social interaction. Among the innovative features that have been developed, in this paper, we focus on the possibility to add comments to portions of sentences or single words. We will show and discuss also a preliminary evaluation of its use, which allowed us also to highlight different interaction styles of learners and tutors

Challenging Technologies: The Virtual Show and Tell in Design Inspired Learning Processes

The design inspired learning (DIL) processes, and in particular the P3BL (problem-project-process based learning) processes, are usually very time consuming and because of their flexible and complex nature are rarely implemented as on-line processes, at least not as full processes. The P3BL is thus a learning domain in which the pedagogy is deeply challenging the technology. In this paper we present the implementation of a Virtual version of the Show&Tell (VS&T) method, that represents the first step toward the realization of a full co-design lab, at present under development as part of the open-source project Life (Learning in an Interactive Framework to Experience).The S&T is a well-known and very powerful collaborative method that can be profitably used to speed up the problem setting of a design process. Its porting from the reality to the virtuality allowed the technology to challenge back the pedagogy and to iteratively transform and improve the VS&T method. A case history will demonstrate the positive effect of the mutual challenge between pedagogy and technology, at least as P3BL is concerned.