For those involved one way or another in the delivery of educational services, there is little doubt that teacher leadership (albeit underrated) does exist in our schools and that it significantly impacts on school effectiveness. It has even been suggested that this activity contributes to improved organizational memory by using the power of…

This article explores several ways computer-based instruction can be designed to support constructive activities and promote deep-level comprehension during vicarious learning. Vicarious learning, discussed in the first section, refers to knowledge acquisition under conditions in which the learner is not the addressee and does not physically…

The number of distance education providers and learning options has increased rapidly in recent years with the emerging flexible learning technologies. The main challenge facing Australian and other universities aiming to deliver distance education programmes nationally or internationally is to find economical ways to encourage and enable…

In this article, the author reflects on the uses of multimedia literacy and discusses a unique but replicable process of creating a video poem linking her artistic visions with some personal life experiences. Rethinking notions of teacher as learner, the author draws upon particular learning moments to reconceptualize current teaching practices…

Traditionally, Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) has focused on instructional methods to decrease extraneous cognitive load so that available cognitive resources can be fully devoted to learning. This article strengthens the cognitive base of CLT by linking cognitive processes to the processes used by biological evolution. The article discusses recent…

The article develops a theory and practice for teaching and learning in a Community of Thinking. According to the theory, the practice of traditional schooling is based on four "atomic pictures": learning is listening; teaching is telling; knowledge is an object; and to be educated is to know valuable content. To change this practice of…

There has been considerable emphasis on the availability and reuse of learning content in recent years. Since 2000, the ADL initiative has refined the recommendations contained in the SCORM documents through progressive stages represented in the SCORM 1.0, 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3 documents. Fundamental to SCORM is the notion of the Shareable Content…

"Bildung" is a key concept in the German tradition of educational theory. Originally meant to indicate a specific state of mind and ideal of perfection, it now serves as a symbol of the unity of whatever refers to the field of education, particularly to its organisational and functional aspects. The aura of "Bildung" is bestowed on its counterpart…

In this article, the authors interpret an event of collaborative poetry writing in a pre-service teacher education class in order to demonstrate the ways in which different theories of learning are and are not able to account for the production of original poems. The first part of the paper offers a conceptual heuristic that organizes a variety of…

Humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers made a distinction between traditional approaches and humanistic "learner-centred" approaches to education. The traditional approach holds that educators impart their knowledge to willing and able recipients; whereas the humanistic approach holds that educators act as facilitators who assist learners…

After learning to categorize a set of alien-like stimuli in the context of a story, a group of 5-year-old children and adults judged pairs of stimuli from different categories to be less similar than did groups not learning the category distinction. In a same-different task, the learning group made more errors on pairs of non-identical stimuli…

In this paper, the authors describe a mechanism for the introduction of small variations in the original learning design process defined in a particular Unit of Learning (UoL). The objective is to increase the UoL reusability by offering the designers an alternative to introduce slight variations on the original design instead of creating a new…

Information Technology brings about rapid changes in working environment, quickly rendering skills and knowledge gained in formal learning institutions obsolete. Even as they prepare students for their first career, institutions also need to equip students with skills necessary for lifelong learning. The Nanyang Technological University (NTU),…

In order to improve the quality and popularity of environmental education in China, the State Education Commission (now Ministry of Education), World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and British Petroleum (BP) (China) have reached an agreement on the launch of the project named the Primary and Secondary School Environmental Education Campaign. This project…

This paper takes a cognitive perspective in an attempt to analyze mental mechanisms involved in contextual learning. In the following, it is suggested that contextualized environments evoke mental mechanisms that support reasoning about "what if", imaginary situations--utilizing a powerful mental mechanism known from the history of physics as…