When I sat down to write a refletion on the expereience of developing an e-learning system as part of my masters degree subject, I had several tabs open to articles by the current gurus of e-learnbing and e-technology: Wenger, Woo and Reeves, Neilsen, Seely-Brown ... the list goes on.


Yet when I started to write, my reflection was more about the old masters in both education and teamwork. Knowles (Androgogy), Mager (Learning Objectives), Kirkpatrick (Evaluation), Kolb (Experiential Learning), Bloom seem to me to be still relevant to the way adults learn up to sixty years after they first published. Adair, Belbin, Tuckman, Blake and Mouton, Blanchard are still relevant on teamwork.

Their insights may not be any more profound, but the way they expressed them are burnt into my memory.

Wenger says: "Learning creates emergent structures: it requires enough structure and continuity to accumulate experience and enough perturbation and discontinuity to continually renegotiate meaning. In this regard, communities of practice constitute elemental social learning structures."

Is this really any different to what Knowles said about adult learners 40 years earlier:

1. Self-concept: As a person matures his self concept moves from one of being a dependent personality toward one of being a self-directed human being

2. Experience: As a person matures he accumulates a growing reservoir of experience that becomes an increasing resource for learning.

3. Readiness to learn. As a person matures his readiness to learn becomes oriented increasingly to the developmental tasks of his social roles.

4. Orientation to learning. As a person matures his time perspective changes from one of postponed application of knowledge to immediacy of application, and accordingly his orientation toward learning shifts from one of subject-centeredness to one of problem centredness.

5. Motivation to learn: As a person matures the motivation to learn is internal (Knowles 1984:12).

The answer to me is: "Yes! There is  adifference between Wegner and Knowles," Readability.