A Learners’ View (ALV) Is Of Choices On The Shortest And Fastest Path To Learning, The Oxygen Of Social Life.

Main Article: Notes

AT THE BEGINNING OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, learning remains one of the most used and least agreed upon words in and about education. A universally accepted definition of learning does not exist. As Allardyce (1979) said about another word, “We have agreed to use the word without agreeing how to define it” (p. 1). People use the word learning to indicate many things, ranging from inferences about mind, cognition and thinking to breaking social codes that manage social patterns in ways other people accept. Given this ambiguity, people appear compelled to reduce it to parts rather then to describe how people use learning to solve problems.

A learners’ view (ALV) uses observable social processes to describe learning as problem solving. ALV consists of categories of options (variables) from which learners make choices to learn, that is to solve a problem. Experimental behavioral and social scientists have described these options. They have also described the probability of learners choosing them while learning. When arranged into the order scientists report that these options represent in the learning process, they form a model or paradigm that teachers may use to accelerate, increase, and deepen learning promptly.

Classic education gives priority to defining learning to explain how people manage changes in themselves in ways described in traditions and legacies that others have left behind. People today have descended from such descriptions, especially of how earlier people made choices to solve problems in conditions they faced. In so doing, classic education provides a base for learners today to make choices that result in novel changes in conditions faced today.

In this sense, learning occurs as a series of exchanges (transactions) that alter each person’s observable social patterns. Each person gives time and other personal resources to “pay” attention, make choices and in other ways use (manage) elements of the learning process to solve problems.

In their most simple form, these transactions occur in four stages each with optional social patterns to choose. Some of these options lead to a learning criterion faster than others.

ALV, also named A Learning Efficiency Analysis Paradigm (aLEAP), identifies these stages, options, and relationships to each other as described by results of empirical experimental behavioral studies reported over more than century.

This description of what people do while learning is all that remains after removing everything except what is common among empirical experimental research results, philosophies, and theories about learning.

As far as anyone knows, learning has always occurred in this generic way.  Learning happens for everyone everyday wherever they are. It’s another word for life.

Depictions of this view of learning appear in art, legends, literature, science, personal experience and wherever someone tells another something novel.

Without learning, people do not live, they cease to breath and their bodies stop working. That is, until people do not adopt, adapt, and manage themselves to do that which they must do to survive wherever they are at the moment. Of this people know through personal experience as well as through science.

Classic education has captured and offered this generic view of learning for eons to those who want to know what others know. Of this, people also know or at least can know that such education exists.

What is less known is how people learn. Classic Education: A Learners’ View (ALV) of Choices during Teaching and Learning describes common elements of learning that people can see, hear, smell, touch, and use with other senses to know that learning is occurring or has occurred for themselves as well as for others.

References

1. Allardyce, G. (1979). What Fascism is not: thoughts on the deflation of a concept. The American Historical Review, Vol. 84, No. 2 (Apr., 1979), pp. 367-388. (Captured 7-31-14 at 5:45 AM MST at http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1855138?uid=3739552&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21104443415517 )
2. Learning

 Related Reading

1. ALV Philosophy of Learning
2. A Learners’ View (ALV)
3. ALV Path to Learning
4. A Learning Efficiency Analysis Paradigm (aLEAP)
5. Argot Used by Educators
6. Categories of Choices while Learning
7. Generic Definition of Learning Lecture Notes
8. Introduction to Learning
9. One Step Learning
10. Principles of Learning
11. Social Transactions of Learning
12. Steps While Learning
13. Learning efficiencies
14. Where Learning Occurs

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1. To Learn