Preface to Glossary

Learners Distinguish How to from What They Learn

A Learners’ View (ALV) is the Straightest and Fastest Path with the Least Number of Steps to Learning, the Oxygen Of Social Life.

Preface to the Glossary

Classic Education at EduClassics.com gives priority to vocabulary that describes learning from a learners’ view (ALV). As with every other topic, subject, science, or other way of describing existence, ALV has its own vocabulary or terminology. The facts of ALV and other topics are expressed in words and related symbols such as mathematical formulae. It follows that no topic, including ALV, will have more precision than the words and other symbols used to express it.

Glossaries

Glossaries exist as collections of the uniformities and precision in use of words related to a given topic. Most of these words or their definitions occur in daily use and appear in standard general dictionaries. However, their appearance in a glossary moves these words a step toward one word indicating one agreed upon description of a social action or object of a topic.

Such collections rely on authoritative sources for various descriptions assigned to a word. This purpose holds for behavioral and social science studies of learning and of the application of their fiindings.

The usefulness of a glossary depends on the extent to which you as a users accept and apply these descriptions consistently and scrupulously as each description indicates.

Descriptions of Social Actions and Objects

A good glossary introduces a field or topic, so a novice or specialist may identify the actions and objects the first time you observe them.

Introductions go beyond mere classifications or recipies, although descriptions embody both. They capture everyday use with most of the words in descriptions coming from a standard dictionary, even when entries refer to results of scientific studies.

This mixing of sources creates an inescapable element of indefiniteness in descriptions.

Listing Descriptions

The fact that many terms in this glossary are more than one word creates the technical problem of where to list it. What word in a phrase should appear first, so you will find the phrase quickly?

For example, should the entry for “Content” related to learning it in a lesson appear as a single “C” word or also listed under “C” as the phrase “Content of Lesson,” or listed with “L” words and phrases as “Lesson Content”?

The wiki platform used for Classic Education at educlassics.com permits use of internal links that direct all three listings to a common description without distinguishing among scientific descriptors, education jargon, and grammatic precision.

Limits of Lists

This glossary has limited lists of words and phrases. This limit emphasizes the specialized precision assigned to entries. These limits may occasionally not meet your expectations for an entry; this seems an inescapable consequence of precision.

For example, people generally associate the word learning with education, especially with schooling. At the same time, the word learning represents minute to monumental changes in common daily behavior patterns of individuals. It also can refer to variously labeled aggregates outside of schools, such as the beginning doctors are learning to respond to the pressure of life and death decision making in the emergency room.

It appears likely that people learn more outside of schools during their lifetime than they do from school assignments. To acknowledge learning outside of schools, specialists use synonyms to represent learning, such as socialization, results of on-the-job-training, military drills for survival, and practice.

To complicate the matter further, sociologists use the word education to indicate the social institution that transfers what people know and do from one generation to another in order to provide social continuity. By contrast, educators, politicians, and others refer to education as an amorphous category of activities, programs, buildings, policies, and problems generally including, but not limited, to learning.

Writers of this glossary from a learners’ view of learning have decide which of these descriptions to list in order to provide the highest level of confidence and precision in entries that behavioral and social scientists have reported.

An Evolving Document

Glossaries evolve. This one started with a few entries. Over time, through editing, these entries change, sometimes requiring new entries to represent other experimental empirical research results. That process continues, likely without end. That’s one of the joys of reading and writing glossaries on wikis!

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