These Are The 4 Concepts Shaping 21st Century Learning

December, 2014
Today's learning landscape is enriched with a variety of new concepts that were to the recent past foreign  to many. Of course learning is a dynamic field and it will always keep developing as human knowledge progresses. But the last two to three decades in particular have witnessed the outburst of several new conceptions and theoretical frameworks that, among other things, attempt to capture the latest developments in learning . This cheat sheet features a number of these concepts.

I am also sharing with you the visual below which highlights three more concepts shaping the 21st century learning. To these I added the concept of Andragogy.

Source: http://goo.gl/MBwZfp

1- Andragogy
Andragogy is a teaching strategy developed for adult learners. Andragogy has been around for more than a century but it gained more momentum and came up to the surface in educational literature particularly with the work of Malcom Knowles. Andragogy marks a clear departure from the traditional pedagogy informing child learning in that it is predicated upon 5 assumptions related to the characterstics of adult learners :

• 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)

Check out this page to learn more about Andragogy: 

                                        Related : Pedagogy Vs Andragogy

2-Heutagogy
Heutagogy is the study of self-directed learning and self- determined learning. While some think about Heutagogy as a separate methodology from Andragogy, several other scholars view it as an extension of Andragogy. Heutagogy is all about teaching learners how to learn. In this respect,  "heutagogy looks to the future in which knowing how to learn will be a fundamental skill given the pace of innovation and the changing structure of communities and workplaces.�

Here is a PDF document to learn more about Heutagogy.

3- Peeragogy
As for peeragogy, here are some definitions cited by Arenastudies:
�Peeragogy (which he refers to as �paragogy�), is a collection of �the best practices of effective peer learning.�
�It is also a theory of peer-to-peer learning and teaching that addresses the challenge of peer-producing a useful and supportive context for self-directed learning�.Charles Jeffrey Danoff .

Check out this post to learn more about Peeragogy.

4- Cybergogy
This is a completely novel concept to me and as I searched further on its meaning I came across this entry from Edutech Wiki:

One of the central elements of cybergogy is the intent to combine fundamentals of both pedagogy and andragogy to arrive at a new approach to learning (Carrier & Moulds, 2003). Cybergogy focuses on helping adults and young people to learn by facilitating and technologically enabling learner-centered autonomous and collaborative learning in a virtual environment. At the core of cybergogy is awareness that strategies used for face-to-face learning may not be the same used in the virtual environment.

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