ABOUT WCER NEWS Events Cover Stories Research News International Research Press WHAT'S THE RESEARCH ON...? PROJECTS All Active Projects All Completed Projects PUBLICATIONS LECTURE SERIES PEOPLE Staff Directory Project Leaders ERG - EVALUATION RESOURCES GROUP RESOURCES Conference Rooms Equipment GRANT SERVICES GNS Proposal Preparation GRADUATE TRAINING SERVICE UNITS Director's Office Business Office Technical Services Copy & Mail EMPLOYMENT CONTACT INFO STAFF LOGIN WORKSPACE LOGIN

Socio-Technical Learning Environments

In designing learning environments, Sharon Derry and colleagues consider learners and practitioners as people experiencing a social and physical learning environment through cognitive processes of recognition and pattern matching that are essentially perceptually based.

Professors and managers of large professionally-oriented courses will make the ideas they teach useful for their students' later practices to the extent they can create course designs that cause students to repeatedly mesh (1) patterns of activation associated with conceptual systems taught in courses with (2) families of perceptual patterns resembling events learners will experience in practice.

These learned meshings, or conceptual/perceptual fields, are potential future patterns of activation. For more information, visit the STELLAR project site at http://www.wcer.wisc.edu/stellar/.