Have you ever heard of heutagogy? Me neither. It refers to self-determined learning, or maybe self-teaching. I did a bunch of research on autonomous learning for my M.A., but I don't remember coming across papers on heutagogy. Not a big deal, I can learn about it later.
Heutagogy would have made for an interesting presentation on its own, but instead we were treated to the results of the presenter's dissertation study. The only problem was that the study was so small it was often meaningless. Her study was teaching the same English (composition I think) course in two different ways. One was the control (canned) version supplied by the English department and the other was infused with all kinds of "student-centered" learning activities (e.g. positive messages, multi-media, peer interaction, discussion, group work, etc). Each course only had about 15-17 students, so trend analysis just seemed silly.
Still, it's an interesting attempt at trying to gain an understanding of what she called "Electronic Pedagogy" (I'm not sure if she made that up, but I like it). Near the end, someone asked what she felt was the most important piece of student-centered learning that she added to the experimental group. Her response was the inclusion of learning and personality style assessments. Maybe I should add these to the student orientation.
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