Rethinking Learning for a Digital Age: How Learners are Shaping their Own Experiences

Rethinking Learning for a Digital Age addresses the complex and diverse experiences of learners in a world embedded with digital technologies. The text combines first-hand accounts from learners with extensive research and analysis, including a developmental model for effective e-learning, and a wide range of strategies that digitally-connected learners are using to fit learning into their lives. A companion to Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age (2007), this book focuses on how learners’ experiences of learning are changing and raises important challenges to the educational status quo.

Rethinking Learning for a Digital Age:

• moves beyond stereotypes of the "net generation" to explore the diversity of e-learning experiences today
• analyses learners' experiences holistically, across the many technologies and learning opportunities they encounter
• reveals digital-age learners as creative actors and networkers in their own right, who make strategic choices about their use of digital applications and learning approaches.

Today’s learners are active participants in their learning experiences and are shaping their own educational environments. Professors, learning practitioners, researchers, and policy-makers will find Rethinking Learning for a Digital Age invaluable for understanding the learning experience, and shaping their own responses.

Rhona Sharpe is Principal Lecturer in Educational Development, Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development, Oxford Brookes University.

Helen Beetham is an e-learning consultant.

Sara de Freitas is Director of Research, Serious Games Institute, University of Coventry Technology Park.