Learning to Learn.

In our conceptual work, we notice again and again the difficulty of selecting and condensing from the abundance of information material which is actually available at any given moment. Too many distractions lead always to new discoveries and turn learning paths into labyrinths rather than goal-oriented projects. This is just as true for students as it is for learning facilitators and in the conceptual work for our innovative learning concepts.

Corporate knowledge management is also familiar with these issues. Numerous methods attempt to focus goals and cast them in program form so that a coherence of activities emerges. Mostly, however, with a strong mandate and with tight success tracking, so that the maneuvering space for the learners is rather small and the learning environment strongly externally determined. The success of programs set up in this way is often rather moderate.

Therefore, there has been a lot of movement in organizations in recent years towards freer, self-organized learning. [Simon Dückert](https://cogneon.github.io/lernos-for-organizations/de/ (currently in German only)) writes a good guide for organizational alignment here, which can also be used as inspiration for the school sector. Another prominent example is Working Out Loud, an organiztaion that strongly promotes a grassroots approach from communities in addition to an enterprise deployment.

I designed LearningExpedition with this in mind. This is an agile iterative learning model. I’ve incorporated several suggestions with an eye toward our own learning, organization, and operating system for alternative schools. Together with some automation magic for documents and for websites, it is a compact, self-organized form of learning that is open enough to support various learning activities and yet structured enough to methodically bundle all intentions in a similar way and thus make them manageable.

This supports my main concerns - to better support concept work and to methodically strengthen project-based learning. It is not a complete How To manual or elaborated pedagogical concept, but a guide to experiment. You can use it for example to advance your own learning concept and to get to know your own learning expeditions better. Have fun with it!

Here the overview image as PDF.