Desire lines

I'm a strong advocate of student centred learning. I can't see any other way education can be conceived. From my early years in education, studying Freedom to Learn by Carl Rogers and my initial forays into the classroom as a fledgling educator, I have strongly believed in the principles of keeping the student at the centre of the learning experience. As Stephen Downes once remarked, where else could the learner possibly be? Later in my career I did extensive work around the development of personalised learning environments, and was involved in research around personal web tool development. One of the things I discovered is that students create their own pathways - or desire lines - through their learning experiences. It is the role of educators to support these pathways.

While I was in Barcelona to speak at an education event I was invited to record a short video about these perspectives, and below is the result. I hope you find it helpful in outlining some of the principles of this particular philosophy on education - personalised learning.



Photo by Wil van der Aalst


Desire lines by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.