New science of learning: Exploring the future of education

There is an abundance of literature themed with teaching in the knowledge society. Most educators have a shared belief that education in the future ought to offer the knowledge society a qualitatively different approach to encounter the demands of twenty-first century skills. Many argued that existing pedagogies and practices are unable to address the new paradigms in education. The needs to understand the complex processes of learning, transformed by the emerging technologies and social interactions, are widely debated in the academia as learning is becoming ubiquitous. In the midst of dynamic changes and confluence of computers, communication, media, and culture, the notion of learning in schools, communities, and social networking environments need to be freshly examined with theoretical lenses from interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary perspectives. The chapters in this book, brought together by leading educators and researchers from highly regarded institutions, share their experiences and provide theoretical frameworks, along with their contemporary research in the role of cognition, computers, and collaboration in education. In the concluding chapter, the major contributions and salient feature by the contributors are summarized with a view to inform the readers about the new developments in this area. © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010