Learning theories and technologies

The chapter explores approaches to learning that we argue best reflect a constantly changing, dynamic environment as reflected in current thinking (Giddens, 2000; Beck, 1992; Castells, 1996). We acknowledge that there are many different schools of thought in terms of learning theories, but we would like to focus here on those we believe are most relevant and applicable to e-learning. This will include a discussion of the following: a critique of behaviourist approaches and their impact, advocacy of the application of experiential/reflective, social constructivism and socio-cultural approaches, and the argument that effective e-learning usually requires, or involves, high quality educational discourse (Ravenscroft, 2004) combined with an experiential and reflective approach (Conole & Dyke, 2004; Mayes & de Freitas, 2004)