The Great Learning Experience : An attempt to understand learning from the wies of the millenial learners.

Millenial learners are individuals born after 1985 with very wide exposure to various types of media enhanced by technology. They are persons who had listened to music while in the wombof their mothers and had watched television starting at age 0. Most of them would have hada music player or a game pad or a mobile phone at age 8. (Deterle, Dede and Schrier, 2008)These millenial learners grew up with constant web connectivity at their fingertips to assist themin their homeworks.The present pedagogies our academic institutions employ to support the learning style ofthe web generation of students may not be as suitable. Social constructivism, transformativelearning or problem-based learning, while prevalent in the Asian context, may be more perfectfor cognitively dynamic students. Our students nowadays are more adept to constructingknowledge, content (Attwell, 2007) and even more independent in their learning priorities.This study attempts to understand the new learning practices among our students. This studyattempts to find out how college students define what a good learning experience is. It is alsothe intention of the study to explore new educational practices and hopefully drive ways ofdesigning and developing the future of learning activities.The study was conceived in May 2011 and was planned to collect data in the form of shortvideos in a span of six months, from June to December. There will be two sets of samples, onefrom the students of De La Salle University of the Philippines (DLSU) and the other from thestudents of University West (UW) in Sweden.The experiment asked for a two minute video that will be created and expressed by anindividual or group of students. This meant planning and organization to compose the thoughts,the message and the content of the video. Since this contains the expression of the studentsthemselves, the self-expression equates to a great degree of authenticity.This paper will impart the work-in-progress of this experiment, the Great Learning Experience.To date, there are twenty videos from DLSU and fifteen videos from UW. This paper will tell themethods used in the different classes and the initial findings. Comparison of the UW and DLSUvideos is not included in the paper.