Designing Participatory Learning.

The beginning of the twenty-first century has been described as a time of development for social innovations through which people use, share, and create knowledge in ways that differ fundamentally from those of previous eras. The topical and widely accepted focus of education should be toward twenty-first-century skills. However, there is no consensus regarding in which kind of environment these skills can be practiced and neither is there consensus on how to organize the instruction for learning these skills. To enhance our students’ chances of becoming active agents in their own lives and learning in settings far beyond classrooms, a design-oriented learning system is proposed as a context for practicing twenty-first-century skills. A learning system is understood as a system that extends the network of resources, communities, and tools. Respectively, a design-oriented pedagogy has been developed for organizing the ways that diverse people, resources, and tools interact with each other, and for developing the best opportunities for learning from the system. The presented research-based design perspectives may help educators in different institutions to facilitate connected learning across spaces and communities.