Who are Self-Discovery Learners…Online?

Abstract

Self-discovery learning may be understood in multiple ways—as a state of expertise and learning maturity; as an attitude and approach to self-directed learning; as a perceptive and learning stance to the world; as a minor everyday skill for informal information-seeking, and even as an inherent part of the self-discovery learner. It is this last conceptualization that is addressed in this chapter, which explores who self-discovery learners are and what their learning needs may be. Self-discovery learning may be a human character trait. Further, this chapter explores who self-discovery learners are online and how they behave in those spaces. Given the sparseness of the research data, this work proposes questions of how future researchers may further define self-discovery learners online. Finally, this work offers some suggestions for how those online spaces may be evolved to more closely meet the needs of self-discovery learners.