Creating a Different Kind of Learning Management System

Abstract

It is in the nature of pedagogy as a social activity to bring the outside world in, and not just some aspects of the outside world but every conceivable aspect—atoms, poems, mountains, revolutions, laws, kidneys. This is how everything in the world becomes learnable within the formalized institutional frame of education —by exophoric reference. If the architecture of meaning of the classroom is like a clause where the given/subject is addressed by the new/predicate, then the given/subject is the taken-for-granted existing knowledge of the student, and the new/predicate is whatever the class happens to be about—and that could be anything at all.