Last week we had some students from TAFE drop in to the Silicon Beach House to chat about what we have set up here and working in the web industry as a career option.

The students are part of the Gaining Access to Employment and Training project, which is trialling a new learning methodology called Heutagogy to explore innovative ways that students can use new technologies in an educational setting.

Harriet Wakelam told me the the project came out of an argument over whether or not Gen Y kids were ‘digital natives’ a la Mark Prensky, and therefore able to instinctively use technology to learn vs, they use technology instinctively for entertainment/communication, but do not know how to use it for learning/do not want to use it for learning.

Heutagogy is the process of allowing learners to decide what they want to learn, how they want to learn it and when they want to learn it. It enables the students to become responsible for their own learning. The project aims to use Web 2.0 technologies to engage and motivate the students and then mentor and support them while they complete a project based outcome.

The students all shared a bit of their background with us, most of whom had become disengaged with a traditional classroom setting.

It’s great to see the support for these sorts of projects and the students I spoke to had really enjoyed the experience with most now realising what they wanted to go on and do. I had no idea anyone in education was prepared to take these sorts of risks – big kudos to the people involved in setting the project up.

It was a reminder to me about how much I love what I’m doing and I think we may have even convinced one of the students that this could be his area of interest. Actually, in fairness I think it was Myles who did that with his live coding session.

Better still I learnt something. It occurred to me by it’s very nature being a founder of a web 2.0 start-up means I am learning based on the principals of Heutagogy. It’s certainly self-determined learning.