TOOLS FOR EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING: THE “E 2 -LEARNING” APPROACH Miguel Boavida, Anacleto Correia, Susana Cabaço, Adelaide Trabuco, Carlos Santos and Jorge Pereiros MaDLabs – Multimedia and Database Labs http://www.mdlabs.est.ips.pt Polytechnic Institute of Setúbal – Superior School of Technology Setúbal (Portugal) (mbv, accorrei, scabaco, mart, csantos)@est.ips.pt Abstract “Tell me, and I will forget. Show me, and I may remember. Involve me, and I will understand.” Confucius, around 450 B.C. Learning is a complex task where personal, cultural and social factors play a crucial influence in the process’s efficiency. Nevertheless, such complexity may be smoothed when learning is achieved through a natural process and thus made more efficient. This is what is intended with experiential learning, the process of learning through experience, actively involving and motivating participants to use their skills in the most positive way to accomplish a set of tasks previously structured through a variety of instructional methods. After an experiential recognition of the path to solve a problem, individuals become more able to make their own reflections and construct different analogies to similar problems. They enhance their global understanding of facts and develop best practices to solve problems in their everyday life. Also, they become more able to communicate and thus disseminate knowledge by discussing facts, problems and solutions within workgroups. This is a whole new level, where experiential learning leads them to the improvement of their capacity to apply what they learned. It may be considered as an integration or generalization stage. We are trying to build e-learning tools as complementary elements of experiential learning in the education of 12-14 years old kids, bearing in mind the use of outdoor activities as a motivational driving force to lead the students in maintaining and developing their interest on the subjects being studied. In this document we resume the work being done in Portugal, with a pilot experience that involves the study of geography. We also present WebLets (Web-Learning Education Training System), a tool developed as an e-learning infrastructure directed to experiential and mobile learning. E-Learning Information Systems Since it’s beginnings in the late eighties, internet technologies claimed an important role in education, of being able to revolutionise the educational system. This promise was not fulfilled. In fact, more than ten years later, education is probably one of the elements of information society where the impact produced by technology is less visible. The problem was probably not with technology but with the emphasis given to technology itself instead of the improvement it could bring to the learning process. As stated in [3], the mere existence of a tool may not be a justification for its use in particular ways. One reason for the limited success of the hypermedia systems in education is associated with the cognitive overload that results from learners getting lost in hyperspace. Hypermedia is a web of information rather than a cohesive expository presentation. Thus, when used in an educational system, care must be taken with the interface in order to minimize ‘disorientation’ [2]. The number of options available as alternative paths to gather the information and the level of relevance of the information also has a crucial impact in the efficacy of the system. These navigational difficulties may consequently bring frustration to the learner that becomes uncertain of his original learning objectives.