Situated learning is a theory that explains an individual's acquisition of professional skills and includes research on apprenticeship into how legitimate peripheral participation leads to membership in a community of practice.
For example, the workplace is considered as a discernible community of practice operating as a context wherein newcomers assimilate norms, behavior, values, relationships, and beliefs.
They understand and experience the world through the constant interactions by which they reconstruct their identity (i.e., becoming a different person) and evolve the form of their membership in the community as the relations between newcomers and old-timers who share the social practice change.
For example, Hansman[7] shows how adult learners discover, shape, and make explicit their own knowledge through situated learning within a community of practice.
In this paper, the authors criticize public schooling for separating the "knowing and doing" and for treating knowledge "as an integral, self-sufficient substance, theoretically independent of the situations in which it is learned and used.
"Other theorists (Jean Lave, Etienne Wenger, Lev Vygotsky, John Dewey, and J. G. Greeno) associated with situated learning theory argue that knowledge must be taught in context and not in the abstract.
At the same time, cognitive psychologists have been paying increasing attention to education as an area of application of psychological knowledge and as a source of important research problems.
[9]Vincini (2003) continued to explain, that "the social interaction that occurs in communities of practice between experts and novices is crucial to the theory of situated cognition or learning.
Hung concludes that taking a problem-based learning approach to designing a curriculum carries students to a higher level of thinking.
[16] In the 2009 article "Rethinking education in the age of technology", Collins & Halverson argued: The pedagogy of the lifelong-learning era is evolving toward reliance on interaction.
The pedagogy of computer tutors echoes the apprenticeship model in setting individualized tasks for learners and offering guidance and feedback as they work.
Instruction must be situated in an authentic context that resembles that of the classroom teacher to enrich their learning process by providing realistic experiences that more easily transfer.
When today's students enter their post-education professional lives, odds are pretty good that they will be asked to work with others from around the globe collaboratively to create content for diverse and wide-ranging audiences.
Odds are also pretty good that they are going to need to read and write effectively in linked environments as they locate, analyze, remix, and share the best, most relevant content online for their own learning.
The learning environment needs to provide well-defined activities which have real-world relevance, and which present a single complex task to be completed over a sustained period of time, rather than a series of shorter disconnected examples.
[16] As organizations re-evaluate how they accomplish necessary workplace training with limited funds, they depend on informal learning that occurs within specific areas of practice to ensure that employees develop the skills they need to be effective.
Reliance on structured, theoretical training programs, especially offered by third-party providers, is decreasing, and companies are finding ways to facilitate authentic learning opportunities within their communities of practice.
When students are taught abstract instruction they are exposed to more skills that will be useful in helping them obtain a variety of jobs but at the same time, they may have training that is not necessarily needed.
In the 2010 article "Blogs, wikis, podcasts and other powerful web tools for classrooms", W. Richardson stipulated: The act of writing in a Weblog, or 'blogging' can go a long way toward teaching skills such as research, organizations, and the synthesis of ideas.
When students blog, they are creating journals/text entries which are considered to be English (writing) and reading; they also have the opportunity to utilize other learning tools such as videos, photos, and other digital media.
[30]Social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Ning allow learners, once they move beyond the personal connections, to embrace a community where they can learn from each other.
For example, as more adults have been forced to move through the job market recently, they've turned to technology to develop new skills and to find work.
Web-based learning tools provide integrated environments of various technologies to support diverse educators' and learners' needs via the internet.
It will be much more beneficial for students because involvement in learning results in the improvement of possessing skills and attitudes that permit you to seek solutions and issues while you build your new knowledge.
It is speculated that the broad selection of readily accessible web-based learning tools will make it easier for teachers to integrate WBLT's into a classroom environment.
With recent advances in technology, it is possible to facilitate the social aspects of learning by virtually connecting individuals within a distributed community of practice in the online environment.
[17] Research shows that learners not only respond by feeding back information, but they also actively use what they know to explore, negotiate, interpret, and create.
As lifelong learners dealing with real-life problems, a project-based approach is what develops when they come together with other adults at brick-and-mortar learning centers or in social networking communities on the web.
A few of the trends followed in evaluating the situated learning could be: The process includes the content so this can be assessed by a few methods such as concept map and videotape coding.
Collaboration with technology will allow to track the students activities like time spent on planning, collecting information with respect to solve a problem etc.