Page 105 - Educational Technology A Primer for the 21st Century

94 6 Learner Experiences with Educational Technology
Another way to talk about experience is to talk about having an experience—
what philosopher John Dewey referred to in his book Art as Experience (Dewey,
1938). This type of experience has a beginning and an end, and changes the user,
and sometimes, the context of the experience as a result. For example, your
experience of climbing the mountain. Another example of an experience is wit-
nessing a story that allows us to feel powerful emotions, assess our system of
values, and possibly make changes in our behavior. The University of Pennsylvania
Oncolink Web site (http://www.oncolink.upenn.edu) has a powerful selection of
stories written by those who have experienced cancer themselves, or through loved
ones, leading us through an experience as we read them.
A third way to discuss experience is to talk about experience as a story, an idea
that has been discussed at length by Schank (1990). Stories are the vehicles that we
use to condense and remember experiences and to communicate them in a variety of
situations to certain audiences. Experience as the story plays an important role in
events as diverse as legal testimony and fantasy gaming. Because experience as the
story is naturally communicative, it has relevance for sharing user findings with a
design team of various disciplines.
At present, the definition of user experience given by ISO is widely recognized.
According to the ISO. 9241-210 standard, “user experience is the cognition and
response generated from the use of a product, system or service and expected use”
(ISO FDIS 9241-210, 2009).
The definition of the learning experience is close to the user experience in that
both involve cognitive processing and subsequent responses. Learning experiences
represent the user experience from a learner’s specific perspective in the interaction
with an educational product or learning environment (Huang, Hu, & Yang, 2015).

Learning Experience
Learning experience is a notion derived from user experience and is also a general
kind of experience that may have associated feelings and biases. The subject of a
learning experience is the learner, just as the subject of a user experience is the user.
Learning experiences can be understood as a variety of experiences through the
learning process, and in the learning environment (see http://edglossary.org/
learning-experience/).
According to the previous discussion, learning experiences can be defined as
learners’ perceptions, responses, and performances through interaction with a
learning environment, educational products, resources, and so on. Information
processing learning theory can be used to explain such a process (Anderson,
Matessa, & Lebiere, 1997; see http://act-r.psy.cmu.edu/). Likewise, Gagné pointed
out that the learner perceives various things and, after a series of information
processes, the learner forms a conceptualization and then reacts (Gagné, 1985).
Learners’ perception of learning environment mainly refers to their perception of
the people and the things, including resources, tools, learning community, com-
munity education, learning styles, and teaching methods (Huang, Yang, & Hu,
2012). Perception enables a person to carry out actions in an environment (Elnaga,
2012). According to Mahlke’s user experience model (2008), learner perceptions