A micro-labs design: Informal learning in a social networked setting

The Internet is fundamentally changing the way learning occurs. In the last 10 years, universities have adopted technology in a way that reinforces a dominant teaching paradigm. As online culture and technology change, new paradigms of learning and teaching become more tenable. As universities adjust their collective teaching styles to incorporate these changes they can continue to prepare students become engaged contributors in a community. We explicate the design of a university course architecture which supports and incorporates "web 2.0" informal learning principles, enabling students to entirely create their own curriculum with the goal of contributing all objects created by learning back to a learning community of practice, and an Internet audience. This type of course design builds upon a micro-labs design (Pendleton-Jullian 2009), and seeks to harness both the student's intrinsic desire to learn and the ease of access to knowledge created by advances in communication technologies.