The "Exploratorium"

 Here's a submission from Ryan on San Francisco's Exploratorium:

"While this resource isn't an e-learning resource, I feel like the message at it's core can be applied to e-learning.

The science museum, The Exploratorium in San Francisco, is the product of years of collaboration between artists, engineers, and scientists. Part of their work is the teacher institute, which provides professional development and a leadership community for science educators that imparts a teaching philosophy best summarized as: 'we are the explore-atorium not the do for you-atorium.' Some of their training work can be seen here and their activities can be found here. Experiencing a week of their training was some of the best training I have ever experienced. 

Exploration with trail and error is an intuitive and natural style of learning that reflects the normal activities of many professional fields, but designing such experiences is a sincere challenge, especially in e-learning, because it places such a high burden on the learner with the removal of supports and guidance that typically capture all learners. The exploratorium is a great resource for pedagogy (instructional design methods) to include such a style of learning in your work. "