While proponents of self-directed learning understand that learning is taking place literally everywhere under all sorts of circumstances, they also know that the quality of self-directed learning can be enhanced with appropriate scaffolding. Such scaffolding can provide the minimal support necessary to guide learners along more productive pathways than those they might initially encounter if left totally to their own devices.
One of the key questions posed to those who appreciate the value of scaffolding is where such scaffolding might be most productively inserted into the lives of learners. An optimal location might be one where learners are likely to go and where they are likely to engage in the active pursuit of knowledge or one sort or another.
Obvious venues for such pursuits are the various sites offering opportunities to search for information. While search has become ubiquitous on the web and while there are continuing improvements in the search experience, there is still much that can be done to treat search as a venue for scaffolding learning. In particular, the search experience in academic libraries attached to colleges and universities provides unique conditions for experimenting with the application of scaffolding techniques to enhance learning.
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