Exploratory and Experimental Learning for Teachers and Researchers too!

The term “exploratory learning” usually denotes some type of activity used by students, with or without a teacher’s supervision, to facilitate the learning and mastery of a predefined and relatively circumscribed domain. That exploration may be more or less guided, according to the domain structure and the teacher's pedagogical goals and strategies. But there is also another way to use exploratory and even experimental learning, which may be used inside or outside an educational setting: rather than students, the actors would be researchers and research-minded teachers, and their goal would be to discover and structure a new, unexplored or ill-structured domain. Using two existing computer systems as examples, this paper attempts to show how this is possible, and compares the proposed exploratory and experimental learning by teachers and researchers with the more traditional exploratory learning by students.