The user driven learning environment

This chapter is an introduction to user driven learning that initially dwells on features that are unchanged such as the role of collaborative social interactions in human learning and certain aspects that are evolving and helping create a learning transformation through web based technologies. The chapter is interspersed with user driven learning narrative examples taken from the authors' own experience of sharing data over the web to accumulate learning points as well as the experience of a significant population of other web based learners in discussion forums, blogs and other networking sites. This is an attempt to create a background that may help illustrate the evolution of user driven health care, which is another form of user driven learning on the web with particular reference to individual user clinical problem solving, be it initiated by patients, health professionals or other actors in a care giving collaborative network across a web interface.