Young learners today are overwhelmed with access, material and tools. Learning seems easy. Everything is there – go get it! Cascade of books, papers and reports are describing and celebrating this unbelievable access, these enormous resources. Finally, learning is free for all, you can learn whatever you wish to, just go capture the gold.

So, we should celebrate this liberation of learning resources. And, it is, no doubt, very different from the traditional education with its precise curriculum and well-defined school books. Very different; in fact the total opposite.

If we speak with the tongue of the old German philosophers, we have reached the anti-thesis of traditional curriculum: everything is open and available. The German philosophers were, though, more concerned with the syn-thesis, the balanced point at which both thesis and anti-thesis were brought together, but at a higher level.

What the many celebrations of the oceans of learning resources overlook is that we have not yet reached this point of synthesis; learning resources are not learning. Learning only takes place when the resources are put into play by learning individuals or communities.

This is disturbing, perhaps: even the most affluent learning resources do not, per se, result in one milligram of learning. As Mitch Resnick explained some years ago: access is not enough. He was referring to computer access; we are referring to learning access.

We cannot simply neutralize this immense contradiction by stating: then the young people must learn to learn, learn to navigate, learn to... This will not make the problem disappear.

^ECOLEARNING© is about learning techniques for young learners, wherever and whatever they might be learning... It is about a learning ecology respecting the limited resources of individuals and communities, still preserving smart and creative solutions. It is about developing ecological learning techniques allowing young people to meet the challenge of the in theory limitless but never easily unfoldable learning resources.

Young people will need such ecological learning techniques as they enter the new world of laboratory, self-directed learning, media based, project based and game based learning. That young people are born with these learning skills is one of the great and dangerous myths of today.

^ECOLEARNING© will offer the young people, not pre-defined pathways, but smart, creative and ecological learning techniques that allow them to benefit from the overwhelming resources.

^ECOLEARNING© is likely to include elements of: peer learning, community learning, identification-findingorganizing- delivering guidance, as well as creative and productive learning approaches.

^ECOLEARNING© might be regarded an umbrella initiative, including different project pathways, expected to be submitted at the 2013 Lifelong Learning Call – and carefully prepared through collaborative activities in 2012.

If you are interested in contributing to these 2012 ^ECOLEARNING© initiatives, please contact Jan Gejel in January or February 2012 – [email protected].