"For me, experiential learning requires students to be engaged in the process of knowledge production for an audience beyond the classroom. By that, I mean that students should be put in a position to ask their own questions or tell their own stories about a body of material; that they should pursue those questions or stories in a manner that models good disciplinary practice; and that they should produce something that is useful to the public or to the field, in such a way that they are both responsible for the quality of this new knowledge and able to be recognized for it. This is the principle I use when I take students into the field on an archaeological project -- they are collaborators, not workers, and they have real responsibility for producing (and often fixing) new data that they then help to interpret. But I think it can work the same way in the classroom as well, especially -- at least in the humanities, where we don't have labs -- with digital tools for the discovery and presentation of information.

I really like the idea of students as collaborators in projects that advance knowledge -- and the idea that we can find different pathways for contributions that work for students at all levels of training. I also think it's important that students come to recognize knowledge creation as a messy process, in which it is important to be transparent about biases -- and in which it is equally important to be able to assess the results of other people's research in terms of the transparency of their methods. In disciplines like history, students tend to come in with the sense that experts have figured out what happened, and they're just there to hear the final cut. I want to be sure that students understand the sausage-making too. 

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Adam has taught archaeology in the field, in practice and in uncontrolled environments, for the last 25 years, and has experimented for much of the last decade with digital approaches to experiential learning in the classroom, like crowdsourcing the transcription of handwritten documents. (Watch him talk about his work.)