What happens to learning when we move from the stable infrastructure of the twentieth century to the fluid infrastructure of the twenty-first century, where technology is constantly creating and responding to change?
This critically important question provides the impetus for a thought provoking book entitled A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change. The authors, Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown, have the perfect backgrounds and credentials to address this challenging question in a thoughtful, meaningful and provocative way. Readers of this book will find a well thought out perspective of learning that is very different from the one which dominates all levels of education today.
The authors start with the obvious - information abounds, it gets easier every day to get it, and the world (and consequently information) is changing more rapidly than ever before. Along the way, they help us to recognize the multiple ways in which we all learn outside of the classroom through experiences of all kinds, with perhaps a bit of emphasis on play and failure. Through stories, they begin to draw out a description of a new culture of learning, one which involves using the new informational resources in a way that responds to personal needs, and results in sharing that experience in a way that helps to recreate the space of knowledge.
This new culture of leaning is one which moves from the present mechanistic approach in which learning is treated as a series of steps to be mastered, to one in which learning should be viewed in terms of an environment -combined with the rich resources provided by the digital information network-where the context in which learning happens, the boundaries that define it, and the students, teachers, and information within it all coexist and shape each other in a mutually reinforcing way. Peer-to-peer learning moves to the fore in this new view, as learners participate actively in the collective learning process. Learners may become involved in defining the questions, helping to provide information needed to address the questions, structuring approaches, and deciding objective. Not all members of the collective will participate in the same ways, but instead each will find the modes of participation that are most individually meaningful.
The authors walk us through a number of conceptual changes that they believe are occurring such as:tacit knowledge is increasing in importance compared to explicit knowledge; and, questions are becoming more important than answers as learning becomes continuous. They use Mizuko Ito's work to categorize ways in which students are using social media to learn: hanging out, messing around, and geeking out.
Throughout, the authors describe the ways in which games, both physical and virtual, lead to learning. In a world of near constant flux, play becomes a strategy for embracing change, rather than a way of growing out of it. However, not just any play will do to provide the desired learning. Thus we move onto the crux of the problem:
...traditional approaches to learning...have yet to find a balance between the structure that educational institutions provide and the freedom afforded by the new media's almost unlimited resources, without losing a sense of purpose and direction....
The challenge is to find a way to marry structure and freedom to create something altogether new.
The other continuing "crux" thread has to do with the passions of students - it leads to a fundamental principle of this new learning:
Students learn best when they are able to follow their passion and operate within the constraints of a bounded environment.
I felt that this book clearly described the ways in which students and and other young people are using "informal" ways to learn today, and made a very convincing case that these powerful modes of learning should be brought into the educational mainstream. However, for me, the least clear aspect of the argument had to do with the bounded environment necessary to maintain the sense of purpose and direction of formal education. The few examples given seemed to relate to students who shared some common passion; the ordinary class may well have few overlapping passions with which to organize. And of course, one of the things education seeks to do, especially in the earlier years, is introduce students to subjects for which they originally may well have no passion in an effort to expand their horizons. What types of bounded environments will lead to graduates who posses the intellectual and work skills and knowledge expected of a graduate of the institution? And more fundamentally, what are those expected skills and knowledge in this changing world?
This cavil should not detract from the importance of this book. It does not answer all the questions and objections that one might raise, but that is to be expected in a short book that is introducing so many new ideas. Its importance is that it will challenge some deeply held educational belief of almost every one of its readers. At the same time, it forces most of us to look at education from a different perspective. And in these times - that is really good.
