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.
