A New Culture of Learning

A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change by Douglas Thomas, John Seely Brown

This book just reminded me of so much I’ve talked about  with some of my colleagues over the last few years. It emphasises the relevance of MMOG and MMORPG’s and the lessons from them for 21st Century learning. It talks about participants creating their own collective learning in spaces like online forums in order to help themselves get better (learn).

It talks about the power of the collective and references such things as Kiva and other microfinance operations.

Its an excellent and easy read.

1 ARC-OF-LIFE LEARNING

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? The answer is surprisingly simple. Ironically, this requires environments that are bounded yet provide complete freedom of action within those boundaries. This familiar dynamic, in fact, structures all our contemporary notions of play, games, and imagination. Play can be defined as the tension between the rules of the game and the freedom to act within those rules. But when play happens within a medium for learning—much like a culture in a petri dish—it creates a context in which information, ideas, and passions grow.

Play, questioning, and—perhaps most important—imagination lie at the very heart of arc-of-life learning. Children, for instance, embrace play as a central part of how they experience the world, and they learn that questioning the world is one of the key ways they can understand it.

The new culture of learning actually comprises two elements. The first is a massive information network that provides almost unlimited access and resources to learn about anything. The second is a bounded and structured environment that allows for unlimited agency to build and experiment with things within those boundaries.

It is the combination of the two, and the interplay between them, that makes the new culture of learning so powerful.

In the twenty-first century, how do we cultivate the imagination?

I really like the interplay of unlimited agency for a learner within a bounded environment. It reminds me of some of the presentations I was doing back in the early 2000’s when I was first running individual programmes with students running their own timetables and I was creating and giving presentations with titles such as Structure Behind the Chaos. It was easy for someone to walk in and perceive 60 students all doing their own thing and just doing what they wanted, but there actually needs to be structure behind that kind of programme for it to be as effective aspkossible and focus learners in on what the need. That structure is not always immediately apparent from the outside, but without it the student agency could turn to apathy.

2 A TALE OF TWO CULTURES

For most of the twentieth century our educational system has been built on the assumption that teaching is necessary for learning to occur. Accordingly, education has been seen as a process of transferring information from a higher authority (the teacher) down to the student. This model, however, just can’t keep up with the rapid rate of change in the twenty-first century. It’s time to shift our thinking from the old model of teaching to a new model of learning.

The ultimate endpoint of a mechanistic perspective is efficiency: The goal is to learn as much as you can, as fast as you can. In this teaching-based approach, standardisation is a reasonable way to do this, and testing is a reasonable way to measure the result. The processes that necessarily occur to reach the goal, therefore, are considered 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

Typically, when we think of a culture, we think of an existing, stable entity that changes and evolves over long periods of time. Individuals can choose to join cultures, but no individual can create one.

primary difference between the teaching-based approach to education and the learning–based approach is that in the first case the culture is the environment, while in the second case, the culture emerges from the environment—and grows along with second difference is that the teaching-based approach focuses on teaching us about the world, while the new culture of learning focuses on learning through engagement within the world. 

This reminds me of a conversation I had with a teacher I was co-teaching with last year. We  talked about possibly changing the whole structure of what we were doing because the learners weren't completing things as quickly as we wanted. But then we managed to reflect and review what our purpose for learning was. We realised that we could standardise things and get more finished quicker or “in a more efficient way,” but this wouldn't necessarily lend itself to better learning just completion. So we went another way with helping learners develop the boundaries within their environment but still maintain that learner agency.

3 EMBRACING CHANGE

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”

In the traditional view of teaching, information is transferred from one person (the teacher) to another (the student).

major pitfall of the twentieth century’s teaching model—namely, the belief that most of what we know will remain relatively unchanged for a long enough period of time to be worth the effort of transferring

As information is constantly produced, consumed, updated, and altered, new practices of reading, writing, thinking, and learning have evolved with it. 

Children use play and imagination as the primary mechanisms for making sense of their new, rapidly evolving world.

In a world of near-constant flux, play becomes a strategy for embracing change, rather than a way for growing out of it.

The challenge is to find a way to marry structure and freedom to create something altogether new.

I really like the concept about play being a strategy for embracing change rater than growing out of it. I still think there is much we cold do with games like Minecraft in the classroom to help kids understand and embrace their changing future, just not sure how to do it yet.

4 LEARNING IN THE COLLECTIVE

In the new culture of learning, people learn through their interaction and participation with one another in fluid relationships that are the result of shared interests and opportunity.

In communities, people learn in order to belong. 

In a collective, people belong in order to learn. 

Communities derive their strength from creating a sense of belonging, while collectives derive theirs from participation.

I think our new eldership structure is perhaps a bit of a starting road towards collective rather than community with teams forming because of people passion to learn and further that particular aspect of our school. I’m hoping this reaps benefits across the whole school and from that collective feeling across everywhere.

5 THE PERSONAL WITH THE COLLECTIVE

But is public versus private really the best way to frame the distinction anymore? Perhaps the fact

that the boundary between the two is becoming so permeable indicates a need for a new way to think about the differences between them. We suggest a framework that has elements of both but involves intertwining and remixing—rather than opposing—domains: the personal combined with the collective.

Collectives, unlike the larger notion of the public, are both contextual and situated,

Sharing something personal with a collective, therefore, is very different from taking something private and putting it into the public domain.

We see collectives as the creations of play and imagination in an era of digital media. They are, in that sense, a product of a changing world that can no longer focus on a single, national sense of community. But collectives are also a nearly infinite set of resources that any individual can selectively tap into and participate in as part of his or her own identity.

approaching some of our biggest challenges—whether financial, environmental, or health-care related—in terms of the collective has led to the development of meaningful solutions.

Kiva is dedicated to microfinance—lending very small amounts of money to people in the world’s poorest regions to effect economic and social change. Funding for small projects had previously not been possible, since small loans are typically too costly for banks and other traditional financial institutions to provide. Yet as of July 2010, Kiva had loaned $147 million to more than 370,000 recipients in 200 countries using the World Wide Web as a platform. The average size of each loan was roughly $200, and the repayment rate greater than 98%.

children who live in lower-income homes perform significantly less well in school as a direct result of poor educational attitudes and a lack of exposure to educational resources at home.

I’ve been involved with Kiva for a couple of years now, and it completely amazes me how the loans are pretty much always paid back. One of the best things outside of school Ive been made aware of in the last few years,

6 WE KNOW MORE THAN WE CAN SAY

Different people, when presented with exactly the same information in exactly the same way, will learn different things.

Students learn best when they are able to follow their passion and operate within the constraints of a bounded environment.

Both of those elements matter. Without the boundary set by the assignment of playing the prelude, there would be no medium for growth. But without the passion, there would be nothing to grow in the medium. Yet the process of discovering one’s passion can be complicated.

Consider a student who loves basketball, for example. A physics teacher might be tempted to take advantage of that interest by writing a problem set concerning gravity, force, and acceleration within the context of the sport. She might want to ask, “At what angle and with what force must a person shoot a ball to make a basket 20 feet away?” In doing so, she might think she has engaged the passion and imagination of the basketball enthusiast. But in reality she has done little more than cloak a typical physics problem with a basketball theme. Now, imagine asking the question a little differently: “What is the best way to shoot a basketball?” If the student has a true interest in the game, he will have seen countless times that the best players all use jump shots to score points, and that those jump shots all share similar mechanics. Now the student may become curious: “Why is that? What do they have in common?” He may turn to physics for an answer, but that will tell him only part of the story. Knowing the physics of how a jump shot works doesn’t explain why it is the best way to do it. So he continues to dig. Where he will go with this line of inquiry is anyone’s guess—it could be history, math, anatomy, physiology, sports psychology, or something else entirely. The point is that no matter what direction he goes in or what he finds, more questions await. And the questions he asks are limited only by his imagination.

Inquiry is the process by which we ask not “What is it that we know?” but “What are the things that we don’t know and what questions can we ask about them?”

Game worlds are meritocracies—leaders and players are subject to the same kinds of assessment—and after-action reviews are meaningful only as ways of enhancing performance (whether individual or group).

• Understand the power of diversity.
• Thrive on change.
• See learning as fun.
• Live on the edge.
• Collective Indwelling

Such a close relationship between games and effective assessment- how can we make the most of that? Great example to illustrate true integration. Used this with staff at induction and it seemed to help some understand the difference between the old thematic approach and true integration.

And again, passion is being highlighted.

7 KNOWING, MAKING, AND PLAYING

The truism, “you live, you learn,” lies at the heart of the new culture of learning. A lifelong ability to learn has given human beings all kinds of evolutionary advantages over other animals. It is our killer app.

Up to and through the better part of the twentieth century, regarding knowledge as a static, easily transmitted what made sense, and it was the primary principle we used to shape our understanding of learning and education.

In the twenty-first century, however, knowledge is becoming less a question of “What is the information?” and more of a “Where is the information?”

When we build, we do more than create content.

Learning now, therefore, goes far beyond a simple transfer of information and becomes inextricably bound with the context that is being created.

Since many of the places we now look for information do not carry the institutional warrants that have traditionally been used as markers for accuracy or truth, learning to navigate through and evaluate them—an expanded notion of literacy—is now critically important. We need to learn to read in a whole new way.

What we do in play may best express the sense of becoming. Whatever one accomplishes through play, the activity is never about achieving a particular goal, even if a game has a defined endpoint or end state. It is always about finding the next challenge or becoming more fully immersed in the state of play. In play, therefore, learning is not driven by a logical calculus but by a more lateral, imaginative way of thinking and feeling instead.

The three dimensions of learning—knowing, making, and playing—are already beginning to emerge within the fabric of the digital world itself:

Expanded notion of literacy is critically important- learning needs to go far beyond a simple transfer of information

8 HANGING OUT, MESSING AROUND, AND GEEKING OUT

Hanging Out

At the most basic level, participation in digital environments requires a sense of “learning to be,” which is more about acquiring certain social practices that give meaning to experiences than it is about any kind of abstract notion of knowledge as a thing or set of facts.

Messing Around

“When messing around, young people begin to take an interest in and focus on the workings and content of the technology and media themselves, tinkering, exploring, and extending their understanding.”

The function of play in messing around, above all else, is to unpack and experiment with the familiar.

For some users in digital environments, messing around, which is characterized by Ito as “open-ended,” “self-taught,” and “loosely goal directed” follows from hanging out.

Geeking Out 

The final stage of participation, geeking out, is the most complicated.

The richness of experience and social agency produced by hanging out and the sense of embodiment and personal agency created by messing around, combined with the sense of making, produces what we think is the ultimate goal of indwelling: learning.

Geeking out provides an experiential, embodied sense of learning within a rich social context of peer interaction, feedback, and knowledge construction enabled by a technological infrastructure that promotes “intense, autonomous, interest driven” learning.

This kind of learning highlights the importance of understanding the power of collaboration.

9 THE NEW CULTURE OF LEARNING FOR A WORLD OF CONSTANT CHANGE

When we think about what a new educational environment might look like in the twenty-first century, we can imagine a number of things.

Imagine an environment that is constantly changing. Imagine an environment where the participants are building, creating, and participating in a massive network of dozens of databases, hundreds of wikis and websites, and thousands of message forums, literally creating a large-scale knowledge economy.

Imagine an environment where participants are constantly measuring and evaluating their own performances, even if that requires them to build new tools to do it.

Imagine an environment where user interface dashboards are individually and personally constructed by users to help them make sense of the world and their own performance in it.

Imagine an environment where evaluation is based on after-action reviews not to determine rewards but to continually enhance performance.

Imagine an environment where learning happens on a continuous basis because the participants are internally motivated to find, share, and filter new information on a near-constant basis.

When people stop learning in a game, they lose interest and quit. When understood properly, therefore, games may in fact be one of the best models for learning and knowing in the twenty-first century.

Why? Because if a game is good, you never play it the same way twice.

his or her maximum potential, and in order to do so, each player’s character must successfully fulfill the specific responsibilities of its class. Perhaps most important, however, is that each stage is highly indeterminate; players only know what to expect in a very general sense. The monsters they face have a certain degree of artificial intelligence, meaning that they will respond to the context in different ways depending

That moment of fusion between unlimited resources and a bounded environment creates a space that does not simply allow for imagination, it requires it. Only when we care about experimentation, play, and questions more than efficiency, outcomes, and answers do we have a space that is truly open to the imagination.

And where imaginations play, learning happens.

The most important part of the above: Only when we care about experimentation, play, and questions more than efficiency, outcomes, and answers do we have a space that is truly open to the imagination.

This really is an amazingly easy and though provoking read. Its well worth the effort. Backs up a lot of thinking around inquiry learning, experimentation, the value of playing and games including online games.