The New Culture of Learning in a World of Constant Flux
John Seely Brown, The New Culture of Learning in a World of Constant Flux
Video Presentation Notes:
· We are at a point of time when many of the ideas that made us successful in the 20th century are going to work against our ability to perform in the 21st century.
· The big shift is from a worlds of constant equilibrium to a world of constant flux and disequilibrium.
· He argues that the notion of equilibrium is gone and we will never see it again
· “The half-life of any particular skill is shrinking, shrinking, shrinking.”
· Most of the skills we teach kids today may have a half-life of around five years. (technology skills)
· Every strategic architechture in our corporate world is based on how to preserve the current value of “stocks”
· Stocks
o protecting knowledge assets
o and resisting change
· Flows
Participating in knowledge flows
o Creating new knowledge (strong tacit component)
o Scalable tacit learning (embracing change)
· “Learning now has a lot more to do with creating the new rather than learning the old.”
· If you are constantly creating the new, much of what you are creating has a very strong tacit component
· Tacit knowledge (as opposed to formal, codified or explicit knowledge) is the kind of knowledge that is difficult to transfer to another person by means of writing it down or verbalizing it. For example, stating to someone that London is in the United Kingdom is a piece of explicit knowledge that can be written down, transmitted, and understood by a recipient. However, the ability to speak a language, use algebra,[1] or design and use complex equipment requires all sorts of knowledge that is not always known explicitly, even by expert practitioners, and which is difficult or impossible to explicitly transfer to other users.
· We are used to delivering, passing on, teaching the explicit, not the tacit
· It takes time to codify what can be codified from an experience in order to pass it around in terms of the explicit
· If we are living in a world where more and more of the things that need to be shared are the tacit, how does this change the very notion of how we want to change systems?
· How does it change how we want to think about immersive learning?
· If we have a world of constant flux and change, how do we afford (encourage) curiosity? In a world of constant flux and change, curiosity becomes paramount.
· How do we honor curiosity in the way we run schools?
· IPADS, iphones, itouch are curiosity ampliphiers. You can look anything up the minute you hear a new word or concept (but is it a directed curiosity? I wouldn’t be here listening to this TED-ED by accident. I wouldn’t have wandered into it. It’s pretty boring right now with the lack of graphics.)
· Curriculum needs to change. We need to think about how we learn, what we need to learn, and how new media has changed this game in fundamental ways.
· 19th century view: A Cartesian view of learning. The Thinker statute says, “I think; therefore I am.” Knowledge is a substance. Pedagogy is the substance delivery system. knowledge is the substance and pedagogy is transfer.
· Sophisticated pedagogy (said sarcastically) has to do with designing ideal impedance matches from the pitchers we want to pour knowledge from to that which matches the kid’s head
· A social view of learning rejects I think therefore I am... for... we participate, therefore we are
· This has deep psychoanalytic roots in terms of object relation theory. We come into being and discover ourselves by our relationship to others.
· THE SOCIAL VIEW OF LEARNING
o We think therefore we are
o Understanding is socially constructed
o Learning has to do with making knowledge personal
o I make it personal by using it
o My understanding, but not the knowledge itself, is socially constructed
o Robust learning occurs in study groups
o Nothing beats collaborative study groups, especially around homework. The social construction of understanding is real.
o And there is no better way to learn than to explain something to others. The best way to learn is to teach! (all teachers know this!)
o The best predictor of how well a child will do in Harvard is their ability to form or join in study groups. Not SATs or GPAs.
o That’s not surprising. There is no better way to learn than to try to explain something to someone else.
o These study groups can work virtually as well as physically-online learning
o (What about different learning styles? What about people who prefer to work alone, do independent work instead of partner or group work?)
o Learning and educating are not the same thing
o Learning, at its essence, is fun and fulfilling
o He sites example of Dusty the surfer in Maui forming a surfing cohort and then Dusty becoming world champion surfer, then all the rest of the cohort did too!
o Seriously! You coulnd’t turn the camera toward the surfing movie!! Arghhhh!
o Dusty now sells advertising space on the bottom of his board to make money. Dusty now makes a lot more than his dad.
o These kids have an amazing passion to get things right which means risking failing.
o They analyzed frame by frame the video of previous surfers.
o Then they started inventing their own moves and videoing themselves. They were deconstructing each other.
o When you are surfing you’re in the moment and not thinking.
o The cohort looked for adjacent fields: skating, snowboarding,windsurfing, mountainbiking, even motorcross
o Dusty got the idea for the superman move from motocross
o If we want to prepare out students for the 21st century, perhaps it is not knowledge or even a skill we need to transfer to them..but a questing disposition.
o A commitment to indwelling, coming from the tacit notions of Palani ? immersion in, not about. They are marinating in, not about.
o Without digital media to study other surfers, they would not have been able to do this
· How can we generate exponential learning? Most of the learning we do has diminishing returns or at best it is a linear progression.
· World of warcraft is a site of “joint collective agency”.
· Pay attention to the social learning on the edge of the game.
· The edge is often referred to as a knowledge economy.
· In interviews of World of Warcraft players they said that the learning was what made It fun and was what was constantly driving them to return
· The gamer wants to be measured so they can see how much they are progressing in their and in relation to each other
· The in-game learning is that when you are playing you are constantly experimenting and tinkering and moving around
· After action reviews. A collective indwelling. We are blending the tacit with the cognitive.
· In a world of flux we have to blend the tacit with the explicit. We tend to focus on the explicit, the what not the how to
· He is interested in the idea of marinating in something (very vague but I relate it to language immersion. You must need it.. to use it.. to learn it)
· In world of warcraft analogy there are 10 million players a night creating 10,000 new ideas a night on how to perfect play
· In WOW they are using a guild culture in which some members are given certain tasks (differentiation of labor)
· Guilds allow for small groups 20-200 to seek out, test, filter, and disseminate information
· He thinks you get exponential learning by being both about this (explicit)and in this (tacit) at the same time
· The ability to show exponential learning is quite unusual
· One more example of in-dwelling is speed chess and hard core hacking
· Indwelling complements/transcends cognition
In speed chess, you make a move every 30 seconds, so you don’t have a lot of time to think about what you are doing
THE BIGGER PICTURE
· A blended epistemology
· Home sapiens
· Man as knower
· Tools as instrumental
*Homo faber
*Man as maker
*Tools as a device to engage in productive inquiry
· An answer just becomes the next question
· Donald Chom at MIT
· Tools are a way to think about interpreting the backtalk of the situation
· Listen to how the material is talking back to us in materials science
Home ludens = man as player
· A highly nuanced concept of play
· Fail, fail, fail again and then get it right
· Play of imagination-poetry
· Play as in an epiphany-suddenly solving a riddle;
· Play as the progenitor of culture
Classroom implications. We don’t spend a lot of time thinking about how to afford children with opportunities to have an epiphany ( he’s talking about discovery learning and teacher setting up the for discovery learning)
Reframing example, a riddle:
A black dog is sleeping in the middle of a black road that has no street lights and there is no moon. A car coming down the road with its lights off steers around the dog. How did the driver know the dog was there?
Answer: who said it wasn’t daylight?
A trivial example of reframing.
Extending the blended epistemology to a triangle between homo sapien, home faber and homo luden. Man as knower, maker and player.
In new media we can make context as much as content. This opens up a new dimension of meaning making.
You give me a movie and let me change the soundtrack and the change will change what you actually see! The sound of the dinosaur crunching the human is more dramatic. You never see it.
Blogging is not content creation, it is joint context creation. Quotes Andy Sullivan from Atlantic Monthly: “The blogger is more than any other writer of the past “a node among nodes” connected by unfinished without the links and the comments and the trackbacks that make the blogosphere at its best a conversation rather than a production. Blogging is like jazz. Inherently collective
At the center of the triangle is Deep Tinkering: playing, testing, trying, tinkering.
When recreation becomes an act of re-creation/re-mix and productive inquiry then you create a culture of learning and a life-long quest to always become.
Video Presentation Notes:
· We are at a point of time when many of the ideas that made us successful in the 20th century are going to work against our ability to perform in the 21st century.
· The big shift is from a worlds of constant equilibrium to a world of constant flux and disequilibrium.
· He argues that the notion of equilibrium is gone and we will never see it again
· “The half-life of any particular skill is shrinking, shrinking, shrinking.”
· Most of the skills we teach kids today may have a half-life of around five years. (technology skills)
· Every strategic architechture in our corporate world is based on how to preserve the current value of “stocks”
· Stocks
o protecting knowledge assets
o and resisting change
· Flows
Participating in knowledge flows
o Creating new knowledge (strong tacit component)
o Scalable tacit learning (embracing change)
· “Learning now has a lot more to do with creating the new rather than learning the old.”
· If you are constantly creating the new, much of what you are creating has a very strong tacit component
· Tacit knowledge (as opposed to formal, codified or explicit knowledge) is the kind of knowledge that is difficult to transfer to another person by means of writing it down or verbalizing it. For example, stating to someone that London is in the United Kingdom is a piece of explicit knowledge that can be written down, transmitted, and understood by a recipient. However, the ability to speak a language, use algebra,[1] or design and use complex equipment requires all sorts of knowledge that is not always known explicitly, even by expert practitioners, and which is difficult or impossible to explicitly transfer to other users.
· We are used to delivering, passing on, teaching the explicit, not the tacit
· It takes time to codify what can be codified from an experience in order to pass it around in terms of the explicit
· If we are living in a world where more and more of the things that need to be shared are the tacit, how does this change the very notion of how we want to change systems?
· How does it change how we want to think about immersive learning?
· If we have a world of constant flux and change, how do we afford (encourage) curiosity? In a world of constant flux and change, curiosity becomes paramount.
· How do we honor curiosity in the way we run schools?
· IPADS, iphones, itouch are curiosity ampliphiers. You can look anything up the minute you hear a new word or concept (but is it a directed curiosity? I wouldn’t be here listening to this TED-ED by accident. I wouldn’t have wandered into it. It’s pretty boring right now with the lack of graphics.)
· Curriculum needs to change. We need to think about how we learn, what we need to learn, and how new media has changed this game in fundamental ways.
· 19th century view: A Cartesian view of learning. The Thinker statute says, “I think; therefore I am.” Knowledge is a substance. Pedagogy is the substance delivery system. knowledge is the substance and pedagogy is transfer.
· Sophisticated pedagogy (said sarcastically) has to do with designing ideal impedance matches from the pitchers we want to pour knowledge from to that which matches the kid’s head
· A social view of learning rejects I think therefore I am... for... we participate, therefore we are
· This has deep psychoanalytic roots in terms of object relation theory. We come into being and discover ourselves by our relationship to others.
· THE SOCIAL VIEW OF LEARNING
o We think therefore we are
o Understanding is socially constructed
o Learning has to do with making knowledge personal
o I make it personal by using it
o My understanding, but not the knowledge itself, is socially constructed
o Robust learning occurs in study groups
o Nothing beats collaborative study groups, especially around homework. The social construction of understanding is real.
o And there is no better way to learn than to explain something to others. The best way to learn is to teach! (all teachers know this!)
o The best predictor of how well a child will do in Harvard is their ability to form or join in study groups. Not SATs or GPAs.
o That’s not surprising. There is no better way to learn than to try to explain something to someone else.
o These study groups can work virtually as well as physically-online learning
o (What about different learning styles? What about people who prefer to work alone, do independent work instead of partner or group work?)
o Learning and educating are not the same thing
o Learning, at its essence, is fun and fulfilling
o He sites example of Dusty the surfer in Maui forming a surfing cohort and then Dusty becoming world champion surfer, then all the rest of the cohort did too!
o Seriously! You coulnd’t turn the camera toward the surfing movie!! Arghhhh!
o Dusty now sells advertising space on the bottom of his board to make money. Dusty now makes a lot more than his dad.
o These kids have an amazing passion to get things right which means risking failing.
o They analyzed frame by frame the video of previous surfers.
o Then they started inventing their own moves and videoing themselves. They were deconstructing each other.
o When you are surfing you’re in the moment and not thinking.
o The cohort looked for adjacent fields: skating, snowboarding,windsurfing, mountainbiking, even motorcross
o Dusty got the idea for the superman move from motocross
o If we want to prepare out students for the 21st century, perhaps it is not knowledge or even a skill we need to transfer to them..but a questing disposition.
o A commitment to indwelling, coming from the tacit notions of Palani ? immersion in, not about. They are marinating in, not about.
o Without digital media to study other surfers, they would not have been able to do this
· How can we generate exponential learning? Most of the learning we do has diminishing returns or at best it is a linear progression.
· World of warcraft is a site of “joint collective agency”.
· Pay attention to the social learning on the edge of the game.
· The edge is often referred to as a knowledge economy.
· In interviews of World of Warcraft players they said that the learning was what made It fun and was what was constantly driving them to return
· The gamer wants to be measured so they can see how much they are progressing in their and in relation to each other
· The in-game learning is that when you are playing you are constantly experimenting and tinkering and moving around
· After action reviews. A collective indwelling. We are blending the tacit with the cognitive.
· In a world of flux we have to blend the tacit with the explicit. We tend to focus on the explicit, the what not the how to
· He is interested in the idea of marinating in something (very vague but I relate it to language immersion. You must need it.. to use it.. to learn it)
· In world of warcraft analogy there are 10 million players a night creating 10,000 new ideas a night on how to perfect play
· In WOW they are using a guild culture in which some members are given certain tasks (differentiation of labor)
· Guilds allow for small groups 20-200 to seek out, test, filter, and disseminate information
· He thinks you get exponential learning by being both about this (explicit)and in this (tacit) at the same time
· The ability to show exponential learning is quite unusual
· One more example of in-dwelling is speed chess and hard core hacking
· Indwelling complements/transcends cognition
In speed chess, you make a move every 30 seconds, so you don’t have a lot of time to think about what you are doing
THE BIGGER PICTURE
· A blended epistemology
· Home sapiens
· Man as knower
· Tools as instrumental
*Homo faber
*Man as maker
*Tools as a device to engage in productive inquiry
· An answer just becomes the next question
· Donald Chom at MIT
· Tools are a way to think about interpreting the backtalk of the situation
· Listen to how the material is talking back to us in materials science
Home ludens = man as player
· A highly nuanced concept of play
· Fail, fail, fail again and then get it right
· Play of imagination-poetry
· Play as in an epiphany-suddenly solving a riddle;
· Play as the progenitor of culture
Classroom implications. We don’t spend a lot of time thinking about how to afford children with opportunities to have an epiphany ( he’s talking about discovery learning and teacher setting up the for discovery learning)
Reframing example, a riddle:
A black dog is sleeping in the middle of a black road that has no street lights and there is no moon. A car coming down the road with its lights off steers around the dog. How did the driver know the dog was there?
Answer: who said it wasn’t daylight?
A trivial example of reframing.
Extending the blended epistemology to a triangle between homo sapien, home faber and homo luden. Man as knower, maker and player.
In new media we can make context as much as content. This opens up a new dimension of meaning making.
You give me a movie and let me change the soundtrack and the change will change what you actually see! The sound of the dinosaur crunching the human is more dramatic. You never see it.
Blogging is not content creation, it is joint context creation. Quotes Andy Sullivan from Atlantic Monthly: “The blogger is more than any other writer of the past “a node among nodes” connected by unfinished without the links and the comments and the trackbacks that make the blogosphere at its best a conversation rather than a production. Blogging is like jazz. Inherently collective
At the center of the triangle is Deep Tinkering: playing, testing, trying, tinkering.
When recreation becomes an act of re-creation/re-mix and productive inquiry then you create a culture of learning and a life-long quest to always become.