John’s vision 6
EXTRACT LEARNING
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On these numbers, perhaps Illich would have been pleased. It looks as if the deschooling of society is well under way. The problem is that policymakers see an opportunity to fill up more time with formal learning. Those hundreds of hours American children spend watching the box are under scrutiny as an opportunity for “edutainment.” With the notable exception of Sesame Street, nothing much of interest has resulted. Most educational or edutainment television casts children in the role of passive consumers; it continues to be based on a point-to-mass model—only with tinier budgets than the soaps or reality TV that command far more of young people’s attention. Those fourteen hours a week spent traveling by Dutch students are another tempting target. Why not put e-learning on the buses or in their mobile phones? In Japan, this has already started. In a country whose commute times are among the longest in the world, Rikkyo University has launched a website accessible from I-mobile phones. Students use the system to catch up on missed classwork, ask professors questions, and check for lecture cancellations. Text-messaging symbols—such as a smiling face or a broken heart—have started to appear in students’ essays. In other educational applications of text messaging (or SMS, short for “short message system”), tutors send reminders and alerts to students on courses or send a daily message to learners, thereby providing them (as one e-learning website puts it) with “a daily dose of learning … the message is pushed to the learners so that they don’t have to actually go out and get it every day.” This is the wrong way to design the use of time in learning. Those hours do not belong to policymakers or to mobile phone companies. They belong to the students. Rather than fill up all time with prepackaged content, we need to make it possible for learners, of whatever age, to use their own time more flexibly and actively.
Design Principle 2: Place and Space
The concept of a “death of distance” made great headlines when Internet rhetoric was at its height. Its grandchild is the concept of “anytime, anywhere learning.” This idea sounds attractive and uncontroversial—until one realizes that it describes a point-to-mass distribution model of learning that overlooks the significance of place and the localization of knowledge. Learning depends on place, time, and context. An exclusive focus on schools and colleges as sites of learning and the distribute-then-learn model of e-learning both fail to exploit these more complex geographies of learning. As Seely Brown and Duguid emphasize in The Social Life of Information, a lot of what we learn is remarkably local: history, agriculture, politics, art, geology, viticulture, forestry, conservation, ocean science. A great deal of learning also takes place in what these authors describe as “an ecology of local or regional sites of professional excellence: research labs, hospitals, architects’ and design offices, Web design studios, and the like—anywhere, indeed, that people gather together to work. Knowledge as it grows is necessarily social, the shared property of extended groups and networks.” All spaces, places, and communities that foster complex experiences and processes are potential sites of learning.
Design Principle 3: Meaningful Projects
Metacognitive skills—judgment, understanding, the capacity to reflect—do not lend themselves to being taught by rote. Nor are they easy to download from a website. Active learning happens when we participate in projects that are meaningful to us and engage with the real world. We need to believe that the task we are about to tackle is important and meaningful. As Charles Hampden-Turner and Alfons Trompenaars so wisely counsel, we often overlook “the extent to which needed applications give meaningful zest to our work and learning: Without shared purposes and moral meaning, we end up with a culture of self-absorption and narcissism.” Those words resonate uncomfortably when I think about some of the projects I see during my frequent visits to universities and design and architecture schools. Projects that enable self-expression by the student, but are otherwise pointless, are depressingly common. The design of meaningful projects is not easy—particularly if an instructor tries to do this on her own. A second success factor for projects is that learners should help to design them. Precooked projects are usually uninspiring. The most interesting phase of a project is setting it up, designing it. Scanning the domain, framing the issues, specifying an action, seeking information and advice, planning the work, putting together the team: All these are design tasks, and they are best learned by experience. Designing and setting up a project can be messy, time-consuming, hard to manage—and won’t go according to plan. Just like the real world.
Design Principle 4: Technology and Networks
When wiring up schools to the Internet fails to deliver instant, dramatic results—which is nearly always—politicians often blame teachers, whom they have long tended to regard as an impediment to technological modernization. The real culprits are policymakers who think of technology as a cost-saving cure-all. Serious budgets are persistently voted for the hardware of connectivity (computers, modems, and so on) but grossly inadequate resources tend to be allocated to content and process development—the what? and how? of learning in new ways). Education planners have persistently ignored the advice of their own software suppliers that 30–40 percent of any technology budget should be devoted to staff training and organizational development.
Design Principle 5: Mentors
Learner autonomy and self-organization are crucial ingredients in successful learning—if only for defensive reasons. Formal education systems are under pressure to teach more and more students—while at the same time being given smaller budgets per student to do so. When a government pays a school less than six thousand dollars per pupil per year, as is the case in Britain—an amount equivalent to two or three days’ fees for a McKinsey consultant—quality face-to-face time between teachers and students will be miniscule. The wise student does not wait to be taught, but in learning, self-organization works better when there’s someone there to guide it. The best learning experiences, besides being codesigned by the people who do them, also benefit from good coaching, facilitation, feedback, and mentoring. These are highly labor-intensive activities. Activity-based learning requires the presence, time, and attention of mentors in all shapes and sizes. For Theodor Zeldin, who teaches the art of conversation in a wide variety of contexts, “the most important skill, which underlies all creativity and all scientific discovery, is the ability to find links between ideas which are seemingly unconnected. Our life stories are dominated by the encounters we have had with particular individuals, and by our constant search for new encounters. Oxford normally describes itself as having 16,000 students and 2,000 staff, devoted to acquiring knowledge. But that is to forget its 130,000 graduates all over the world, busy acquiring experience; which is far more valuable than the donations they are constantly being asked for.” Old people often have time to be mentors, and they usually know a lot. Søren Kierkegaard famously complained that his life would have made more sense had he known, as a young man, what he only discovered when he was old. In my own experience, young people crave feedback from any quarter possible; feedback from older people is appreciated not necessarily because it is better, but because it is better than none at all. After all, young people can be mentors, too. Families and communities are also important and influential places of learning. Many of us learn the basics about health, well-being, and key social skills at our mother’s knee—or on the street. New Geographies of Learning Technology fixes for education are an old and discredited story. The delivery of precooked content, by whatever means, is not teaching. Radio, film, television, the videocassette recorder, fax machines, the personal computer, the Internet, and now the mobile phone: It was promised of each of these, in turn, that here was a wonder cure that would transform education for the better. And yet here we are, five hundred years after the first books were printed, and teachers are still giving lectures, and students line up to hear them. Why? They do this because the best learning involves, as it always has, live experiences and conversation between people: Most people prefer talking to one another to talking to themselves. Educational institutions change so slowly that social interaction remains their core activity. This is not to deny that our learning infrastructures need to evolve. More than 70 percent of learning experiences in the modern workplace are informal or accidental, not structured or sponsored by an employer or a school. This kind of learning is pervasive, continuous, and profoundly social. It happens wherever people do their work: on a shop floor, around a conference table, on site with customers, or in a laboratory. So let’s be optimistic and anticipate a near future in which tech disappears quietly into the background, just as electricity did a hundred years ago. What, then, will be the important design issues? There are three that matter. The first issue before us is time: We need far more time for learning than we allow ourselves now. The second issue is the need to redesign the job descriptions that define learners, teachers, and everyone else relate to one another. The third issue is how best to design the support systems and institutions we need if t those first two changes are to happen. You may object that that I should have framed those three issues belong at the beginning of this chapter, and that by now, at its end, I should have explained how to deal with them. But I don’t have the answers, and I am in good company in declining to make them up. Socrates once acknowledged (in words attributed to him by Plato) “the common reproach against me, that I am always asking questions of other people, but never expressing my own views about anything.” Socrates’ self-defense was that he did not set out to teach people; he set out to pose interesting questions to them that would get them thinking about a topic he felt needed attention. The same applies to the design of learning: Questions are more powerful than answers in stimulating our curiosity and creativity. As Pekka Himanen writes in The Hacker Ethic: The metaphor was that of the teacher as master of ceremonies—the symposiarch—at banquets. These took place in the evenings and, in conjunction with the dialogues of the day, they were an essential learning experience. They were powerful experiential events. The symposiarch was responsible for the success of their banquets in two ways: first, from his elevated position he made sure that the intellectual goals of dialogue were attained; second, it was also his responsibility to make sure that none of the participants remained too stiff. To this latter end, he had two means at his disposal. First, he has the right to order excessively stiff participants to drink more wine. If this did not work, the symposiarch could order the participant to remove his clothes and dance!
Ever since I read this text I’ve described myself as a symposiarch. The worlds of learning would be lighter and more playful places if we could recapture this ancient Greek approach in a world in which social, industrial, and natural systems are gently nudged and stimulated rather than steered.
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