Following up on my previous blog post about John Seely Brown’s lecture on ““A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change”, I wonder what are the changes needed for schools to reflect how real everyday learning takes place.

Based on JSB’s observations, real learning takes place when there is passion. Passion as I have mentioned previously is the fuel that drives the learning process and, if I may add, the learning aptitude. The existing framework of schools today do not encourage the passionate pursuit of a subject or a skill. Most learning done in school is done in pursuit of examinations or test scores. Not exactly, the kind of goal that will excite most students. So how do we create passionate interests and pursuits if schools today still stick to standard, highly compartmentalized “subjects” that must be covered within a given frame of time and with the ultimate aim of getting their students to pass tests?

How do we also change the in-built time element of traditional schools. The time element concerns a few aspects of traditional schools. The curriculum is almost always dictated by a time element specifying when the curriculum starts and when it ends. This is in turn usually dictated by pressures to meet the demand of summative assessments to meet administrative needs.

The second aspect of time is the breaking of the learning period into fixed, bits usually called periods. Does real learning take place in fixed bits of time or does learning take place according to the learners’ needs? This fixed bits of time are in turn cocooned within the official school (read, learning) hours.

The other aspect of time is that most schools run on the Piagetian approach where learning is closely linked to developmental age (usually conveniently implemented according to the child’s age). Through this implementation, students are placed in the same levels regardless of whether they are of the same ability or otherwise. In general, a seven year old must stick with a seven year old. Do people learn only from people of their age group?

Lastly, do the physical structure of schools also lend to an a real learning environment? Do the walls that compartmentalized the adults in the schools and the students from each other encouraged the formation of groups of passionate people with common learning interests? This reminds me of Marshall McLuhan’s (in?)famous dictum, “The medium is the message.”

These are just some questions that come to my mind due to JSB’s lecture. Do you think those questions are relevant for schools or are JSB’s ideas only for the more (perhaps) fluid adult world and their organizations? If you think JSB’s ideas are relevant to schools, are there other questions that we should ask ourselves?

Recently, John Seely Brown or often referred to simply as “JSB”, a visiting scholar at USC and the independent co-chairman of the Deloitte Center for the Edge, breezed into Singapore and delivered a lecture entitled, “A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change” at the Singapore Civil Service College (click on the book on the left if you want to know more). JSB gave his insights on how learning is taking place in today’s connected world.

He started his lecture by highlighting a group of surfers known as The Grommets. This group of surfers is based in Maui, Hawaii. The Grommets have become the leading proponents of a new water sport called aerial surfing. If you look at them in action, you will see a lot of similarities with skateboarding. According to JSB this group of surfers became excellent because of the way they learn to improve themselves at the sport. According to JSB, The Grommets underwent these stages in their pursuit of excellence:

a) Deep collaborative learning with/from each other;
b) A passion to achieve extreme performance and a willingness to fail, fail, fail on the way;
c) Accessing and learning frame by frame the best surfers around the world via videos of the pros;
d) Use of video tools to capture and analyze each of their own improvisations;
e) Pulling the best of ideas from adjacencies: wind surfing, skate boarding, mountain biking, motor-cross and others;
f) Accessing spikes of capabilities around the world – leveraging networks of practice around the world; and
g) Attracting others to help them around the world

What JSB found most interesting was that the group came together and began to “critique each other on-the-fly almost all the time and to compete like mad with each other the rest of the time.” And they do so passionately. They will try out new ideas and fail continuously and end messed up on the quite unforgiving waves. But as JSB pointed out, they would do it again and again.

The Grommets also learn  by watching the DVDs of other great surfers. They would actually do a frame-by-frame viewing of the moves done by these surfers. Then they would ride the surfs again to try out what they had seen and try out their own new moves which they would also video and review. It is a constant process of learning, trying, and reviewing aided by a willingness to fail and fueled by passion.

One of the ideas that he highlighted was the idea of adjacencies. As JSB puts it:

“How do you start to pull ideas, moves, recoveries from adjacencies to hard core surfing. Obviously skateboarding would be one. And yes, Dusty is a darn good skateboarder too. And so he goes out and studies these skateboard moves. And so you say how do you appropriate this skateboard move over here and do what I am doing over there? But it doesn’t stop with skateboarding. Let’s look at mountain biking and motocross. One of the things that he does is to let the board get way out in front of him. It is a move that he appropriated from extreme performance in motorcross where you see these guys with their motorcycles out in front of them flying over an edge. There is an incessant ethic of how can I appropriate what I see into my own skill set?”
~ “The Cook Report on Internet Protocol, 2010″

The other two aspects of The Grommets learning that interested JSB was their understanding of local ecosystems or “spikes”. According to JSB, The Grommets “travel all over the world going to every kind of local talented place observing surfers and looking for new moves.” They use Skype to remain connected. JSB also found it interesting to see how they’ve figured out where there are local hotspots of incredible talent to visit and build relationships in those “spikes of incredible capability”.

The second aspect that JSB finds most interesting is that the learning is often reciprocal, in the sense that others would also come to them to share their skills. So as JSB puts it, he is interested in“how do they productively interact with folks so that people will begin to come to them to show them things with the result that they don’t have to go out as much.”

Learning about learning from JSB, I wonder about the kind of learning  takes place in schools and  most tertiary institutions. Schools are meant to be places that prepare students for the real world but when I compare the real world learning experiences of The Grommets and what takes place in schools, I cannot help feeling a wide disparity between the two.

I would just like to highlight a few differences. The differences, I believe are in the following areas:

a) the passion in the pursuit of learning;

b) the great depth of learning in a niche area yet open to learning from other niches;

c) the personalised yet collaborative nature of the learning (the building of an ecosystem of learning); and

d) the culture and willingness to fail repeatedly to achieve excellence.

By the way, if you think I had been at the lecture by JSB, I was actually not there. My wife was at the lecture and summarized it for me. It piqued my interest (and jealousy), and I went to the Net to find out more about the things JSB had said at the lecture. I have just highlighted one part of what I believe he had delivered at the Singapore Civil Service College. I believe, however, based on the additional work that I have done through the connectedness of the world today and important points noted by my wife, I have presented a fairly accurate picture of a portion JSB’s message. In my own way, I am already doing some of the things that JSB discussed about learning. Do you think this way of learning is interesting and useful? Share your thoughts.

(Addendum: By the way, if you want to view the same lecture done elsewhere, click here. If you want to download the video, click here. And if you want the slides of the lecture, they are here. And of course you can email JSB here).

“Which people and what institutions will be most seriously harmed by this new technology?” ~ Neil Postman

This is the fourth question that is posed by Neil Postman in his attempt to get us to think of entering a serious discussion ongoing discussion with ICT. While ICT in education can be an enabler, we must always also bear in mind that it can also be not just a disabler but it may also cause serious harm to both sections and institutions of a community as a result of its use.

This is not as far-fetch as it sounds. The most obvious is the link between the use of ICT in education and the great divide between the haves and the have-nots.  This is a real issue despite the price of ICT-related equipment falling over the years. This is also in spite of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) movement to provide the poor with inexpensive laptops. Even in countries where there has been a large investment in ICT equipment with the country’s schools through the MasterPlan for IT in Education (MPITE), there is still a sizable number of students who do not have access to ICT tools for learning at home. As teachers move towards online learning, it is easy to imagine how difficult it would be for the “have-nots” to have access to computers for online learning. This can mean an unfair advantage for those who do not have computers in their homes. A good look at issues of access is required before educational institutions embarked on such online learning adventures.

Will the use of ICT lead to the extinction of the classroom teacher as an institution? This is not just about the issue of older teachers having difficulty adapting to new technologies. These new technologies can also endanger those who can adapt to the new tools as the tools can take a life of their own. The possibility of these new ICT tools to take over the teaching and assessment of learning of students would mean that even for those who can incorporate ICT into teaching, their own existence as a teacher is threatened especially if the use of these ICT tools imply the possibility of greatly reduced costs. Already we see at the tertiary level, institutions pushing for more online courses to accommodate a global student audience and its attendant increased revenues.  This increase in online courses will not necessarily mean an increase in the number teaching staff at such institutions but it may mean that existing teaching staff will be required to take on additional teaching burdens, and even this may disappear with greater automation being introduced.

To prevent the latter from happening, it is vital that teachers (at any level) quickly understand what technology is all about. What can “live” teachers offer that ICT cannot offer in terms of the quality of the learning and the learning experience? Teachers must make clear their contribution is indeed invaluable and unique to their being “live” teachers. Their students must be able to see this. It cannot be just an empty boast. But before their students can be made to see it, can teachers themselves see what it is?

With the advent of ICT in education, will schools and other traditional educational institutions, in the form that they are generally today, continue to exist? Why would students need to sit in a classroom? Why would students need to go to schools or universities to learn? The advent of the Net has meant that learning students today are spoiled for choice about what they want to learn. They can pursue whatever interest them. They are not limited to the traditional subjects on offer in schools today. They can enjoy the educational version of the “Long Tail” (see here and here) instead of what is being offered in the traditional shop window. Not only this, schools and other traditional educational institutions will have to show a far greater dexterity and nimbleness to fit a world where learning, unlearning and re-learning is the order of the day. Yet these are institutions not known for these qualities. What would become of these institutions as we know them today? These institutions would need to change quick or be irrelevant and become defunct.

But it is not only schools that will become defunct. The traditional methods of assessing learning will change and that also means that the various high stakes examinations syndicates which are the traditional arbiters of who has knowledge and who has not, will also have to change. Today, these high stakes examinations syndicates only assess the  subjects that are traditionally offered in a school shop window. With the increased choices offered by ICT, who decides who is knowledgeable? While there has been talk of the death of such high stakes examinations in the past with the “discovery” of the other intelligences, high stakes examinations have actually grown in popularity, despite it being a poor means of assessing learning. This rise in its popularity has also meant that examinations syndicates have grown too. But with the ability to learn almost anything in almost any way you want, examinations syndicates will face a real challenge to their raison detre. How will they be able to assess the learning of a myriad of subjects that will be offered through the use of ICT for learning? What will be under attack is who is the authority in learning. Is this necessarily bad? The last question is also applicable to the other issues raised in this post.