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).

Many years ago, when I was still fairly new at teaching, I attended a course on assessment for History. The course was meant to provide teachers with a better understanding of the marking of student’s History essays. This was before the days of the current History syllabus with the incorporation of the thinking skills. It was conducted at the National Institute of Education (NIE).

What I remembered most of the experience was the lecturer telling us that there wasn’t much to discuss as we all should know how the marking should be done and we would already know what is a good essay. He said that by just reading a good essay we should “know”. Of course, I immediately felt that I had wasted my time coming for the session and it turned out to be just that.

Several years later, when I was with the Educational Technology Division (ETD), I was asked to chaperoned some foreign guests from the ASEAN countries to the NIE. The visitors were all officers from educational institutions from the ASEAN countries. We were going to look at NIE‘s use of discussion forums in their teacher training. We were given an overview by one of NIE‘s lecturers and at the Q&A after the overview, a Malaysian guest asked the NIE lecturer how they assessed the students learning on the forum. The lecturer rather flippantly said that they just read the comments and contributions of the students on the forum and have a “feel” for the correct marks. I remember cringing and shifting uneasily in my seat, when the Malaysian who had asked the question, looked at me and whispered, “What he means is that he is just doing impression marking?” I also remember just smiling sheepishly at him. I was at a loss for words as I knew what the Malaysian guest meant.

A few days ago, I was at a meeting between teachers and parents of my son’s class. Just before the actual meeting started, a teacher for Design and Technology, was complaining to a parent about her son’s portfolio work that was due to be submitted for the GCE O levels. The parent accepted that her son was not doing what he should and asked the teacher what was lacking in her son’s work. All the teacher said was that her son was not doing “enough”. The teacher proceeded to say that her son was over-confident and had thought that he was doing a good job. The parent asked again what was lacking and again the teacher only said that he was “over-confident” and that her son had thought that he had done enough when in reality it was far short of acceptable standards. It, perhaps, never crossed his mind that it wasn’t a case of over-confidence at all but rather the student not knowing how to assess his own performance.

As I watched this last incident, the first two incidents came to my mind. I have come to the conclusion that students in Singapore are, in general, not taught how to assess their own learning and performance.In the first two examples, it seems that even the teachers concerned have no clear inkling of how the assessment of learning is to be done. If teachers have no idea of how assessment is to be done, we can safely assumed the students have even less of an idea of how to do it.

The sad thing is that, the last incident showed that it is still happening today. Teachers mark with some hazy idea in their heads about the assessment standards. Because they are hazy about it, they cannot transfer their knowledge to the students. Students will, therefore, always be dependent on the teacher to assess their performance. The students cannot do it on their own. I suspect this haphazard approach to assessment is still prevalent in Singapore schools. I am sure many students, for example, don’t know why their English language essay is considered good or bad. Sure there will be marks and some comments made on the student’s essay paper but rarely is the student given clear criteria for what constitutes a good essay. Writing essays is a hit-and-miss affair. Students who do well, don’t really know why their essay is good. The poor essay writer also does not know why his essay is good. They are all dependent on the teacher.

Now this might seem normal to some of us but at a time when schools are spouting slogans like “independent learners” and “life-long learning”, how do we expect students to display such characteristics when they are not taught to assess their own learning? How are they going to be taught this if teachers themselves are hazy and vague?

In my view, independent learning and life-long learning will not happen as long as this state of affairs continue. It is just as bad for students to be waiting for an “assessment” from the teachers about their learning, as waiting for the teachers to provide them with ready-made notes.

The independent learner needs to be taught how to assess his own learning. He has to be his own “man in the mirror.” He must be able to reflect accurately on his own abilities and decide what he lacks and what he is good at. Without this skill and attitude, independent learning will only remain an illusion.

I’m Starting With The Man In

The Mirror

I’m Asking Him To Change

His Ways

And No Message Could Have

Been Any Clearer

If You Wanna Make The World

A Better Place

(If You Wanna Make The

World A Better Place)

Take A Look At Yourself, And

Then Make A Change

(Take A Look At Yourself, And

Then Make A Change)

- “Man in the mirror” by Michael Jackson

The flip side of not being able to make your own notes for your own learning is that you are less likely to read as much as you should. Independent learners must be people who are willing to read. They do not expect information to be given to them on a platter. They explore what they are interested in or what is important to them. They are seldom told what to learn. They decide what is to be learned.

But the absence of note-taking skills in anyone will deter him from making his own explorations. Text  becomes a chore because they would not know how to process what they read as they are so used to be given everything in neat bulleted form. This addiction to ready-made processed notes means that they cannot process and organize information on their own.  Reading would be difficult and a time-wasting chore because what is read is quickly forgotten without good processing of the information.For this reason, non-note-takers are poor readers.

A good note-taker knows that good processing of the information requires him to interact with the information, sifting out what is important from the unimportant, and organizing them so that it makes sense to him as he understands it. A lot of thinking is required and it is this thinking that will re-wire the neurons in the brain cells and help the brain make sense of what is read. This process is important because information only becomes deep knowledge to someone only if the person himself has processed the information. Reading ready-made notes processed by someone else makes it harder for the information to become deep knowledge. The reader of someone else’s notes only becomes a superficial learner.

The non-note-taker is a superficial learner because he does not undergo a richer learning process. He is only interested in an end product, not the process. The sifting and organizing of the information from the reading he would otherwise have to do himself are important cognitive processes that makes his understanding deeper. Worse, he will always be dependent on others. His learning will be crippled. He will nto be a successful life-long learner.