Who is the learner of the future? What matters most for this learner?

[Connie Weber]

Let's say you're at a cocktail party or a picnic. You're among friends, so you feel pretty easy about chatting, you can "speak your gut" more or less without getting too fancy, without piling on the references. You're approached by someone you know who isn't much involved with education and is turning to you because he thinks you know something about what's happening with the "digital revolution." He asks in a soulful way, wanting to know your personal view and perspective of "what's going on."

"Who is the learner of the future?" he asks. "What matters most for this learner to learn?" "How will this learner learn best?"

Could you please use that as a jump-off place, and say what you'd say to that friend if you were just "telling it like it is," your take? Please feel free to discuss both the positive and negative sides of where you see things are now, and where you see things are going.

Thanks. I'm using this as a launching point for discussion of some of the questions we're exploring in Harvard's Summer Institute, The Future of Learning.

[Nathan Lowell]

Oh this is too much fun. Here's my response:

Who's the learner of the future?! Are you kidding? Got a mirror? Look in it. He'll be looking back at ya.

What matters most to that person? And do you really think it's going to be the same as the last person who looked out of that glass? Or the next?

Sure, there are some commonalities. We want to 'succeed' - what ever that might mean and even for a given person, that qualification changes over time. Generalize it into Maslow if it's helpful and we all want to make it to our own personal Self-Actualized Peak. We wanna tapdance on the summit and have the oyster of the world for dinner.

Education as it exists today is the railroad in 1930. It's lost track of what it is, where it's going, and what it needs to be doing. That airplane business thing is never gonna -- pardon the expression -- fly because you just can't put enough goods in a plane to make it cost effective. What? You think that people are gonna send packages to Aunt Mable in Poukeepsie by a PLANE?!

That's Education today. The railroad.

But they're still selling credentials when people need knowledge. Education is a train schedule and learning can't wait for the train. The disconnect is everywhere and it's getting worse.

Politicians are making policy decisions in arenas where they lack the expertise. The people who know what's happening are the last people to be engaged in the process because there's over a century of protectivist policy in place to bar the door to anybody who's not properly indoctrinated in The Way.

You want a "behind the scenes" conspiracy? Don't look to the Freemasons. Look to the Colleges of Education. You can't get a teaching license in this country unless you've been properly indoctrinated and have convinced a jury of your betters that you'll faithfully uphold their sacred views of the world.

You want to change the system? Start with licensure. Don't give me that "We have to protect kids" stuff! If you wanted to protect kids, you'd do something about the systems that conspire to keep them stupid and under control. You'd do something about the political structure that allows one ignorant parent to force a school to adopt the least common denominator.

No Child Left Behind?! Don't make me laugh! Try "No Child Gets Ahead" because that, my friend, is the only way you can operationalize it. Kids aren't bolts coming off the production line. They're finely tuned customized machines. You can't apply these stupid ideas of Industrial Age command and control -- statistical analysis and quality control checks -- to them. It's like trying to measure a bird song or count the value of a poem. What's the utility of a home cooked meal?

What are we gonna do? Darned if I know. But I DO know this.

If Education is the railroad, then what we need to do is the airline. I don't care how much freight you can carry between Chicago and New York.

I wanna fly to London.

Figure that out, and you got something.

Now where's that bartender. I need a refill.

[Connie Weber]

Hi Nathan,

Glad you're participating in this. It's good to hear your radical self ;-) and I'm guessing you're even trying to be calm at the moment! Here are some points from your response I want to talk about:

"But they're still selling credentials when people need knowledge. Education is a train schedule and learning can't wait for the train. The disconnect is everywhere and it's getting worse."

What would you see happening if people were getting "knowledge"? How would that look to you? I'm wanting to get your take on the difference between credentials and knowledge. Might you have both? Are they unrelated? --and I guess I'd also ask, if you're not thinking happily about "credentials," what would you like to see instead?

"Politicians are making policy decisions in arenas where they lack the expertise. The people who know what's happening are the last people to be engaged in the process..."

Yes, very true. This is an age unlike others. Why are politicians making decisions about education?

"Kids aren't bolts coming off the production line. They're finely tuned customized machines. You can't apply these stupid ideas of Industrial Age command and control -- statistical analysis and quality control checks -- to them. It's like trying to measure a bird song or count the value of a poem. What's the utility of a home cooked meal?"

--I am still astonished at what has happened to learning at this time in history. Seems it's becoming increasingly more intriguing and engaging outside of school. And after saying that, I wonder, was that always true? Am I just imagining that this is more of an issue now than ever before, or is that just me seeing through the eyes of my time?

I keep thinking if only someone would hand me several thousand video cameras and a good movie-making program with easy editing capabilities, well, then I could possibly avert several thousand students from dropping out. Oh yes, it'd take teachers who value participatory education and learning together with the students. But that doesn't seem so far out, does it? Couldn't we be giving ideas like that a try, instead of just tightening the screws, locking the bolts on a system that already has proved largely irrelevant?

Just thinking aloud. Let's keep this conversation going. I really do want to figure it out. What does the learner of the future look like? Oh, my, so many "It depends" comments are necessary. Depends on who gets access, what the teachers convey (are they learners, too?), what the gatekeepers say you need to get into the next staging room of the factory.

No, I'm not actually as cynical as I sound in that last comment. I LOVED college, found it to be what I had waited for all those years. Guess that's not true for everyone, for a lot of people I know college wasn't any better. So many say that school was an endurance trial: boredom alternating with anxiety.

We can create a much better vision. How open do you think it is? Can we carve out a new, relevant, engaging system for schooling? Getting back to your analogy, is the track just only solidly linear and already laid out?

Or is it more like this:

I'm of the mind that strong learning just can't be boxed up into benchmarks... of the mind that that's where a lot of wrong decisions have come from, this standards-era. Don't know whether to see it as the last gasp of a dying system (which will prove itself to be a failure), or whether we'll plateau here for a long time, in effect making it die by strangling all the learning out of education. Remains to be seen. It depends.

[Nathan Lowell]

"What would you see happening if people were getting "knowledge"? How would that look to you? I'm wanting to get your take on the difference between credentials and knowledge. Might you have both? Are they unrelated? --and I guess I'd also ask, if you're not thinking happily about "credentials," what would you like to see instead?"

People learn - "get knowledge" - all the time every day. I'm convince that "learning" is what separates humans from other animals -- not tool use, not the production of art, but "learning."

Credentials are fine if they mean something. The problem with what we're doing is handing out credentials that certify that the individual has completed the course, not that they actually learned anything useful. We *say* that it does, but assessment of such a broad notion is problematic and I'm not sure that it should be done even if it could be. My solution to this issue is just to recognize the issue and move one.

"Oh yes, it'd take teachers who value participatory education and learning together with the students. But that doesn't seem so far out, does it? Couldn't we be giving ideas like that a try, instead of just tightening the screws, locking the bolts on a system that already has proved largely irrelevant?"

It's not that far out. A lot of teachers are as disaffected as the rest of us. The political momentum -- and the financial requirements of really good learning experiences -- will keep the status pretty much quo in terms of reforming schools. I actually think schools could be transformed into institutions of real learning, in spite of my rather eeyore-ishness on the current situation. There is great synergy possible when you bring people together in sufficient mass to trigger creative thinking.

But schools -- even back as far as the venerated one-roomer -- are notorious for lining up kids in desks and promoting the quiet conformists.This is not a place of learning so much as a place for indoctrination. Is there a first year teacher who hasn't heard, "Just keep them in their seats and keep them quiet!" as an operating principle in their classroom? "Don't smile until Christmas," indeed.

The problem is that this change is not a refinement. It's a radical disconnect - a singularity event.

My sense is that the current economic collapse is only the beginning. Even if the "old economy" turns around and limps along for a few more decades, working life has been permanently altered. The internet has changed how we will work in the future. I think that might be one reason that the government is trying to hard to control what happens on it, and why the communications companies are trying to get a handle on a new business model. When the dust settles, internet will have to be as ubiquitous as any other infrastructure -- electricity, roads, water. That's a very scary scenario because it means a fundamental shift in capitalist societies like ours. The means of production (a computer) and the means of distribution (the web) are now democratized down to the point where one person, working alone, can have a product with a global footprint, and more, that product has as much chance of being successful as a product that is produced by the corporate masters. Maybe more so.

And if that's the case, then the stranglehold on "making a living" that HR departments and hiring managers have held for decades has been broken. People can work, produce goods, provide services, and do it without the credential that the current gatekeepers are requiring - even while they admit quite freely that the credential itself is meaningless. When the old "you need to get the credential so you can get a good job" argument becomes invalid, the utility of our current system of education becomes - effectively - zero.

As a participant in the new economy, I can tell you, we haven't scratched the surface yet but the potential is huge - and it doesn't require anybody to have a degree. It just requires them to know something. It could be something they learned in school, but that would require schools to become considerably more flexible, adaptable, and responsive to student needs than they are currently.

I tell my own grad students. "Yes, this will be on the test, but the test will come after you've left my class and I won't be grading it."

[Connie Weber]

Nathan, great line, simply wonderful. I'm going to start using it. I'll give you credit, of course. "Yes, this will be on the test, but the test will come after you've left my class and I won't be grading it."

Thank you for your thoughts. I want to keep analyzing this line in particular: "The problem is that this change is not a refinement. It's a radical disconnect - a singularity event." I want proof of this. Is it certainly a qualitative change in everything we know (about learning, about knowing)? How do we know how different it is? So is this certainly historical? I think so, but can we know? As you say, it's a fundamental shift. Yet how can that be, I ask myself, when most of the teachers I know are pretty completely ignoring it? They're intelligent people, why don't they pick up on the fact that something's going on here?

And how do we explain to people that intelligence is increasingly distributed--that working together, using your entire learning community and all its extended resources--that that's the way for learning to happen these days... Does that fit anywhere into the current model, or is it un-fittable?

[Nathan Lowell]

The problem with singularity events - by definition - is that you can't see beyond the threshold of the event to see what's on the other side. It's a discontinuous change. Like the railroads and the airlines. The railroads actually have a chance of coming back, but they have to change their perception of what they're doing if they want to run passengers. (They're too expensive for the speed. It costs *more* to take a train from Denver to Chicago than it does to fly and it takes a lot longer.) Ian's idea of the taxi is an interesting one, but a taxi still won't get you to Hawaii.

[Ian Carmichael]

I was trying to avoid the carbon costs of charter aircraft!

[Nathan Lowell]

Heh. It's virtual. Carbon footprint is miniscule compared to fossil fueled vehicles.

Altho the question of computers, networks, and the carbon footprint there is an interesting one.

[Ian Carmichael]

In that case, I'd have taken my taxi as at least metaphorical - and to Hawaii as well!
But metaphors/models crystallise out differently for different users...

[Nathan Lowell]

well if your taxi can fly, i'd take one of those, too .. but i'd take it down under to visit you :) much more educational!

[Paddy O'Dea]

hi Nathan - I'm convinced that learning is a two-way street so I thought you might be interested in the article on page 16 & 17 of the attached magazine... Schools ETC Issue 11. I commissioned this impressive young fellow, Gareth John, who is a student at the school, to write this article about what he and his fellow student governors are up to at Beauchamp College in Leicester, UK. It's a new(ish) idea to have students inspecting teachers - but I had a chat with one of the teachers there, and it seems to be working incredibly well. There are huge rewards on this route for both teachers and students - setting it up needs the support of school leaders though - it needs to be taken seriously for it to work.
Do you know if anything like this is happening anywhere in the US? I'd be pleased if you could point me in the right direction.
Okay... here goes. Trying to upload the document now. Hope it works.
best
Paddy

BTW, sorry I have attached the whole magazine (and it's only the penultimate version of Issue 11, as I can't find the final copy. But it gives you the idea anyway.)

[Ian Carmichael]

Thanks Paddy,
A very interesting article, and very polished magazine all through. Thanks for uploading it.

[Connie Weber]

Thanks, Paddy, for sharing the exciting model of empowered students helping to shape positive learning habitats! Great leadership opportunities, great example of learners (teachers and students) all being part of a learning-community.