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.

[Rogier Gregoire]

Yes Dan
I can see where employment is a huge aspect of American life and the efforts of the public schools to prepare children for work. It is so essential an activity that it now seems paradoxical to also suggest that they should be able to think independently and critically about their lives but that's what I am suggesting. The values of the public schools (those that get the biggest play and notice) are competitiveness and an acquisitive nature (read greed). How to get ahead of everyone else is what an industrial value, n'est pas!

I don't disgree with your assumption and your ambitions for your students seem practical and worth while but I am old fashinoed I guess and see work as ancillary to life not its purpose. I would like to work to live to not live to work. Life is a better goal than work, of course that would not support the cultural culture that seems to own everything.

So that we understand each other I see the purpose of schools to be the development of clear, critical and independent thought and a responsiblity for the common good, the commonwealth. Schools don't have those objectives and tend to discard those that do. It is a paradox isn't it.

Then I read your last comment and wanted to say that large urban communities have profoundly more diversity than most tidy little suburban towns that tend to have very little diversity and narrower perspectives. They often have very little tolerance for differences or strangers that intrude into their cloistered existence - just a thought.

Rogier Gregoire

[Daniel Bassill]

Hi Rogier,

Your last paragraph has truth to it. Many communities, and countries, are so homogeneous that it provides a very narrow perspective. People writing about social capital have shared some ideas on this.

However, within big cities, there are large sections of racially and economically isolated communities. These show up on demographic maps that my organization produces.

It's great to talk about what public schools should be, but for youth in these high poverty communities not much of that talk will turn to reality unless we find ways for more people who don't live in poverty to get personally and intellectually involved, and to stay involved for many years.

Unless we address the self interest of many different sectors, I'm not sure we'll ever reach the convergence of ideas, and resources, to change the future opportunities for these, or many other kids in the world.

I create these concept maps myself. I post them to share my own thinking. However, my hope is that others who are much smarter, and more graphically talented, will create their own strategy maps and share them via the Internet. That would enable us to be learning from the strategies many people are trying to conceptualize as paths to new ways of learning.

[Rogier Gregoire]

Dear Dan,
I like your concept mapping and agree whole heartedly in your conclusions. By the way thank you for a thoughtful and detailed response, I find that flattering and helpful.

Let me suggest there is more to human experience that what happens right outside our doors. In that sense the world is become more aware of its diversity urban and suburban as well as rural. The social matrices has become in wonderful ways boundless and your conceptual village demonstrates that.

Intimacy is the issue. large cities have profound diversity but less intimacy and the opposite is true in small communities (even in ghettos) and what we learn through intimacy is quite different that what the institutions promote. How can I know myself if I don't know you? is a paradox of modern life. Great technologies for exchanging ideas and information - and yet there is growing feeling of loneliness. We can virtually see everything and yet we remain invisible to one another.
Something is wrong with this picture.

Sadly

Rogier Gregoire

[Daniel Bassill]

I think that "learning" is something that takes active participation. Thus, I spend lots of time thinking of what sort of marketing, or incentives, might motivate youth, or adults, to spend more time learning. I've not found a good solution yet.

In the same way creating "intimacy" is something that takes active participation. People can build strong relationships via on-line connections, but it takes work.

In both examples, intermediaries, like Connie Webber, can help bring people together, so they have the opportunity to learn, and build relationships. Any one can organize place based meetings or gatherings to add a more personal connection to this relationship building. I host the conferences in Chicago to help that happen.

In the book Freakonomics, the writer claims that everyone responds to incentives.

Thus, what would be the motivations that make more youth and adults active learners, and that help them take a more active role in building the relationships and intimacy that you envision?

[Rogier Gregoire]

Dear Daniel
Last things first. Freakonomics is driven by economic principles not human motives and I don't want to belabor the differences but I understand the thrust of the comment. The most profound incentive of intellectual development is the inherent need to raise one's consciousness. These powerful incentives are internal, efforts of the mind to achieve coherence or comprehensiveness. According to Maslow's hierarchy bribery is the lowest of all incentives just lower than the incentives that one uses to train animals. They may be right but I would like to have a higher or better sense of human motives for any behavior.

It is the nature of this society that we are driven by greed and dominance because those are the values of a commercial corporate society. Look at the healthcare debate where the common good is being sacrificed where the health of the nation is treated as a commodity.

Learning, like intimacy, does take active participation but that is not enough and there is too much active participation with little critical thought or reflection. if you want to engage an incentive why not try an incentive that promotes a better world or a better person in which they are required to take responsibility for social improvement. Carrots and sticks seem both literally and figuratively beneath a legitimate effort at improving the education of our youth.

I too work in the field of difficult conversations, because (I assume) we both hope to bring people together for an exchange of ideas and ideals for the purpose of expanding the collective consciousness. Dialogue, where inquiry is employed to expose and examine our assumptions is a powerful way to achieve these ends.

I continue to be intrigued and informed by your comments and assertions.
Thank You

Rogier Gregoire

[Mike]

Hi Daniel and Rogier.... hope this finds you both well!

My take..... your both right!

The fundamental human incentive system is CONNECTIONS!

Those connections leading toward a "felt sense" can then be used to guide people toward a higher vision for themselves.

The shift from External locus or Control to a more Internal locus of Control is a life time endeavor.... and both kinds of incentives may be of use.

I talk a bit about that here:
http://firesidelearning.ning.com/forum/topics/school-changeroot-que...

be well... mike

[Laura Gibbs]

Hi Daniel and Rogier, I've just now caught up on some of the ideas going back and forth here. As Daniel knows from past exchanges, I promote technology use among my students for a lot of reasons, some of which have to do with promoting better and broader sharing and communication, and some of which have to do with wanting very much for my students to be able to get stimulating and rewarding jobs when they graduate (most of my students are college seniors, and often they have majored in a department at my school which might have a very lofty sense of itself, but which has a very casual disregard for students who will need to go out and earn a living after they graduate).

Intimacy: Using online technology (blogging, websites, etc.), students can share with each other in addition to just writing for me as the only audience. The students interact with each other through their blogging and websites, and they do so with a degree of rapport and camaraderie that they value highly. They are really motivated to share with their peers and often work harder on their writing in order to impress their peers even if they are not all that motivated to impress me (this is especially true of students who are jaded about school and suspicious, understandably, of teachers). So, I like that! With the digital world, there are new kinds of audiences that were not possible/practical before I started teaching writing online. They don't have to write just for me! What a relief!

Incentives: After years of formal schooling, my students have developed the intended Pavlovian response to grades... which is enormously depressing to me (discussion about grades elsewhere... such a dilemma). They are also motivated to succeed in the world of work and earn a good salary. Just speaking for myself, I find it much easier to relate to their desire to succeed in the world of work than to their motivation to get good grades, since I've always valued the world of work more than that of the world of school (school felt to me more like prison, very coercive, whereas work has always been a kind of freedom for me; as a young person I always enjoyed my jobs more than I enjoyed school). So, I really enjoy teaching my students about the online technology that is available for them to use, free, to promote themselves and with which they can begin to develop their professional identity. For me, being able to make use of these online technologies has opened up some career opportunities I would never have had otherwise, and I want to be able to do the same for my students.

Plus, I think these students can actually learn more in self-propelled studies and informal learning online than they can learn in most formal classes taught at my university, so helping them explore the Internet and what it has to offer seems to me to be both educational AND vocational. Plus, they are EAGER to learn about the Internet, not really having learned much about it at all in their many years of formal schooling...

:-)

[Daniel Bassill]

Hi Laura and Mike, thanks for joining in.

Roger spoke of a higher motivation for learning, which I strive for. In my case, it's to help disadvantaged kids have some of the same opportunities as most other kids. Idealistically, there should be loads of reasons why young and old should explore all of the ways they could understand the challenges of poverty, and respond with ideas and solutions of their own. Realistically, that's not happening in enough places, with enough depth.

Laura, your teaching via technology really offers hope. I encourage you to look at the work this class at DePaul University in Chicago is doing. http://jhickey50.wordpress.com/

They are not at a level of sophistication that your students seem to be at, but they are focusing on learning about poverty, and about organizations who work to help kids. They are learning to write blogs, share comments and talk about this issue. By doing it in a public forum, hopefully they are learning that what they learn and how they write can attract others, who learn from them, and who may become more directly involved, as a volunteer, leader, donor, advocate.

Thus, the goal is to engage in discussion and build understanding of the issues, but then to motivate people to act to solve the problems. Such actions need to be repeated over and over for many years, with constant learning from our own experiences, and from those of others. The actions need to have impact in thousands of locations over many continents.

Those who are teaching and motivating learners to be inquisitive about big and small issues, and who are teaching them to share and learn with others, and then are teaching them that actions must result from some of their learning, will be creating a future generation who might be able to deal with some of the social and environmental and economic problems they will inherit from our generation.

[Laura Gibbs]

Wow, Daniel, that class at DePaul is producing beautiful stuff - I am so impressed!

To me, that is the Holy Grail: having all the classes, at all levels (K-12, undergraduate, graduate), publishing their work online so that we can benefit both from the content of other people's work, but also explore together the many different ways these online tools can be used to promote learning, often in ways that just were not possible before (or were prohibitively expensive, inordinately complicated, etc. etc.)

Just a small example: I got a great email yesterday from a Latin composition student at Rhodes College, whose teacher had assigned them three major Latin compositions, and he was so proud of his that he had posted it online in a blog, and he wanted me to help him publicize it (I have a very active daily Latin blog, and he had had the wherewithal to find my blog, and to send me a very nice email) - how absolutely delightful! Even though I am not "his" teacher and he is not "my" student, we shared a great learning moment, thanks to the Internet, and by publishing his composition online he might give heart to the many Latin teachers who are baffled by how to teach Latin composition. That's just one example from my own little corner of the Internet - but it's an example that could be extended endlessly to any field of human learning.

So, even though Latin composition is not one of those social or environmental or economic problems that you are writing about here, it makes me optimistic that students are learning - in any subject, for any purpose - how to harness the power of the Internet so that they will have that tool available to them as they make other life choices and keep on learning long after they get out of school!