Supercool School will set minds on fire

Eminent knowledge entrepreneur John Seely Brown (a.k.a. Chief of Confusion) published a great paper entitled "Minds on Fire", which not only outlines "the perfect storm of opportunity" supercool school is playing in, he also nails down our ventures leitmotiv - social learning / learning to be [free].

Here are some of the key points of his paper:

"As we move from career to career, much of what we will need to know will not be what we learned in school decades earlier. We are entering a world in which we all will have to acquire new knowledge and skills on an almost continuous basis."

He continues to state that society is facing a real challenge to develop the institutions and the methodology to meet this growing global demand for education. Of course this is exactly the challenge we @ Supercool School believe we are developing a solution for.

Next he elaborates on his understanding of social learning. His argument here is that, as we have to learn new stuff all the time, "the focus is not so much on what we are learning but on how we are learning". He refers to research which showed that "students who studied in groups, even only once a week, were more engaged in their studies, were better prepared for class, and learned significantly more than students who worked on their own". In his view study groups are so effective, because "students in these groups can ask questions to clarify areas of uncertainty or confusion, can improve their grasp of the material by hearing the answers to questions from fellow students, and perhaps most powerfully, can take on the role of teacher to help other group members benefit from their understanding" and here it comes "one of the best ways to learn something is, after all, to teach it to others".

While he commends social learning as a superior method for learning, there is - and we couldn't agree more - another effect of learning in groups: One is not only "'learning about' the subject matter, but also 'learning to be' a full participant in the field". This reminds me of Sartre's existentialist thinking along the lines of "if you want to be a writer you need to write, if you want to be a politician you need to debate, lobby and engage in politics"; and what better way is there to start to become an expert in X than to take that role within a group of peers?

In the next two sections of the paper he supports his assessments with a number of real world examples and introduces some interesting toughts about the long tail in learning (something that Supercool School should/will strategically exploit as well).

      

He then turns to describe his analysis of the learning ecosystem as a circle of knowledge building and sharing (see pic), an approach that we also foresee to support within the supercool learning environment. It is however his last point "from the web 2.0 to learning 2.0" where he (implicitly of course)  describes supercool school: "We now need a new approach to learning - one characterized by a demand-pull rather than the traditional supply-push mode of building up in an inventory of knowledge in students heads. Demand-pull learning shifts the focus to enabling participation in flows of action, where the focus is both on 'learning to be' through enculturation into practice as well as on collateral learning"

Comments

[Jon Bischke]

Reminds me of a Drucker quote in Tom Peters' book Re-Imagine:

"My ancestors were printers in Amsterdam from 1510 or so until 1750, and during that entire time they didn’t have to learn anything new. The average knowledge worker will outlive the average employing organization. This is the first time in history that’s happened. … So the center of gravity of higher education is shifting from the education of the young to the continuing education of adults.”

It's one of my favorite quotes and one that deeply inspired eduFire.