Pull-outs: The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age
A few pull-outs from Cathy Davidson and David Goldberg’s recent 82 page white paper, The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age. The document can be found here.
Modes of learning have changed dramatically over the past two
decades—our sources of information, the ways we exchange
and interact with information, how information informs and
shapes us. But our schools—how we teach, where we teach,
who we teach, who teaches, who administers, and who services—
have changed mostly around the edges. The fundamental
aspects of learning institutions remain remarkably familiar
and have done so for something like two hundred years or
more.A key term in thinking about these emergent shifts is participatory
learning. Participatory learning includes the many ways that
learners (of any age) use new technologies to participate in virtual
communities where they share ideas, comment on one
another’s projects, and plan, design, implement, advance, or
simply discuss their practices, goals, and ideas together.The concept of participatory learning is very
different from “IT” (Instructional Technology). IT is usually a
toolkit application that is predetermined and even institutionalized
with little, if any, user discretion, choice, or leverage. IT
tends to be top-down, designer determined, administratively
driven, commercially fashioned. In participatory learning, outcomes
are typically customizable by the participants.Most university education, certainly, is founded on ideas of
individual training, discrete disciplines, and isolated achievement
and accomplishment. What we want to ask is how much
this very paradigm of individual achievement supports the
effective learning styles of today’s youth and prepares them for
increasingly connected forms of civic participation and global
commerce—or how much it is at odds with contemporary culture.
That needs to be stated more forcefully: The future of conventional
learning institutions is past—it’s over—unless those
directing the course of our learning institutions realize, now
and urgently, the necessity of fundamental and foundational
change.
Most fundamental to such a change is the understanding that
participatory learning is about a process and not always a final
product. We are concerned here not just with a prognostication
about future institutions for learning, but with considering,
even with projecting, how learning happens today—not in some
distant utopian or dystopian future.…most institutions are stuck in an epistemological
model of the past, even as they pour tens or even hundreds of
thousands of dollars into IT that promises a technological
future. Yet, we are no longer talking about the future. Institutional
change is happening as we write.When we advocate institutional change for learning institutions,
we are making assumptions about the deep structure of
learning, about cognition, about the way youth today learn
(about) their world in informal settings, and about a mismatch
between the excitement generated by informal learning and the
routinization of learning so common to many of our institutions
of formal education. We advocate institutional change
because we believe our current formal educational institutions
are not taking enough advantage of the modes of digital and
participatory learning available to students today.As open source legaltheorist and activist James Boyle notes in his witty and terse
article “A Closed Mind about an Open World,” we have been
conditioned by a confluence of factors, economic and social,
political and cultural, to acquire an “openness aversion.” The
familiar is safe, easy, reliable. Boyle suggests that aversion to
openness—to be disposed against the challenge of the unforeseen—
is an actual cognitive bias that leads us to “undervalue
the importance, viability and productive power of open systems,
open networks and non-proprietary production.” To
overcome this bias requires that knowledge producers (all of us
involved in the practices of teaching, in whatever current institutional
configuration) rethink every aspect (from economic
theory to citation form) of what we think of as “knowledge
production.”Digital technologies increasingly enable and encourage social
networking and interactive, collaborative engagements, including
those implicating and impacting learning. And yet traditional
learning institutions, whether K–12 or institutions of
higher learning, continue to privilege individualized performance
in assessments and reward structures. Born and matured
out of a century and a half of institutional shaping, maturing,
and hardening, these assessment and reward structures have
become fixed in place. But they now serve also to weigh down
and impede new learning possibilities.Pillars of Institutional Pedagogy: Ten Principles for the
Future of Learning:1. Self-Learning
2. Horizontal Structures
3. From Presumed Authority to Collective Credibility
4. A De-Centered Pedagogy
5. Networked Learning
6. Open Source Education
7. Learning as Connectivity and Interactivity
8. Lifelong Learning
9. Learning Institutions as Mobilizing Networks
10. Flexible Scalability and Simulation
But can we really say, in 2009, that the institutions of learning—from preschool to
the PhD—are suited to the new forms of learning made available
by digital technologies? Is there an educational enterprise
anywhere in the world redesigned with the deep assumptions of
networked thinking core and central to its lesson planning? Has
anyone yet put into institutional practice at the level of higher
education what John Seely Brown is calling a “social life of
learning for the ‘Net age’”?
