The Future of Learning

A new report out from MIT Press on the Future of Learning in a Digital Age is digested on the HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) website, or blog. Some interesting conclusions about the way a new generation raised on digital technology learns, and potential problems for the way old style universities teach.

I've been thinking about this for a while. I sensed something was up when I started my old Teaching with Electronic Technology website back in the nineties. Sounds so long ago. That site has died, and gone the way of most electronic technology; it's obsolete. Of course, ghosts remain here and there, and last time I checked there were still links to it on other teaching sites.

Now that I'm an old man and have spent a lifetime trying to keep up with learning, I've come to a few conclusions, none of which are original or very profound. First, nothing lasts forever, but some things do last a long time. Homer, for example, has had a good run, and Shakespeare seems to be holding his own, but still has a ways to go. I'm sure there are other candidates, but those two come quickly to mind. They both rely on my second conclusion: human beings in their fundamental emotional makeup haven't changed very much in the last several thousand years, which is why we continue to enjoy stories about killing one another. I submit that would seem to be our most enduring, if not endearing, characteristic.

But I digress. I was going to say something about learning. I've been a student and a teacher for nearly sixty years, and I still haven't figured out how we humans learn things. Of course, we observe and imitate, and some of us try to teach others how to do some of the things we've learned how to do. We still rely on our ability to communicate using language for most of this learning and teaching. If you disagree, then try doing it without language. Seeing may be believing, but there's still more to learning at any deeper level. Or maybe that's just me being misled by my own prejudices and assumptions.

Anyway, I would suggest that language was the first killer app, and so far as teaching and learning were concerned, we got along pretty well without some of the later refinements we've come to depend on, such as writing, reading, books, and other aids to human memory. But anyone who has paid attention to such matters will have noticed that the invention of writing, and then of printing, provided a real boost to the business of teaching (and probably learning as well). I suspect we're now going through another of those revolutions with computers and digital technology. Some folks are actually figuring out ways for our computers to do our reading for us, not the entertaining kind, so much as the instrumental kind. Most of us have learned the rudiments of this by using search engines such as Google to find out things we don't know or can't remember. We've also learned to communicate with much wider circles of "friends" and acquaintances using social sites like Facebook and Twitter, even if that communication is filtered or only oneway.

No question the world will change, and keep changing. It's going along so rapidly now that I would hate to have to pick the winners and losers. Fortunately, I don't feel I have to. I have the luxury of old age, one of its few, of being able to stand back and watch as the younger folks try to keep up with themselves. My only bit of advice would be don't latch onto anything too firmly just now, and keep your options open, because while it's always been true that nothing lasts forever, nowadays I would add a twenty-first century corollary: in a versioning world, nothing will last very long.