Week 1 - Blog Posting #2 - Learning 2.0

What is Learning 2.0? Well to know that let us look at Learning 1.0 first.
According to dictionary.reference.com Learning is defined as

1. knowledge acquired by systematic study in any field of scholarly application.
2. the act or process of acquiring knowledge or skill.

Note that the definition does not mention school.

As I was watching the plethora of videos offered by Dr. Siegel there was one particular line that I liked. The very last line of Learning to change, changing to learn a teacher says: “It’s the death of education, but the dawn of learning and that makes me very happy”. That I think is the most important line of all the videos. Here is why.

As that video also stated, our current Education system was setup at the start of the mass production era, and used a lot of the same techniques. It was designed to provide factory workers who had a minimum set of skills. Those were Reading, Writing and Arithmetic. Those are a cliche now but they accurately described the curriculum a hundred years ago. Reading because you had to be able to read directions on how to operate the assembly line. Writing so you could generate reports. Arithmetic so you could do simple math required for operating the line.

To see a modern example of an assembly line here is a video of the assembly of the new A380 Jumbo Jet from Airbus. It is quite a cool video! If you watch it, you notice how the people are like cogs in the machine. No individuality. They are interchangeable.

The modern society we are living in has changed dramatically from the one only 30 years ago. Creativity has become much more valuable than it was. A common refrain from the last several years is that our country is “exporting” jobs to other countries. That is true. It is also true that most of those jobs are lower skilled job such as manufacturing. With modern education techniques it is fairly simple to teach a person in a foreign country to operate the modern machines of an assembly line. Transportation costs are also very low so it makes sense to drop the labor costs too. Eventually robotics will replace all assembly line jobs. Ayers and Miller predicted this in their article entitled: Robotic Realities: Near-Term Prospects and Problems “The current generation of robots, lacking sensory data processing and interpretation capabilities, can potentially replace up to 1.3 million manufacturing jobs. The next generation, with crude vision or tactile senses; will potentially displace about 3 million more (1983).” They were right.

So if assembly line skills are being rendered obsolete by machines, what is left for humans to do? How about think, dream, and create? As Ken Robinson said in his Ted talk, children are born creative. We are “educating them out of their creative capacities”. Education is now attempting to change as it becomes increasing clear to educators that the assembly line model is not useful anymore.

Learning is happening outside the classroom now at ever increasing rates. This ability to use outside sources to learn from is what I define as Learning 2.0. Like Web 2.0 it is interactive, dynamic and personalized. It can happen anywhere the student is, not just in the classroom. Teachers are trying to figure out what their role is in this new learning model. I believe the students will tell us what they want us to do.