Connected Learning: Interest, Peer Culture, Academics

We commissioned filmmaker Nic Askew (http://soulbiographies.com) to make a series of films about connected learning, a new …

Connected Learning: Interest, Peer Culture, Academics/a>

there is no longer a promised future for all kids if people don’t really learn how to learn and how to engage and how to be flexible and adaptive and find communities and have ideas about things that they want to do now we’re just really in trouble if we’re going to compete with everyone else then we can no longer say let’s only educate a segment of society we have to educate everyone and we have to educate everyone to be creative and to think about things which means we have to completely overhaul our education system we have to completely overhaul overhaul how we think learning happens and where it happens and who’s who’s capable of learning there’s a sense in which in all kinds of registers and indices um yeah our institutions have to some degree not completely but to some degree failed us and failed our children and you know the passion on our side is to try and open it up to find the ways in which learning and our learning institutions no longer fail us that they actually become environments ecologies sites spaces of excitement and engagement and interest and passion that delight learners at all ages we really think that that part of what’s wrong with the current educational system and why people talk about it is broken is because it’s fundamentally starting with the wrong questions the educational system often now starts with a question of outcomes it starts with what do we want kids to learn what are the goals and what’s the content what’s the material that they need to cover and then everything is defined by that it doesn’t almost matter who the kid is so long as we’re going on pace through the material and through the content and reaching those educational standards or those outcomes because that’s our starting point our core question is what’s the experience we want kids to have so the core question is around engagement and as soon as you start with is the kid engaged what is the learning experience we want the kid to have then you have to pay attention to the kid how do you create a need to know in a kid that’s an emotional question that’s an intellectual question that’s an identity question and when you start designing learning experiences around that then getting to the content and getting kids to engage in core questions related to academic core that’s actually the easy part in school we drum that out of kids we so decontextualize what they’re learning we take it out of context and just teach them discrete facts because we’re so focused on these outcomes that we’ve forgotten the learner and we’ve forgotten that we actually have a passion for learning we’re so used to now giving responsibility for learning to professionals instead of looking at how it’s part of the fabric of our interactions with everybody education has been framed for a long time as somebody else’s job right it’s the job of the schools it’s the job of teachers schools can’t possibly bear the burden a soul burden of educating young people all of the spaces the churches the home spaces families you know the neighborhood coffee shop the person online across the world that’s doing really interesting things those are all people and groups that can help own the learning of of any particular young person and really can contribute so part of this conversation is trying to open up the question of who contributes and who is is ultimately responsible for helping young people survive and thrive and grow up to be curious engaged citizens what we’ve heard from kids over and over again through all of our research is that school’s a node on their network of learning so that they in fact are learning everywhere now in part because of digital media and in part because they always have the problem is effective matchmaking so how does a kid find that mentor or that peer who is going to introduce them or support them in developing their interests making their interests relevant developing a sense of purpose and it’s not about actually finding the information anymore how can we use the capacity of these network resources these social connections to bring people together who want to learn together and not the model of how can we deliver content more effectively from a single source to many listeners and that’s fundamentally reconfiguring what we think of as the problem and goal of education the challenge is there’s so much there and how do i figure out what to hone in on and what to focus in on that works for you and works for me and works for you know the other kid and that’s going to be that’s going to be the hard part because the old approach is to say well i don’t need to think about it because we’re all going to learn the same way we’re all going to learn these 10 facts we’re all going to read these 10 books and we’re going to all write these 10 essays that’s you know those days are gone we have this um almost embarrassment of riches in some sense of so many different pieces that are on the table but we still have to figure out how to put those pieces together we have a broad set of principles and a broad set of ideas that we think need to be at the core of learning for the 21st century and that those principles and designs need to start with the notion of connectedness i think our greatest aspiration is that this becomes the kernel of a set of ideas that enable a lot of people in a wide range of spheres and fields to take it up and do something with it it’s about expertise that’s widely distributed in our society and culture and the fact that anybody can help somebody else get better at something it is absolutely a work in progress i don’t want to say this too strongly but it’s a work that should never be finished it’s a work that should always be in progress and it’s a work that should never be afraid to fail