December Big Question - What did you learn about learning?

We've somewhat lost our fearless Blogmeister, Dave Lee, so we've not been doing the Big Questions the past few months. I'll be doing the moderating. But, we are starting again ...

The Big Question for December is:

What did you learn about learning in 2007?

To help you get started, you might want to look back at some discussions going on last year at this time with a similar kind of question:

• December 2006: Past experiences. Present Challenge. Future Predictions.

I personally am going to be looking back at some of my blog posts and look for those "aha moments." There were quite a few, but it's always good to go back and look.

January's Topic:

Predictions for learning in 2008

How to Respond:

We are going old-school on this, no forms.

Please post on your blog or put thoughts in a comment.

If you post on a blog, please include a link to this post. Ideally, you would also include the Big Question logo. After you post on your blog, leave a comment on this post with a link to your blog post. Periodically during the month, I will add you to the list below.

By the way, if you can make it as easy as copy and paste for me, that would be great. Otherwise, the links may not look great, but everyone can still get there.

Good stuff already coming in!

Posts So Far:

• eLearning 2.0 for Law Firms - What did you learn about learning?
• RÉCIT de la Pointe-de-l'Île - Question difficile - (I only understand the title of the post - someone let me know if this is okay to link to).
• Karyn Romeis
• Ignatia Webs
• Hamilton Notes
• Wendy Wickham (an Edublog Nominee) - My cursory, simplistic response
• Clive Sheppard (another Edublog Nominee) - Most of It
• Tony Karrer (another Edublog Nominee) - My Aha Moments in 2007
• The big question: what did you learn about learning in 2007?
• René Meijer - The Echo of Teaching
• Clark Quinn
• Kapp Notes: ASTD's Big Question for December: New Learning
• How to leverage a Network: What I Learned in 2007
• Mark Frank
• Harold Jarche
• Stephanie Sandifer - well done I might add!
• Jack Pierce
• Tom Haskins
• Marianne - new blog for me, but really enjoyed the thoughts!
• Marcel de Leeuwe - Pecha Kucha answer
• What Did I Learn in 2007?
• Kerry McGuire
• Joel Adkins
• Malinka Ivanova
• Nicola
• Norman Lamont
• e-Learning Journey
• Jay Cross
• Geetha Krishnan
• e-Learning Journey
• Cammy Bean
• Will to Learn
• Anil Mammen
• Christy Tucker
• G-Cube Solutions
• Jan Van Belle
  
• Dan McCarthy
  
• ASTD Cascadia
  
• Mary Hillis
  

The Campfire and the Sandlot

One can imagine the time in our pre-paleolithic history when formal learning consisted of two balanced parts:

During the day, people with skills would show others how to do something. "Grab the spear here," the teacher might say, taking the hands of the apprentice and putting them in the right spot. "Now practice in that sandlot over there by throwing it at that big tree. Keep doing it until you get it right. Then throw it at the smaller tree."

While at night, people around the campfire might tell of great adventures, including myths and legends. People would share ideas, and help their community expand their thinking. The best story tellers would gain bigger audiences and develop their own craft of narrative and suspense.

Then came the technology of writing. And suddenly the balance shifted. Communities were able build on the written work of the past. Written work also scaled well, where the work of one village could impact villages all around it. The disciplines of accounting and drama evolved geometrically. Meanwhile, practicing in the sandlot didn't change much. It was still a one-to-one activity.

Since the technology of writing, many subsequent discoveries have further augmented the "learning to know" skills. Paintings, theaters, printing presses and books, photographs, schools, universities, sound recordings, movies, scanners, Google (and now, the Kindle) all turned our culture into masters of linear content, enabling both great artists and our own exquisite vocabulary around such catnip as plot devices, antagonists, suspense, and the hero's journey, just to name a few. We can watch a Spielberg movie, a piece of campfire-style intellectual property that is the recipient of cumulatively trillions of dollars of investment and R&D, and evaluate it at a level of cultural sophistication that would awe citizens from a even a hundred years ago.

And yet, in the "learning to do" area, we are probably worse than our hunter-gatherer ancestors. For teaching the simplest skills, we mirror our ancestors ("put your hands here"), and for the more complicated skills, we don't have a clue. Ask a Harvard Business School professor to develop leadership (or any Big Skill) in a student and she will go into campfire mode with PowerPoint slides of grids, case studies, and so-called inspirational stories.

The advent of flight simulators and computer games, however, have introduced technology around "learning to do" that can finally scale. Today, there is a robust, if nascent, set of "sandlot" tools that is receiving a significant intellectual investment of the current community, and is able to build on the discoveries of the past. Today's "authors," often game designers, can begin to create virtual sandlots where participants can practice skills, instead of just hearing about them (the theory of nudging a pinball machine to get a better score, from a campfire perspective, is trivial; the practiced application is where it is hard).

And, correspondingly, an entirely new language is being developed. Gamers now effortlessly talk about end-of-level bosses, mapping Actions to interfaces, the attributes of Units on Maps, and what is good or bad level design.

During the next twenty years, the sandlot technologies (the "learning to do" through games and simulations) will successfully challenge the campfire institutions of universities, movies, and books not only for the discretionary time of the community (which we have already seen), but for help in improving their quality of life. We are already seeing glimpses of the latter through Carmen SanDiego, The Oregon Trail, Age of Empires, America's Army, Full Spectrum Warrior, Virtual Leader, and Brain Age. Will Wright, the creator of SimCity and The Sims, is the first Shakespeare or Beethoven of this medium.

In other words, people will engage in games not to play a super-hero, but to actually become more like one. And the balance between "learning to do" and "learning to know" may finally be restored.