Introduction

[INDEX]

01. What Will Bildung Be Like in the Future?

I would invite you to imagine the future and think about how in this future of ours we will be doing research, how learning and sharing knowledge will be different from today. But let us not focus on specific problem-related disciplinary knowledge but take a broader view on the kind of knowledge that orients us as individuals and gives us a sense of knowing who we are.

German has a useful term for this kind of orientational knowledge that includes knowledge about ourselves, the world and others. It is called ‘Bildung’. Bildung is the kind of knowledge that we activate when asked what matters to us, what we find beautiful, the kind of knowledge that determines what profession we pick, what book we read next, what community we join.

It has often been observed that the overall amount of knowledge within disciplines grows with every year. But the amount of consciousness we have available to spend on learning doesn’t.Howthen will we spend that consciousness on Bildung in the future? How will learning be different in principle?

But imagine this future as something that could have come out of our present human condition, as something we could have evolved into. No miracle technologies, no wonder-drugs, no extensions to our brains that would make us super-human.

Imagine the worst-case scenario, where there is no miracle or god to help us into the future. We are left alone with ourselves and have to get there with wisdom, technology and knowledge that we have available today. Wisdom, technology and knowledge we might be able expand, but still grasp the general contours of as of today.

Imagine just our same limited bodies but embedded into a new environment that is more adapted to balance out our inherent impediments to development. Impediments that not only draw us to misinformation but but fragment us as societies and alienate us from our very own actual needs and potential friends.

Impediments such as our bias, our limited attention-span, our inherent affinity to polarisation and simplification, inability to hold multiple frames in mind at once or our tribal tendencies and need for belonging. Our inability to endure a state of not- knowing, our inherent desire for more and thirst for absolution that nothing of this world seems to be able to satisfy.

If I imagine, from a very high altitude, the general contours of Bildung as they would manifest in the year 2050, they look something like the following.

02. Bildung in the Year 2050

It is the year 2050. The most significant revolution has taken place in how we share and acquire knowledge. Learning has become a truly social endeavour. Every step in knowledge generation, from the creation of new ideas to their articulation, testing, adaptation, and proliferation has become a social process.

In the year 2050, at every step of learning, no matter whether you are new to a worldspace or rather experienced, there is someone or a community available to guide you, to play through variations on an idea with you, to think with you, and appreciate your learning efforts. Learning is a social activity with constantly switching roles between those who guide a learning-process and those who follow.

In the year 2050, learning is not something happening in separate hermetic spaces where you neither see what is going on inside nor are taking-in feedback from the lifeworld. Rather, all the spaces around you, from institutional spaces to spaces where you play games and watch movies, are inherently built to foster learning and connected and transparent to each other.

In the year 2050, learning has become a lifelong cumulative process. Instead of spending most of your lifetime on developmental plateaus and in the same mental frames and patterns inducing boredom, society at large is structured as to foster cumulative lifelong development and taking in more and more of reality.

In the year 2050, individuals learn much faster, much more continuously, and from much earlier on. Self-guided learning starts with early childhood, and if you show motivation and talent, there are the means out there for you to master a field long before reaching maturity. You don’t have to wait to get to university; university is right there everywhere around you.

In the year 2050, this increased pace and more cumulative process of learning means that individuals aren’t bound to being narrow specialists anymore. In their lifetime, they get to cover not one but several areas of specialisation — as well as micro- specialisation, such as mastery over a topic, a publication, a book. In their lifetime, they go through many, many cycles of intense learning and transformation.

In the year 2050, the social aspect of idea-formation serves as a failsafe, making sure that no matter how stupid an idea might be, there are various mechanisms in place to make sure it lives up to community standards of ‘depth’. I.e., that it ‘takes in’ as much of the relevant reality-space ‘touched’ by the idea into account as possible.

This is how ideas are ‘dis-armed’ in the future. Not by censoring them but by properly contextualising them and pointing out their partial validity with the help of knowledge communities the learner feels to be a member of. Individuals in the year 2050 are embedded in so reliable and strong knowledge-communities that with the validation of ideas being a transparent and visible process censorship isn’t necessary anymore.

In the year 2050, we have far more voices contributing to knowledge generation, validation, and distribution. At the very same time, these voices co-exist in much more orderly fashion. They don’t speak all at once and compete for absolute attention with rhetoric means, silencing each other and excluding each other. Instead, they get to be heard when it is the right moment for them to speak and for someone to listen to them and embrace their specific message.

03. Making Subjectivity Visible: The Specific Role of New Media

In the year 2050 new media have a fundamentally different goal from today’s; they don’t just spread narrow narratives but rather bring together the right people at the right time to learn from each other and inspire each other. In a sense, social media are everywhere; yet they are everywhere in non-intrusive ways not telling you what to believe but helping you to find significant others for every sprint on your learning- path.

They provide you with a selection of next-best-steps available to take in your learning path and individuals, communities, and spaces which can support you on that sprint. At the end of each sprint, you can change roles, recalibrate direction, shift communities and take a different approach.

In the year 2050, we don’t Google anymore when we want to learn something. Google has been outcompeted by the ‘memex-framework’, a bulwark of tools cohering around the idea of making actual learning paths transparent and visible, i.e. making the subjectivity of how a matter-at-hand is appropriated by individuals visible instead of aiming at giving a single ‘objective’ account of the matter-at-hand.

Vannevar Bush envisioned the memex in the first half of the 20th century. He thought of it as a machine that tracks learning-paths and knowledge-interests — not facts. A machine that creates a representation of the conceptual connections within our minds; a representation of our worldview and our interests.

With this, it makes visible what knowledge-paths and shortcuts we take through reality. It makes visible how a worldview was formed, what influenced it, and what it leaves out. It thus makes worldviews much easier to understand and emulate but also easier to contextualise, to see the limits of.

The memex has become reality in 2050. But it is not a single machine. It is an entire system of tools and spaces, including actual spaces you can visit, which were all designed with the principles behind the memex in mind, to visualise learning-paths, use those as guides for your own, and then use the modifications added by your own learning-experience as a new learning-path for others who follow you.

04. Media are the Windows of Loci of Consciousness

You might imagine the future of learning very differently. However, we might agree that changes will happen in three different areas:

Our individual capacity for learning, learning strategies, and cognitive models through which we “touch” reality, process information, and relate to it will change. The social aspect of learning will look different, including the way we relate to others while learning. For changes in both of these to be possible, we will need significant development in the very fabric of our institutions and media that help us create such learning spaces.

We have had a few thousand years to experiment with sense-making and knowledge acquisition, and yet we still haven’t figured it out. It is not a question of people lacking good intentions or not being smart enough, but rather an inherent structural limitation of our present-day media.

The term “medium” may not sound like a big deal, but it is. The medium is that third thing in between two loci of consciousness that actually connects them. Two loci of consciousness cannot meet without a medium. The medium can be the body, i.e., the medium through which we interact can be literal “touch” and “sight.” But the medium can also be symbols in the form of speech or text. Without a medium, we are isolated beings without the possibility to either look into the world, touch it, or even sense ourselves.

If this were the case, inherent limitations of the medium would be limitations on the ways in which we touch. Traditionally, the moment when two loci of consciousness touch and meet has been called the “act of understanding.” If narrative media are limited in nature, this would inadvertently lead to “misunderstanding” — again, independently of how good intentions people have and how smart they are.

For anything like a “culture of understanding” to be possible — which is a tautology since one cannot have a culture without understanding — significant changes in the structure of our media will be required.

It is these changes in the structure of our media that we will focus on in the following paper. They are admittedly a very small fraction of the overall process of learning and development. They don’t include concrete we-spaces where we feel part of a community, but they are rather about the symbols that we use to create such spaces. However, they are still a crucial aspect without which neither communities nor personal development are possible.

05. Systemic Challenges to Bildung

For the memex-framework to become reality we face general challenges to Bildung that I grouped into five areas. Every single area brings along a dozen or so tough problems that we will have to find creative solutions for. Advances have to be made in all five areas at once for the memex-framework to become reality.

And all five areas have the three dimensions described above, the dimension of the individual, the dimension of a respective we-space and the dimension of the involved media used to create a we-space. We will focus only on changes in the structural aspect of the media involved.

Fortunately our efforts in these areas are already going in the right direction even without the big-picture in mind. Take annotation software becoming more-and-more widely used, simply because it works and helps reading to become more social, fun and rewarding.

But we also will need more coordination of forces between those who focus more on the individual aspect of learning (teaching about logical fallacies, validity criteria, generalisation, framing), those who focus on the social aspect of learning (communication between members, group-cohesion, motivation) and those who focus on the more formal aspect of learning through media (fragmenting information, virtual spaces).

All three approaches need to at the very least know about each other and be aware of the overall complexity of the phenomenon at hand, i.e. learning and development.

For this starting off with the bigger picture and understanding how apparently different things are actually related will help. We in other words cannot get to the future of 2050 described above without our individual efforts at solving punctual problems being at the very least coordinated on the level of seeing how they are related to other problem-areas at large.

This is what this paper is about, seeing the overall complexity of the matter of learning on the level of principles — all the many ways in which learning can go wrong. And coming up with creative new ways of shaping our media in such a way as to meet these challenges face-on.

In part I propose a dozen or so ‘visionary scenarios’ which are an attempt to imagine a future which is designed with Bildung in mind. My focus is not-so-much on the suggested ‘visionary scenarios’ though. These are rather there to get your imagination going and make one feel and think in systems, think in ‘wholes’ and get a sense on how many different problem-areas need to be coordinated for Bildung to be possible.

With just imagining and speculating we will get a hopefully unified sense for how things could be different. From this merely imagined possible universe it will be, in part II, easier for us to understand the actual challenges in our very own real universe. Sometimes we don’t even understand something as a problem until the solution comes along. It’s yet another way of making more conscious that which is supposedly obvious and yet unseen.

In part II we will interpret out 40 (or so) actual — i.e. present-day — challenges to Bildung. All of the ‘visionary scenarios’ are attempts to tackle these challenges. I am aware that these are not actual ‘solutions’ and often would fall apart in the details. My attempt is rather to sketch at least something approximating an imaginable different way of doing things so that we can properly understand the challenges by understanding possible solutions.

We will then turn from imagination and interpretation to actual empirical evidence. I condensed down many reports on how teachers are using the annotation software ‘Hypothesis’ in practice in part III.

Hypothesis is one of the best examples I could find for how the structure of a medium changes the way we interact with each other and communicate. It was explicitly inspired by the memex idea. I will give a rather dense report on how it is already being used in classrooms and beyond to make reading a more social, rewarding and engaging experience. It will be a glimpse into how the future is already here and many of us have missed it happening.

With these three strands of knowledge at hand, imagination, interpretation and empirical observation, we will then turn to our own suggestion of what a consciously designed tool, tackling some of our challenges to Bildung, could look like. We will build on the Hypothesis tool and extend on that.

06. Baking ‘Depth’ Into the Structure of New Media

The point of this paper is to inspire your own thinking on the possibilities and potential of new media, which we are not even scratching the surface of with most social media available today. To help you to see more clearly what we already know, i.e. to see the challenges to Bildung, as to design your own solutions or use those available in more conscious manner.

I hope to show that the structure of the medium matters. The way one designs a new media platform makes a difference to the interactions that will be possible on it. And just as structure can incentivise polarisation so can structure incentivise authentic exchanges and development.

All of the following is basically the result of my frustrations at trying to practice integral theory. If you happen to be acquainted with integral theory you will know it is an attempt at Bildung or ‘big picture’ thinking, where one relates many different disciplines with each other in search for overlaps.

These overlaps form something like islands of particular importance to us, since they point to knowledge that seems to have depth and relevance even over time — some call it ‘perennial’. They seem like solid foundations in an otherwise very airy ocean of flux and chaotic facts.

And while I tried to practice integral theory I failed miserably. I didn’t get to these islands of overlap but got totally lost in mutually exclusive details and fragmentation. And to my horror I observed something similar happening to much smarter people than me, people who even professionally devoted themselves to full-time sense-making and yet fell into fragmentation, even to the degree of social fragmentation and polarisation.

My conclusion was that big picture thinking cannot be done alone. But you also can’t do it in groups as we usually organise them. You actually need all our institutions and learning-spaces to be intrinsically designed to help it. You need literally everybody to help with the endeavour. Including those who have never heard of integral theory. And including those who are not interested in big picture thinking and more focused on details.

So what better way of doing this than if one built integral into the very fabric of the new media that we use? I.e. by virtue of using the medium one could be ‘forced’ into integral principles like self-contextualisation, multi-perspectivism, self- transcendence, empirical grounding, the witness, meta-narration and others. This is basically ‘baking depth’ into the medium itself.

Integral, to put it bluntly, is one attempt among many, to create a space for multiple worldviews to co-exist, to take notice of each other in mutual recognition. To put it in cheesy terms, integral is an intellectual expression of love. It attempts to give everybody a voice while also binding everybody to listen to everybody else and only speak when it really matters and one really has something to say.

If you know integral theory you also might have a look at the epilogue as well to actually understand where the ideas presented here come from.

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