Learning by Learning
Year 1977. Venue was Administrative College Hyderabad. About twenty of us with different background were sitting in a room in front of legendary Dr.Pritam Singh. This was a Problem Solving exercise as per the agenda. The room was very quiet. No one spoke. Everyone expected that the other would speak. Time ticked by. Even after two hours nothing happened. We were all confused and were unable to assess what was happening. Suddenly one of the participant by the name Partha shouted,” What are we doing here ?’, “Are you not wasting our time here?”. That was the trigger. One participant at the other end shouted with equally loud voice said, “ Why are you shouting ?” “Why do’nt you tell what we should do?” Slowly each one of us started talking and in about another two hours, everyone was sharing about himself, his background, his expectations ? etc.etc.etc. There was so much sharing and so much trust in a matter of few hours, Dr.Singh had a big smile on his face.
Year 2002. I was visiting Delhi and I wanted to visit a “Hole in the Wall”site. I got the address and reached the site by about 5 pm. There was a computer housed in a concrete shelf with the keyboard and monitor exposed. As I was watching, one kid with a large school bag arrived there. He threw the bag to the side and started operating the keyboard. He was so short that he had difficulty in reaching the other end of the keyboard. Within a few minutes, a taller kid arrived. He wanted to help the earlier kid with the operation. Very soon a gang of five boys and three girls assembled and started to discuss how to play a particular game. They collaborated and created a 3 D model in the screen. I was impressed. On enquiry, I found that none of them had any computer skills.
Year 2011. I was asked by CGE to mentor a group of individuals with diverse background to solve a real time business problem. All these individuals were located in different geographies and each of them with a different background. The expectation was to provide solutions to a problem. The time given was five five weeks. The team members sitting in different time zones interacted in a virtual mode. The result was phenomenal. A lot of learning took place. The customer was thoroughly impressed with the work of the team.
Year 2018. It was a peer session with 10 African women entrepreneurs (AWEC) in a virtual model and the subject was how to deal with difficult customers. Here again, there was a lot of diversity and each of the women were leading businesses from Agriculture to Healthcare to Manufacturing to IT services. Again the output was phenomenal in a very short time.
Last week. I attended a workshop on Future of Learning(FOL) at Indian Institute of Management, Banaglore. I met many academicians and practitioners and students who are focussed on understanding learning models, technology impact, what is good /what is bad ? and what is coming. Each learning element was sliced and further sliced and papers were presented on each of the slices. Every one said, it was a great conference. A lot of learning has taken place. Everyone agreed that they should assemble next year again to take stock. Poor me, sitting there in plenaries and breakout sessions, talking to the learning experts could not make head and tail of all the deliberations. The only realisation for me was that the learning has become a complex subject and we required complex analytical tools are required to understand the process of learning.
Going back my earlier scenarios. I am layman. I do not understand the learning science. Learning has been in vogue from time immemorial. There were oral traditions of teaching and learning. In earlier days, you go to a teacher and stay with him. He will teach the subjects orally. In return, you provide your physical services during the period. Given the limitations of the mind, a lot of learning got into the cloud.(Not the current day cloud). The students learnt skills apart from acquiring knowledge. There were also community practices where learning happened in times of Plato, Socrates and Pythagoras. I consider learning is a biological tendency — a child learns from the mother, a student from a teacher, a teacher from his teacher and so on. I consider learning as a natural process where human being is dynamically interacting with social systems and reality surrounding him or her.
Between AD 400 -700, Chinese travellers such as Fa Hsien, Sung Yun, Hsuan Tsang and I Tsing, visited India. They were interested in obtaining the original Buddhist scriptures in Sanskrit and Pali. These travellers also introduced Chinese culture to India. They taught and learnt simultaneously. The other travellers such as Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, Ibn Batuta and Ferdinand Magellan changed the world. Invention of paper, ink and printing process brought in a sea change of learning methodologies.
Learning sports, bicycles, swimming, football and other board games is fairly straightforward with interaction with physical objects. These can not be learnt without interaction with external world. There are formats, methodologies which evolved over a period of time. Learning is an iterative process and the constant feedback improves the performance. These games changed and got modified over a period of time. Take the examples of soccer and cricket. You need new formats and rules for each of the games. In fact, social disciplines such as languages, marketing, leadership styles, behavioural theory can not be learnt without the social system. You require a cohort, employees, customers and peers for discussion, review and feedback.
Pen/paper interaction changed the learning process completely. Books were printed and distributed. Papers were presented and discussed. All the scientific discoveries got recorded and maintained in libraries. Note taking in different formats on materials such as Papyrus and clay tablets became a method of recording the learning.
Enter digital age. The learning process has become far more sophisticated. In addition to the new hardware of computers, tablets and smartphones, the internet has helped to connect seamlessly across the communities and geographies through chats, videos, talk shows, podcasts, blogs etc. The learning has been made easily accessible, affordable and contemporary. There are new branches of science such as cognitive science, pedagogy, content management, learning spaces etc. In summary, a very simple of process has become very complex. Learning happens when there is a meaningful social interaction and there is also fun element. Learning does not happen if any of the above elements is missing. One to one, one to a few (like Drona Charya in Mahabharatha), remote learning (Ekalavya) and massive onlearning (MOOCS), peer learning, lend in learning are new models of content delivery. There are new roles emerging in this space such as digital facilitator and learning portfolio designer.
I end the story with a learning from Dr. Amritya Sen a few years ago. He was addressing a few teachers and government leaders in Delhi. While there were many discussions on infrastructure, IT deployment, software, hardware, learning models etc, etc, he simply summarised as “ Get the child out of the home. He or she will learn”. It is so true !
