The Collective Learning Manifesto
Hey lifelong learners around the world, welcome to the Collective Learning Movement. An education platform that organizes learning outside of institutional walls powered by community of learners, mentors and contributors. A community that enables people to learn anything from anyone. Our goal is to be the largest database of collective education navigating on two dimensions: High Tech (Emerging technologies) and High Touch (Human abilities), balancing technology and people.
High Tech: Virtual reality, Augmented reality, Blockchain, Artificial intelligence, Internet of things, Robotics, 3D printing, Drones and Biotechnology
High Touch: Adaptability, resilience, empathy, creativity, communication, collaboration, emotional intelligence, critical thinking and lifelong learning.
Nurture your learning ability, because the future is unknown. We invite you to revolutionize education through technology and collective intelligence.
“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn” | Alvin Toffler
The 4 R’s Pillars
Reset Biases
Rethink Education
Redesign Learning
Redistribute Knowledge
Many species can learn, some can share what they learn. In four billion years of earth existence, only humans could share ideas so efficiently that we learn collectively as a species. We are uniquely powerful because we use language to store and move information that would otherwise disappear when individuals die.
Reset Biases
The world is changing at a never seen speed and it keeps accelerating. This is happening differently at this particular time due to the conversion of powerful new emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, virtual reality, etc with the existing ones like the internet and mobile that will together create possibilities that were never imagined. The human race, during it’s over 150 thousand years of existence, has always had technologies being introduced which allowed extraordinary improvements in its life conditions, environment and realities. However they used to appear with a time gap which has been decreasing rapidly manly the last 500 years. To give some perspective considering technologies that revolutionized industries from the printing press (1450) to the steam engine (1712) there were 262 years of wait, then we had the telegraph (1830), electric bulb (1880), Automobile (1886) Airplane (1903), Personal Computers (1975), Internet (1990), and so on. With the development of the internet and mobile technology, the world became more connected and people are communicating and collaborating more efficiently and effectively across borders. This triggered an explosion of new discoveries that we are experiencing until this day, what Klaus Schwab (Founder and Chairman of the World Economic Forum) called the fourth industrial revolution.
The previous generations were comfortable with the learning that they obtained from their families or during their early years as they were able to apply it for a relatively long period of time and maybe until they retired. The current generation and the future ones will need to put more effort to keep up with the world around them. Current practices taught in schools and universities are very likely to become obsoletes before the students even finished their degrees, imagine the old ones that are still being memorized. We grew up considering change to be a risky move but in today’s reality not changing is the risky one.
One of the most important abilities to be developed in this dynamic environment is to “Learn, Unlearn and Relearn”. A good place to start is with our own biases. We must challenge your own beliefs and open up to new perspectives every day. By identifying our unconscious cognitive biases we are able to minimize the negative impacts of them in our life. We look for ways to confirm our existing beliefs and the internet can confirm anything we want to believe in. We are led by our own brain to agree with ideas that fit our preconceptions and to ignore information that conflicts with them. We should often be searching for ideas that go against our current beliefs to make sure we are aware and making conscious decisions.
Rethink Education
In the last century, humanity has made great strides in improving access to education for all children. More than 91 percent of the world’s children now attend primary school, but that still leaves 57 million children without access to learning. We have a long road ahead of us if we are to reimagine the future state of education. Today’s most pressing challenges in learning include improving the quality of education and ensuring every child gets an education.
As we learn more about ourselves and more about the world around us leveraging the massive amounts of data available, surely the foundations of learning must change too.
The conversion of these emerging technologies brought us the opportunity to completely disrupt education by decentralizing and democratizing learning. There’s something fundamentally wrong when a college degree can cost upwards of $100,000 and keep increasing.
Our current education system is outdated, not to say broken. If we’re going to continue to evolve as species, we are long overdue for an education revolution. Schools are institutions from the 19th century, employing teachers from the 20th century that are teaching students from the 21st century — something is out of balance.
The Education system is a bubble in a classic sense. To call something a bubble, it must be overpriced and there must be an intense belief in it. Housing was a classic bubble, as were tech stocks in the ’90s, because they were both very overvalued, but there was an incredibly widespread belief that almost could not be questioned — you had to own a house in 2005, and you had to be in an equity-market index fund in 1999. Probably the only candidate left for a bubble — at least in the developed world (maybe emerging markets are a bubble) — is the education system.
It’s basically extremely overpriced. People are not getting their money’s worth, objectively, when you do the math. And at the same time it is something that is incredibly intensively believed; there’s this sort of psycho-social component to people taking on these enormous debts when they go to college simply because that’s what everybody’s doing. It is, to my mind, in some ways worse than the housing bubble.
There are a few things that make it worse. One is that when people make a mistake in taking on an education loan, they’re legally much more difficult to get out of than housing loans. With housing, typically they’re non-recourse — you can just walk out of the house. With education, they’re recourse, and they typically survive bankruptcy. If you borrowed money and went to a college where the education didn’t create any value, that is potentially a really big mistake. — Peter Thiel
A Brief History of Education
To understand schools, we must view them in historical perspective.
Most countries have an education system based on a one size fits all methodology that has been static in a dynamic world, Ken Robinson well said that in his famous TED talk “Do schools kill creativity?”. However creativity is only one of the abilities that we need the most in a world where machines are automating manual jobs. More than ever we need to invest our time and energy on developing abilities that will be even more important going forward and transform us in lifelong learners such as creativity, resilience, critical thinking, mindfulness, empathy and emotional intelligence. We need to be prepared to question and challenge our realities and reinvent ourselves over and over in order to build a better future for all of us.
The education system was created in a period when the same type of people were needed for manual and repetitive tasks in the army or assembly lines. This standard system met the need for that reality but is completely outdated in a world which automation is quickly replacing those manual jobs. Our kids are being prepared for jobs that won’t even exist when they graduate. We call High Tech these emerging technologies that are already disrupting industries and changing the way we live which will require from us to develop and master our intrinsic human abilities that we call High Touch.
Redesign Learning
We believe we are at the dawn of a new era of massively amplified learning, creativity and inventiveness. We now have the technology to make education accessible to everyone in the world and the adaptable digital learning tools to personalize the way everyone learns and works.
But this new era requires a new emphasis on lifelong learning and collective intelligence. Today’s students must become self-directed lifelong learners because in the fast-paced digital economy, it is a necessity to be constantly adapting by learning new knowledge and skills.
Access to information and schools have been synonymous for the past couple of centuries but now information is everywhere and the role of schools need to change and evolve more into a mentor role and provide an environment for students to collaborate as well as share with others what they have been learning. Teachers don’t need to give answers anymore, answers are everywhere, teachers need to help students ask questions and make sense of the abundant knowledge out there. Learners will find their own answers through the collective learning platforms like this one available across the world.
Education is going to move away from antiquated accreditation systems and towards a focus on real-world skills. Our vision is to unlock this knowledge and allow people to share their skills with those who want to learn them.
We believe everyone is talented and has the potential to live a meaningful life. When the right conditions are in place life becomes possible, the same is true for education. Applying this concept to humans we are capable of much more than we think if the conditions are right, internally and externally. Therefore it is fundamental that we are aware of this in order to make conscious decisions towards creating the right environment for prosperity in whatever area of life we choose. However this is not the way most of us learned, we grew up in a world which grades in standardized exams were determining intelligence, where there was normally one right answer and one path to success. We are now starting to realize life is a lot more than that, this new interconnected world gives us so many possibilities that requires us to be able to look for the vast existing information and think critically to identify which are the valuable ones to us.
The Web has unlocked the keys to a worldwide virtual school, potentially leveling the playing field for students around the world. Should knowledge be open to all to both use and contribute? Yes! And it is this intuitive philosophy that forms the base of the Collective Learning Movement.
Redistribute Knowledge
Our ultimate goal is to curate the abundant information out there and make it available leveraging the power of technology, community and our collective learning platform.
The role of the Collective Learning Movement (CLM) is to build a community with learning at its center. Sharing to learn and learning to share. We invite people with diverse backgrounds and experiences to share their ideas and create along with us our collective intelligence. We are all about growth mindset and abundant mentality.
What role can you play to help create a future of learning to benefit humanity?
We invite all of you to be part of the Collective Learning community, an initiative co-created by Victor Caribe and Nelson Nectoux leveraging the power of technology to connect, collaborate and spread valuable content.
