The Future of Learning
a scenario
I had to write the following for something and figured I would share it here. Comments encouraged @timothyfcook
The future of learning content will be profoundly shaped during the next decade. While I am afraid of certain outcomes, I am hopeful that, with the thoughtful use of technology and the support of communities, we can achieve something amazing, something that builds on the work of the knowledge-preservers and inventors before us. Here is my hope for the future learning system, as told through the story of a girl named Zoe. In part, this story describes a digital platform that I will call Entelekia:
Zoe is 18 years old and, after attending many traditional schools, has decided to follow the independent learning track many of her friends have taken in recent years. After browsing Entelekia, she finds a local Learning Team that is focused on her area of interest: Residential Design-Build. There are dozens of these Learning Teams distributed around her city focused on everything from Agriculture to Law. Digging into the Design-Build Team’s page, she notices that some of the members have just started an Open Course on Efficient Passive Home Construction techniques. The course was created three years prior by a Learning Team in Maine and collaboratively refined last year by five other teams around the world.
She finds the Learning Team meeting in a coffee shop after hours and loves the mix of participants that have come together to learn something together. After digging into the course, she finds that the course is really just a collaboratively constructed Path through a range of content: videos, exercises, essays, practice assignments, workshop instructions, etc. Some of the content they have to purchase, but most of it has been openly shared by its creators. In addition to digital media, the courses path connects them to some embodied learning opportunities with local resources, regional experts, and in-person experiences.
When her Team identifies a resource that doesn’t exist yet, they ask the community to create it for them. For resources that are urgent and difficult to acquire, they pursue global experts by creating Bounties (paid to whomever creates the learning resource they need). If they notice that a particular person is frequently providing them with excellent learning resources, they support that person on Gittip, a sustainable crowd-funding site, to encourage them to keep up the great work. Lately, they have been funding Phillip Sandusky, a regional expert on sustainable residences; he has single-handedly curated a map of all regional architectural examples and material sources, in addition to creating 67 resources (and curating 829 others) on the Entelekia platform that connects to the Learning Team’s interest area. Last year, a group from their team worked with Phillip on a Passive Home construction project in partnership with the Urban Redevelopment Authority. Phillip has listed the opportunity as a local node on their Entelekia learning resource map again this year. She signs up immediately.
By identifying her personal goals on her Entelekia profile, Zoe can cross-reference her learning path with those of dozens of successful people in her field. She realizes that the types of Design-Builders she admires all spent a lot of time studying Art and Environmental Science. After following all of them on Twitter, she joins two more Learning Teams as part-time members (Drawing and Natural Resource Management), one web-based and one local.
Over the next 4 years, Zoe dives into the Design-Build field and develops an impressive portfolio of work and connections with fellow builders both locally and globally. In addition to benefiting from amazing learning opportunities created and curated by the community on Entelekia, she’s created a number of resources and pathways herself, most recently on the use of Cedar Shake as siding in cold climates. Zoe still attends the Learning Team meet-ups every month to keep learning and share her knowledge. Instead of paying $200,000 to go to college (as her eldest brother did), Zoe spent $1000 on bounties for learning content, $3000 funding on Gittip, and $40,000 on materials for her own Design-Build studio and woodshop that she built herself. Perhaps most powerfully, she sees her local Learning Team and the learning resources on Entelekia, not as a “school” she went away to, but as a resource and community which she can learn from, grow with, and invest in for the rest of her life.
