A New Culture of Learning
Douglas Thomas & John Seely Brown
A New Culture of Learning
It is a cliché that the world is changing fast and that people must change to cope with it. In this context, the predecessor to change is learning, but the common model of education may be unsuitable for this rapidly evolving world. The conventional model of learning supposes that knowledge is a fixed, permanent thing that can be passed from the knowledgeable teacher to a student. The mental model for conventional education is mechanical. For example, arithmetic or spelling is learned by memorization drills. Such knowledge is explicit. Increasingly, what we need to learn is not explicit, but tacit. Tacit knowledge can’t be taught, but it can be learned. Tacit learning is experiential and, potentially, social and cultural. An alternate to the mechanical education model, the learning environment, sets some boundary conditions within which students address problems and learn by observation and participation. A feature of the learning environment is that nobody is quite sure what the student will learn (or some cases, what the student learned).
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