The last few months have seen a dizzying array of announcements tied up with technology and learning: Apple’s recent announcement of tools to author and consume learning content, MIT’s announcement of plans to build open-source courseware (more than their current Web publishing of course documents), Google’s recent discussion of the array of learning uses of its remarkable technologies, Pearson’s announcement of an open-source learning management system (LMS), rich discussions about skill “badging” vs more regulated credentials, and more to come.
A tsunami to come. How are we to make sense of all this? Take up each idea, one after another, for a week, a month? How can we increase the odds of getting lasting value, yet not miss the chance to improve what we’re doing for learners?
- Learning tourism. This is the important and enjoyable activity of casually learning what’s known about the world, past and present. The BBC has been a master of this: I recently saw a bit of a 2003 BBC show Jungle that follows a young raconteur around rainforests, and marvels with her at what’s going on high in the canopy. Stunning, beautiful, unexpected, with images that stay with you for hours afterwards. (The flying snakes – the flying monkeys. . . ) I can’t say I made specific progress towards new capabilities, nor can I say I could make better decisions about our environment after that remarkable viewing, but I did walk away with new learning, acquired in a very pleasurable way.
- Learning for mastery. This is learning to make new decisions, to efficiently and fluently solve or execute basic and harder problems or tasks in a domain, in ways that match or exceed how current experts do it (eventually). This fuels careers (perhaps more than one at a time), but it also applies to deep interests or hobbies, where you seek to be truly “expert” – clearly beyond a tourist. Indeed, the domain itself provides the true “final exam” – if you have not mastered what you need to, you will not thrive in the domain, no matter what your transcript or test scores say.
Of course, there’s more to this classification than these two poles – plenty of things in-between, where you’re trying to learn just enough to finish something, say, but not enough to be a true expert. (My taxes each year.) Or a trickier area: Dana Gioia talks about the purpose of education as creating “productive citizens for a free society” – what level of education, what goals, are appropriate for citizenship and decision-making within a free society?
Leaving the complexities aside, these two (overly simplified) categories have their own drivers of success:
- For learning tourism, the ability to quickly find a topic of interest, the convenience of delivery (including starting and stopping as needed), the intrinsic engagement and production values of the media itself (including “wow” factor), some connection between the approach and tone of the experience and my own background, all play a part in lifting my pleasure and enjoyment with this kind of learning, making it more likely I’ll return for more.
- For learning for mastery, we have to pay attention to the endpoint: expertise that gets closer to mastery in the field. As a result, in addition to benefits from better, cheaper access at a learner’s own pace and location, key factors from learning science apply to improve the odds of mastery from an innovation:
- The outcomes of each instructional activity need to line up to deliver decisions and actions that start to match best practices in a domain. No matter how nicely designed an environment, if the goal is off-track from what’s needed in the domain “for real,” the learning environment is not effective. (Ask employers – it happens far too often.)
- Most of us need a large amount of “deliberate practice” to achieve mastery, not just information. This means concerted learner work, followed by assessment and feedback, and more work, over time. Many learning and training environments undercook this – the one-day seminar, the weeklong “training institute,” with limited to no follow-up.
- For harder goals, the learning environment needs to simplify things: break things down more, become simpler, take advantage of what each of us has already (truly) mastered. Many evidence-based principles that improve learning (e.g., see E-Learning and the Science of Instruction) can be thought of as ways to lower what John Sweller and colleagues call “cognitive load.”
- There’s more, of course, (e.g., the ways combinations of media can help or hinder learning) but let’s stop for now.
As a result, I think these two extremes, learning tourism and learning mastery, give different pictures of how to think about a new technology.
For example, think about Apple’s announcement of a new ecosystem for learning, with easy authoring tools, a terrific new app for the iPad that will frame content very handsomely, and simple approaches to assembling that content and distributing it through iTunes to other Apple iPad users. Even though at first blush it lives inside the Apple ecosystem (which has its own issues), this has the potential to affect millions of users who live comfortably in that ecosystem:
- For learning tourism, the new Apple tools and capabilities are likely to create an even larger cornucopia of interesting and engaging materials. Whether you have a specific area of casual interest, or just want to graze (be a “cyberflaneur,” a vanishing species recently described in the New York Times), the mix of audio, video, and text about a wide array of topics should be greatly increased, at lower cost. With some form of social rating (if you can trust it, of course, a challenge in some places), you can protect your time from the most confusing or poorly produced materials. Feels like an unalloyed good, this new ecosystem – all the things that are important for successful learning tourism are enhanced here.
- For learning mastery, there is clearly a benefit from “more stuff for less money at your fingertips.” However, it’s not clear that the announced ecosystem does anything beyond this for the key drivers of better learning. Of course, newly empowered creators and deliverers of learning experiences within the new ecosystem can choose to make their learning environment work along lines that truly lift learning, but that’s true even for classroom delivery: folks can choose to line up the learning experience with what learning science says will work better, but frequently don’t. Unfortunately, a crowd-sourced opinion about learning effectiveness isn’t as effective for mastery as for learning tourism (as others have noted): most of us don’t have access to performance or demographic data about learners to enable us to judge true growth in mastery, so (most likely and at best) casual reviewers would apply standards for learning tourism to the media elements for learning – which, in fact, can drive confusion rather than mastery. Indeed, the critical role of high quality assessment (which could drive feedback) was left unaddressed. So “more, cheaper stuff at your fingertips” – but very much the same “buyer beware” for mastery that other learning environments have.
For learning tourism, most media advances seem to be an unalloyed good: radio, movies, the Web, new iPad formats – they all seem to improve key things that make for “good” learning tourism experiences. It must be said that the new tools can be used to make awful content as well – but we can pretty much trust people’s reported surface opinions of these materials will reflect our experience/enjoyment of these materials for learning tourism.
For learning mastery, the purpose and likely effective activities are usually different than for learning tourism. Think about reading a non-fiction book, vs. studying a textbook – goals and actions, even with such primitive media, are quite different. What new technology and media, on their own, can offer us is helpful for creation and distribution costs, and accessibility, but we need a lot more built into or on top of these tools to actually wind up with a more efficient or effective learning environment, however handsome it is, however ubiquitous it is.
The potential is there for technology to do remarkable things for learning – but we have to look for it, even if “the crowd” does not. We need to pay attention to the key characteristics of a "learning for mastery" environment, different from a learning tourism environment, as we choose innovations to use with our learners. If we don’t, we run the risk yet again of wasting their time, and more of our resources, on experiences that don’t lift mastery, no matter how attractive they might seem.
Hi Bror, you may have also seen microsoft's recent release of kinect for windows. The potential here to blend learning an gaming is compelling.
Posted by: Phil | 02/17/2012 at 11:25 PM