Project Orange: Entrepreneurial learners in learning ecosystems.

Here's the 20th century notion of education: picking up a fixed set of assets. Your skillset was authoritative, exclusive, and static. It was transferred to you in a fixed delivery models – often called schooling.  Your knowledge was something other people didn't have. Only lawyers knew the law. Going to law school was entering into a guild with secret knowledge of how the world worked.

We used to know how to know. We got our answers from books or experts. We’d nail down the facts and move on. We even had canons. 

- David Weinburger 

That world is gone.

Here's the 21st century version of education: constantly reinventing and augmenting your abilities. Your skillset is evolving, constantly on the edge, constantly growing. Knowledge is open, everywhere, and in everyone. These lower barriers to entry means more competition. It also means people will have more opportunity (and demands) to change and grow.

“In the future, it seems, there will be no fixed canons of texts and no fixed epistemological boundaries between disciplines, only paths of inquiry, modes of integration, and moments of encounter.”

Carla Hesse Professor of History UC Berkeley

As the pace of change continues to increase exponentially, the half-lives of skills will decrease exponentially as well. 

No one knows what the implications of that are, except it's going to unsettle the entire education and work worlds.

To add to the disruption, not only is knowledge everywhere, knowledge is also being created at a rate that is incomprehensible.  Buckminster Fuller noticed the “Knowledge Doubling Curve”: until 1900 human knowledge doubled approximately 100 years. By the end of World War II knowledge was doubling every 25 years. Now information is doubling every 13 months.  According to IBM, the "Internet of Things" will accelerate the rate to every 12 hours. 

“Our parents had one job, I will have seven jobs, and our children will do seven jobs at one time.”  As the expectations for employment and fulfillment change, continuous and lifelong learning becomes increasingly important. Individuals are looking for not just learning but guidance in navigating the changing world to find the best learning and career opportunities. -Robin Chase, former CEO and founder of ZipCar

More details on the future trends in education and employment here.

This is the context for 21st century learning. If information is no longer static, what if the future of education?

Entrepreneurial learners (with credit to John Seeley Brown)

This is the future of post-secondary education: no schools. Yet education all the time.

People will have to learn new types of things all the time, because that is the world that we are moving into – a world of constant and rapid change. To stand still will mean being left behind.

In the 21st century, learning won't be (solely) in the classroom. It won't be (solely) in person or (solely) online. Education will happen everywhere, all the time. People will have to be empowered to learn and teach throughout their lives. They will have to figure out what to learn.

As educators, we will have to teach curiosity. We will have to teach presence. We will have to teach wisdom. 

The current educational model primarily “pushes” information to "students." I say let's get rid of the term "student." The assumptions embedded in it are wrong: passive, supplicant, ignorant, and time-bound. To use an old metaphor in the education world: they were vessels in which you poured information into. We're going to have to find a new word: the entrepreneurial learner. 

The entrepreneurial learner will be constantly looking for new ways, new resources, new peers and potential mentors to learn new things. People are realizing that they can find information themselves and will do so increasingly more in the future. The Internet now allows everyone to “pull” information and resources to them at any moment. People will no longer be satisfied being "students" and become a very different type of learner: active, empowered, seeking, already equipped, and lifelong. They will no longer be only recipients, but creators as well. They will take information, play with it, and pass it forward changed, due to their unique perspectives.

Dispositions of an entrepreneurial learner:

• Always, questing, connecting, probing.

• Deeply curious and listening to others.

• Always learning with and from others.

• Reads contexts as much as content. 

• Thrives outside of the formal curriculum 

Most entrepreneurial learners won't be autodidacts: self-motivating solo learners. Most will be social learners. They will need a way to connect and collaborate, creative and imagine. They will need a way to keep accountable to themselves and their personal vision. They will need to create places and systems where they can sparks of new ideas and perspectives.

The learning ecosystems

We need to build learning environments, entire communities, and cities, that foster entrepreneurial learners. 

Just creating classes makes drive-by community; not enough face-time to make relationships. 

To match the ubiquity of knowledge, we need to create institutions that create an "ubiquity of learning."

A ubiquity of learning will replicate the deep connections of the college experience: the classroom, but also the dining hall, the cafe, and the dorm room.  But the 21st learning ecosystem will have to fit in our daily lives and eliminate the astronomical cost of the university industrial complex. Social media networks will have to fill in the gap. 

For PUGS, we will try using Slack to replace the college dorm: a place where people hang out between classes, share ideas, help each other out. Dorms are places of serendipity, where late night conversations and unexpected encounters bring moments of unanticipated insight and growth.

Have you ever sat with a friend when in the course of an easy and pleasant conversation the talk took a new turn and you both listened avidly to the other and to something that was emerging in your visit? You found yourselves saying things that astonished you and finally you stopped talking and there was an immense naturalness about the long silent pause that followed. In that silent interval you were possessed by what you had discovered together. If this has happened to you, you know that when you come up out of such an experience, there is a memory of rapture and a feeling in the heart of having touched holy ground.

- Douglas Steere 

The Future of PUGS

PUGS is great; people love the experience. But it's not where it needs to be. Right now, it's "education as entertainment." It's it transformative? Not yet. We don't require work. Because of that, the commitment and community level is low. We can do better by explicitly serving the new 21st century learner. Entrepreneurial learners will need a place to go where they will be expected to both learn and contribute something. PUGS needs to be a place where learning becomes:

• participatory
• collaborative
• peer-to-peer
• peer-to-master

The future of PUGSpdx is to be a learning ecosystem. It needs to:

(1) be praxis, i.e. “where knowledge and practice meet.” It needs to be a safe place for entrepreneurial learners to listen, think, ponder, tinker, experiment, fail, fail, fail, reflect, reflect, and grow.
(2) teach everyone to be a teacher.

We will need to teach everyone in society how to be good teachers. Only at that point will a learning ecosystem flourish by itself.

The role of the teacher

The 21st century teacher guides students with a framework, but the real teacher in the room is the work. The work is, in Quaker terms, the Inner Teacher. Learning is an internal process. You can't "learn" someone, and that's not just a grammatical joke. Learning happens within the learner. Our job as teachers is to facilitate that internal process. 

“The whole key (is students) are in charge of their own process. (Teachers) have to inspire them, guide them, but get out of the way.” 

- Montessori schools

You wanna know what's so powerful about Montessori pedagogy? Click here.

But let's go further: performance and work is where people learn. Any didactic instructor takes away from that. The teacher should act as designer and guide, not holder of knowledge. The teacher's job will be to create learning through prompts that spark great work.

The Plan
The Ziglar Plan for PUGS Project Orange, including advisers from altMBA.