BIF Research Advisor John Seely Brown on Learning 2.0 and why social networking matters to education

At a workshop last week I heard a staggering statistic referenced from the Kauffman Foundation that college graduates will have 4.2 jobs in the first 10 years after graduation. Wow - Clearly the days of a fixed, single-career are over. We now live in a world where everyone needs to acquire new knowledge and skills on an almost continuous basis. 

I highly recommend an article co-written by BIF Research Advisor John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler called Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail and Learning 2.0. I found it eye-opening. It's one of the most articulate arguments I've come across for for why we need to discontinue our persistent emphasis on traditional textbook learning and head towards new kinds of open, participatory and social learning environments:

"The emphasis on social learning stands in sharp contrast to the traditional Cartesian view of knowledge and learning—a view that has largely dominated the way education has been structured for over one hundred years. The Cartesian perspective assumes that knowledge is a kind of substance and that pedagogy concerns the best way to transfer this substance from teachers to students. By contrast, instead of starting from the Cartesian premise of “I think, therefore I am,” and from the assumption that knowledge is something that is transferred to the student via various pedagogical strategies, the social view of learning says, “We participate, therefore we are.”This perspective shifts the focus of our attention from the content of a subject to the learning activities and human interactions around which that content is situated."

The article also includes a number of examples highlighting the various new tools and applications for extending education through online social learning networks.

Get the article

Image Source: EduCause Article