A New Culture of Learning

Richard Burd

Mr. Conaway

EDU 255

20 February 2011

A Culture of Learning

I’m quite sure that my second week’s assignment is going to include some rather scattered ideas. I say that because as I got more and more involved about what I thought was going to be an excellent resource for my assignment—Will Richardson’s older blogs--I found myself becoming more interested in the actual learning part than in finishing the assignment.

I thought I would look back at Will Richardson’s beginnings as a blogger. It turns out that he started almost 10 years ago. His early postings were somewhat rudimentary in comparison to his current ones, and I really didn’t notice anything that grabbed my attention. Then I thought I would look at something more current. I went to his December, 2010 writings and discovered that he was planning a hiatus. I checked his first musings of the New Year, and learned that he had taken off almost four weeks from blogging, tweeting, and other social publications. This rather piqued my interest since we are reading the book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens in my computer apps class (don’t ask). The last habit of the seven is “Sharpen the Saw”—which means, in essence, that we need to take time to renew ourselves. It seems that Richardson was doing just that. How, I wondered, would it affect his new writings? I don’t think I ever got the answer to that question because, as I said, I got 'lost in the links' (title for a book?).

In his first post back from vacation, Richardson mentioned a new book by John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas entitled A New Culture of Learning. Well, I was curious. I thought, if Will Richardson is endorsing this book and the other works of the same authors, I’ll check them out for myself. After all, what better way to discover what a person is like than to look at some of the things he recommends?

It turns out that I really liked what Brown and Thomas had to say. In fact I liked it so much that I wanted to get a copy of their newest book but, alas, it is sold exclusively on Amazon and I have a Nook (another story). Some of the things I learned, however, from reading portions of the book on amazon.com, and reviews from Harvard Business Review and others, included:

·         we need to see the current dilemma in education not as a crisis in teaching, but as a crisis in learning.

·         we need to stop looking as learning as always involving a superior (teacher) and an inferior (student), but rather as a collaborative effort of peers and a digital collective (as opposed to community).

·         we need to embrace change in a system that is notoriously fearful of it

·         we need to incorporate play as an essential part of the learning process, along with innovation and imagination (moving from the strange to the familiar, and from the familiar to the strange).

I am thankful for our author. I agree with his praise for these authors. I feel like I have been connected with some very valuable sources for becoming a better educator. Perhaps, in this new culture, there will be a new name for us who call ourselves teachers. I look forward to learning much more about applying play routines to my teaching, and in creating an environment where asking ‘what if’ questions are encouraged, and ‘tinkering’ is embraced..