A New Culture of Learning by Douglas Thomas

I’m not sure what to think about this book. It highlights to me that I don’t know enough pedagogy to see how this fits into current thinking among experts – having read Jo Boaler’s book isn’t really enough to put this in context! At the same time it’s making some pretty populist claims which appear to have some very interesting ideas behind them and at least some attempt at academic discipline (although I would point out Mr Author, that a study of 18 people is not a study, it’s a dinner party).

Setting aside whether they make their case in a rigorous way, the really interesting stuff is conceptual (although it would help greatly if someone could provide something robust which could support their ideas). They can be grouped into three key subjects:

1.       People learn best, on the whole, when they work collaboratively

2.       People are capable of delivering beyond the capacity of any individual when they work as teams

3.       Online resources and potentiality now offer a far greater possibility of realizing these different forms of learning if we can just be a bit creative about our pedagogy.

I don’t think 1 and 2 are controversial in my mind. They’re kind of how business, government and armies work, and have worked, forever. It is revealing that our education process is so patristic and didactic when one contrasts this to how learning really takes place in adult life. Now one might counter this in a number of ways – children are not equipped to cooperate, to learn with loose boundaries or even learn the right stuff and the less able are liable to be left behind. Yet as many of my friends would point out – who the hell actually uses trigonometry in real life (excepting your truly of course) and really, all that time they spent playing football in a team, figuring out how to bend the rules around school uniform and understanding just how many sweets they could buy with their pocket money have delivered many more transferrable, useable and persistent skills than the history of Rome ever taught them.

Now I’m not against facts but I do interview people regularly – and it annoys me when people’s heads are stuffed full of facts that they can’t critically evaluate or without the framework to see how individual facts in one area might apply across other subjects. I would suggest schools are very BAD at teaching people HOW to think for themselves, how to keep the imagination muscular and how to solve problems by learning, thinking and imagining.  

I also agree with point 3 and their use of MMOs as an example of how guilds are exemplars of cooperative learning is very interesting. Up to a point. The authors make MMO raid groups somewhat divinely reified which is nice but clearly problematic. Sure MMO activity, which is really a long period of mind numbing repetition (or grind in the trade) followed by, for a few with LOTS of time, intensive cooperative learning – which reflects real life quite accurately. Most people spend their time repeating themselves while a few, who can afford to spend their time differently, can allocate their resources to very cooperative forms of learning. The MMO model is descriptive of real life (perhaps more than we would like) but it shouldn’t be an aspiration…

However, there are very many other ways to realize point 3 – I engage in them daily and I wonder, actually, if for young people, there are creative ways we can reformulate how they learn. I am certainly trying to explore ways of teaching my children in different ways using different incentives from those they encounter at school and to some degree (they’re only 6 and 4) it’s working for the time being. The reason I read this book is because I want that relationship to continue, for them to have a culture of learning as they grow up and that they can see for themselves that exploring, imagining and creating (be it financial models, economics, history, philosophy, art of whatever) are meaningful lifelong endeavors.

Now I don’t expect to change the way my children are taught at school, but I am now definitely looking for ways of realizing the ideas these guys talk about. If, like me, your completely comfortable with new tech, (and even if you’re not but have children who are) then this book is worth a read.

p.s. by way of disclosure – I find MMOs deeply boring. I like collaborative activities but I am an autodidact who prefers to dip into other’s dialogues rather than, for the main, being full participant