Douglas Thomas’ and John Seely Brown’s book, A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change, provides a fresh insight into the rapidly changing learning environment and ways in which technology can enhance the quality of learning outcomes.  Thomas is an Associate Professor in the Annenberg School of Communications at University of Southern California (USC) and Brown is a visiting scholar at USC.  They state in their book that learning in the 21st century is not taking place in the classroom but is taking place everywhere thanks to changes in the culture of learning.  The authors write that the foundation of the new culture of learning consists of two elements:  the first is a massive information network that provides access to learning about almost anything; the second is a bounded and structured environment that allows individuals to build and experiment within those boundaries.  According to Thomas and Brown, the combination of those two elements is what elevates the culture of learning to the promise that it holds for the future.

Online games and the collectives that develop around them are a prominent example of how individuals are able to learn through the collective participation of many players working together to share tips and through collaborative team-playing.  Thomas provides an example of a class that he taught on gaming at the University of Southern California and the extra efforts and enthusiasm expressed by the students as they explored the multi-player game Star Wars Galaxies.  World of Warcraft is another multi-player game described by the authors that is used for a comparison of the learning that takes place in a collective environment.

Collective learning is not limited to gaming, however.  Brown and Thomas discuss the experience of a person diagnosed with diabetes who consulted the website Diabetes Daily and participated in a number of the forums where patients discuss their problems and experiences living with diabetes.  The patient learned how to live with diabetes from the social interaction with others diagnosed with the disease.  In a new culture collective, people belong in order to learn.  In a classroom in the new culture of learning, students take an active role to create and provide the latest information to the collective, supplementing the role of the teacher.  According to the authors, collectives scale almost unlimitedly and their learning outcomes improve with increases in size and diversity when assisted by technology.

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Articles about transformations in higher education are being published daily, it seems.    Many of them focus on affordability and the fact that the increasing costs in higher education in the United States cannot continue to exceed inflation or the increase in earning power of Americans.  Very few of these articles, however, offer solutions or examples of solutions to the high cost conundrum.

In the September issue of Fast Company Magazine, Anya Kamenetz writes an interesting article entitled “How Web-Savvy Edupunks are Transforming American Higher Education.”  She begins the article by discussing how the internet and various applications or sites such as Google, YouTube Edu, iTunesU, Wikipedia, and Facebook have changed the way all of us share information.

Yet while colleges like MIT have placed all of their coursework online for free, an MIT degree costs about $189,000.  She cites Jim Groom, an “instructional technologist” at the University of Mary Washington as stating, “Colleges have become outrageously expensive, yet there remains a general refusal to acknowledge the implications of new technologies.”  According to Kamenetz, Groom coined the term “edupunk” to describe the high-tech do-it-yourself education.

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I had planned to followup my article about Apple with an article about the differences between my generation of computer users and my children’s generation.  The impetus for my original plan was watching my eight year old daughters search Google the other morning for the term “cute baby animal pictures.”  When I saw that Google was able to synthesize that request and deliver links to some very cute baby animals, I thought about the term Digital Native which I had first heard a few years ago from West Virginia’s First Lady, Gayle Manchin.  Gayle is a former elementary school teacher and is passionate about learning about ways in which technology can be used in education to assist teachers and children with the process of learning. 

The term she referenced originated with Marc Parensky, founder of Games2train and considered to be one of the world’s foremost experts on the relationship between games and gaming technology and the learning experiences of today’s young people.  Parensky holds Masters degrees from Yale, Middlebury and the Harvard School of Business and has been an advocate for the use of technology in classrooms for years.  Parensky has even worked with the Department of Defense to establish an educational program that embraces the use of games as positive educational tools.

The lesson I learned from observing my daughters at play was that children who have access to technology are able to utilize it and to think, act, and learn in ways that are vastly different than the way we learned years ago.

Today’s issue of Inside Higher Ed features an interview with John Palfrey and Urs Gasser, authors of Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives, which focuses significantly on data collected at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, where both work.  The two explore the digital context in which today’s young people are learning and analyze the impact of their digital environment on their learning experiences.

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