John Seely Brown: Rethinking the Learning and the Community Library in the Networked Age
One of my favorite bloggers, Irving Wladawsky-Berger, writes today about a presentation he recently heard by John Seely Brown on Learning and the Community Library. (Slides are attached…to download them click on the image below). After having just completed an innovation boot camp with the American Library Association, I believe that John Seely Brown has identified a very important niche that libraries can play in new forms of technology-enabled learning. Here's what Wladawky-Berger has to say about the ideas here:
Another very important way kids are learning all kinds of new skills is by participating in the virtual worlds emerging around game playing, especially massively multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft and Second Life. What kinds of skills does it take to be good at such virtual world games? John listed among others: pattern recognition; continuous decision making; conquering immense complexity; and constant learning. World of Warcraft has the notion of “Guilds”, and John also listed the skills needed by a good Guild Master: create a vision and set of values to attract others to your Guild; find, evaluate and then recruit players that have a set of diverse skills and which fit with your norms; create a platform for apprenticeship and the teaching of new Guild members; orchestrate group strategy and governance; and create, sell and adhere to the governance principles of the guild and adjudicate disputes. Are we talking about a game, or are we talking about the fundamentals for organizational leadership?
The world of multi-player online games seems to be providing us with more and more clues as to the kinds of skills and training tools that we need for the dynamic virtual work environments that seem to be increasingly important in the future. This came up, for example, in IBM’s recent Global Innovation Outlook in which one of the top recommendations is to look at massively multiplayer online games as one way of teaching the leadership qualities needed in the emerging world of massively distributed virtual work environments.
Formal education and schools have a major role to play in building the store of knowledge, teaching the core materials needed for critical thinking and providing institutional certification of expertise. But, if we insist that formal education is the only way to learn, we will invariably fail, both because there are limits to what you can teach formally and because considerable numbers of people learn differently and are thus left out of formal education, which can focus only on the majority. That is why it is so important to look for innovations in education amidst all the different ways we learn, and to focus particularly on the new ways people are learning informally, especially as part of communities that tinker, design, play games, create, remix and generally learn by doing things they really like to do.
Some of these communities will be virtual, with members distributed all over the world; some will be physical, with members living in the same towns and neighborhoods; and some will be a hybrid of the two. Libraries, which are pervasive throughout the US, can play a unique role by becoming social spaces for informal learning in their local communities.
Given that our knowledge-based age is basically an age when learning is more important than ever, there may be no more critical innovation challenge for us.
