[Videos] Building a Vision and Marketplace for Lifelong Learning

Forecast & Outlook: Learning Systems certainly have what it takes to become a ‘next big thing’ in the world of business.  (Sarcasm intended!)  Yes, we are still years away from personal learning systems becoming functional and widespread.  But, there are signs that conversations about a learning culture are shifting from  classroom to boardroom.  Company leaders are starting to realize that their workers are more productive when they see themselves as lifelong learners (not just people who have jobs).  The lifespan of relevant skill sets and mindsets are likely to become shorter as the global economy shifts gears.  And this includes factory, service and knowledge workers.  My forecast?  Companies, Regional and National economies will soon make significant investments in emerging Learning Systems as ‘learning’ becomes the perceived driver of global economic growth and quality of life for the next century.

Creating Institutions a Marketplace for Lifelong Learning?
What if the most forward looking conversations around the Future of Learning had less to do with present day notions of school reform, teachers, test scores, graduation rates, or the merits of online learning– and instead focused on rethinking the value and role of non-institutional learning, and empowering the ‘learner’ for a lifetime of continual learning.

What if we avoided prescribing incremental strategies and saved ourselves from the painful (and often futile) political battles of fighting incumbents and the status quo?  Instead we might start to explore more transformational concepts of cultures and marketplaces of learning that move beyond the notion of traditional institutional and life-stage based education.

A Culture & Marketplace for Learning
Changes over the next decade might give birth to a very different conversation about education and learning  based on more relevant concepts and expectations suited to the 21st century (e.g. software facilitated learning systems, Personal Learning Environments (PLEs), workplace learning, social learning, micro-courses, et al).  Life in the future might not be transformed by efforts to ‘de-institutionalize‘ education, but instead positively disrupted by the creation of a more expansive marketplace that serves 7 billion learners.  To get there, we might explore the differences of three sets of assumptions and sources of tension ahead:

1) Blending Institutional and Informal Learning
The first assumption to challenge is this belief that real learning is something that only occurs inside a classroom or the institution of ‘school’ or ‘workplace’.  This is the ‘teacher’ oriented world of education- and it needs more innovative institutions.   The alternative assumption to embrace is that learning is something that happens in the world, not inside a classroom or formal workplace.  This is the ‘learner’ oriented world – and it needs a marketplace!

Yes, we must work to improve our institutions (e.g. schools) but the biggest opportunities are developing learning experiences that permeate life outside of the classroom.

2) Shifting Expectations from Life stage to Lifelong Learning
The second assumption to challenge is this unspoken expectation that we are somehow ‘done’ with learning after we graduate high school or college (or when we get hired).    Continual learning remains an elusive idea for most people and organizations.   The alternative assumption is that learning is something that continues throughout our entire lifetime and is not bound by a ‘semester’ or a ‘grade level’-  or a job title.  Instead of framing education around stage-based institutions (elementary to higher education) and degrees, how do we rethink the personalization of skills-building over a lifetime?

3) Start with the Vision of a ‘Post PC’ Web of Learning
Forget about ‘learning on a computer’.  Let go of this image of sitting in front of a computer screen reading text as the future of digital learning!  Banish these images from your head as we explore the future of learning culture.

The web has delivered on its promise of creating ‘access to information’, but we are still building systems that enable genuine learning in any environment!  We must imagine a future in which we can access and learn from the web while we are walking in a forest, or buying a bottle of wine in a store.  Mobile devices are the first step, but not the last.  New interfaces and web experiences are being developed that integrate new forms of interactions based on voice and natural language conversations… video based augmented reality and ‘smart’ object experiences.

The web is being brought into the physical world…

Learning as the Economic Driver of the 21st Century
I suspect that the next decade might give birth to new cultural expectations, business models and marketplace supported learning platforms that make a cleaner break from the 20th century worldviews of ‘education’.  But before we get there, we will need leaders capable of clearly communicating a new  vision that has less  to do with test scores or ‘school’ reform, and more to do with engaging people around an aspiration for continual learning and curiosity based living.

Until we have that vision communicated by national and international leaders, the best visions of continual learning and curiosity based living are promo commercials from NatGeo and Discovery Channel.  But I’m a sucker for viral videos- and they certainly capture the spirit of a culture of learning.

National Geographic: If. Live Curious video

Discovery Channel’s I Love the World song:

Original Version

My delicious tags:

http://delicious.com/garrygolden/learning

Tagged as: business, economy, education, globalization, learning