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RISTOverview: How Learning Occurs and Influencing Factors KNOWN AS JSB Bonnie Nixon * 12.1.15 * Pepperdine GSEP

John Seely Brown (JSB) believes learning occurs not as a response to teaching, but rather as a result of a social framework that fosters learning. A key factor influencing the important role in the evolution of business and societal interaction is the ubiquity of information technology (IT). “We must move beyond the traditional view of teaching as the delivery of information”. JSB claims that credentials, degrees and diplomas are problematic without having gained access to Communities of Practice. Students end up with a label but without the experience it’s meant to signify. Our educational systems need to move from being information traffickers to knowledge creators.

Key ContributionsBOOK - The Social Life of Information. Tunnel Vision: where the interaction of IT and people is downplayed. Humanities are more important than ever.

BOOK - Learning in the Digital Age: Students have developed a new digital literacy with abilities to communicate with moving and still images, sound and other media.

1. Information navigation is the key component – Surfing & Browsing

2. Authority- based lecture model to discovery-based learning

3. Learning is more concrete vs. abstract and social vs. cognitive.

BOOK - Toward a New Epistemology for Learning and BOOK - A New Culture of Learning:4. As we look to the future of Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS), we must ask ourselves “What do we really

know about learning? Not Enough.”5. Our fundamental assumptions are being reexamined and this will offer us powerful new paradigms and

new possibilities for learning technology.6. Information too need to embed transparency so that we more fully understand overall processes of which

we are a part and to which we contribute. Technology design must remain connected to the world. 7. We have to reflect on the environment and context in which both users and tools are embedded and

allow learners to deploy inventive problem-solving skills and not over-constrain kinds of reasoning they support.

BOOK - Push to Pull: Move from a world of stocks to a world of flows. Move from scalable efficiency towards the notion of scalable learning. JSB suggests we learn how to scale John Dewey and Montessori in our school systems and focus more on user center learning and connected learning. We need to cultivate a resilient mindset in our students – to change, adapt & re-conceptualize.

Criticism on John Seely Brown’s WorkSome formal educators and traditionalists resisting change are more focused on the importance of content versus context, In his words, formal educators also speak out against the petri dish model but situated learning still takes the day. JSB does not believe that technology replaces great teachers! Other Theorists Perspectives on JSB’s Work

Paul Duguid wrote The Social Life of Information with JSB. He states that as society is coming to need life-long, ubiquitous learning, we can no longer afford to leave learning, and in particular learning technology, to schools and school time alone.

Tunnel design produces technologies that in Edward Tenner’s phrase “bite back”. Technologies create as many problems as they solve with unintended consequences of design and by neglecting resources lying outside the tight focus of information.

L. B. Resnick says that if we are looking at learning technology, we need to be careful not to risk reinforcing the division that already exists between the problematic learning in schools and the more successful learning encountered elsewhere.

M Planyi, talks about explicit and tacit ---- JSB reinforces this by stating that many theorists overlook the fine balance between the implicit and the explicit in human cognition and the essential interplay between mind and world in sense making.

Caroline Haythornthwaite writes that an information ecology has arose in response to silo-oriented views of information and its management which directs attention to how information flows through organizations and relevant ecological bases of people.

David Weinberger “In the internet age, knowledge has moved onto networks. There is more knowledge than ever, but it’s different. Topics have no boundaries; nobody agrees on anything.

References

References 1. JSB - Toward a New Epistemology for Learning, Learning in the

Digital Age, The Power of Pull, A New Culture of Learning, The Only Sustainable Edge and more than 100 Papers.

2. Center for Business Ethics at Bentley College, Dept. of Accountancy and Computer Information Systems, Bentley College, Waltham, MA. Blackwell Publishers 2001

3. L.B. Resnick, Knowing, Learning and Towards a Generative Theory of Bugs (Paper)

4. M. Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Garden City, NY: Doubleday,1966). 5. International Perspectives on Home Education – Paula Rothermel

(2015) , Palgrave Macmillan6. P. Duguid and J.S. Brown (2000) The Social Life of Information.

Boston, MA; Harvard University Press and (1991) paper on Organizational Learning and Communities-of-Practice in Organization Science, 2(1): 40-57

7. E-learning Theory & Practice, Caroline Haythornthwaite and Richard Andrews

8. Edward Tenner, Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences (1997) Vintage Press

Career MilestonesCurrently Visiting USC Scholar

Co-Chairman, Deloitte Center for Edge

1980 - 2000

Chief Scientist of Xerox Corporation

Director, Palo Alto Research Ctr. (PARC)

Co Founder, Institute for Research on Learning (IRL)

1962 Brown University BA Mathematics & Physics

1970 University of Michigan PhD Computer and Communication Sciences

Currently Holds 8 Honorary Degrees

Born in 1940. An Avid Reader & Motorcyclist

“Information is critical to every part of life but it is not useful to address people as information processors or to try to redefine complex human issues such as trust as simply information.” Interestingly, JSB states that he was a horrible student as a child and was late at the official game.

Shared Cognition Versus Individual “We need new strategies and tools to learn, work, play and create meaning. We also need unlearning, the freedom to fail and for this play is essential. Our old institutions aren’t hacking it well”.

“Knowledge is a process of social construction. People evidently learn communally, but they are usually taught individually. We need to support Communal Learning and transform pedagogical assumptions implicit in practice of teaching”.

Part scientist, part artist and part strategist, JSB’s views are unique and distinguished by a broad view of the human contexts in which technologies operate. He has a healthy skepticism about whether or not change always represents genuine progress and sees that today’s digital kids think of ICT as something akin to oxygen where they meet, play, date and learn. Spent time using application of technology to rethink the nature of work and institutional architectures that enable deep learning across organizational boundaries.