Open: How We’ll Work, Live and Learn In The Future

by David Price

Because it’s a relatively simple task to train workers doing commodity jobs, they can be sourced anywhere in the world. Gee and Shaffer argue that the US education system is still preparing students for commodity jobs, and thus facing overwhelming competition from developing countries, when it should be educating and training for ‘innovation jobs’, which are less easily outsourced.

We’ve been hearing for a long time about how the future will require us all to have ‘portfolio careers’. Our kids are less likely to be applying for jobs and more likely to be bidding for contracts. I speak from personal experience, here. At the time of writing, both my sons are in their mid-twenties, and both bid for IT-related contracts on a variety of auction sites. In order to try to understand how much the labour market was changing, I visited one of the sites they are registered with. I’d strongly recommend that you do too, because here’s where you’ll find the future, except it’s happening now.

“We'll need to see a bigger emphasis on asset-based economics that asks 'what do we already have?'. Just about all our approaches to formal education, across all subjects, promote a narrow way of thinking that reinforces our dominant economic paradigm. We need asset-based approaches to education – what do you already know, what have you got to share, what can we build on?”

Companies like Airbnb (let out a room in your house), Google-backed RelayRides (peer-to-peer car lending), Lending Club (peer-to-peer loans service) and Streetbank (share your under-used tools and skills) could either be seen as confirmation of an age of austerity, or an altruistic and ingenious way around it. One person’s apocalypse is another’s Aquarius.

It’s often said that a time-traveller from the 19th century, beamed into today’s world, would be bewildered by everything he witnessed, but would instantly feel comfortable in a school.

We’re becoming increasingly dissatisfied, and consequently disengaged, from the way we learn in the formal space, when measured against the open learning we do in the social space. It’s why North London rapper, Suli Breaks says, in his viral video of 2013, that he ‘loves education, but hates school’ and why workers avoid office-based training programmes, but eagerly take part in weekly Twitter discussions with colleagues around the world.

E-learning in colleges and universities suffered the same fate as the ‘interactive whiteboard’ in schools: a quick hop from ‘this changes everything’ to ‘well, that didn’t work’. Digital technologies will no more solve the so-called ‘crisis in education’ than airbags will stop drivers from having accidents.

How, I asked, had he managed to acquire a skill that takes years of mentored study? “Oh, some English bloke spent a few years over there, and stuck a bunch of free modules up on the net. I just taught myself by following them.”

Encouraging learners to share what they know, and constructing knowledge together, subtly shifts our expectation of teachers and other leaders of learning: from giving authoritative answers to asking challenging questions; from the sage on the stage, to the guide on the side.

The best learning professionals appreciate the complexity of the dramatic changes we’re witnessing, and the implications for how we structure teaching and learning. Advancements in what we now know, in technology, neuroscience, emotional intelligence, self-perception, and much more, are making thoughtful practitioners fundamentally re-evaluate their work. The imperative now is not to incrementally improve traditional models, but to rethink everything, to make it ‘open’. The public debate, however,

Why, for example, should the end-users of formal education – students – be satisfied with attending a physical centre five days a week, using technology that, in many schools, is slower and more restrictive than the tablet or mobile phone that they carry with them (but are usually prevented from using) when in school? Why should we continue to group young people by the year they were born, to study subjects copied from 19th-century universities, when their passion outside school is to develop skills, learning alongside people of all ages, effectively organising their own ‘curriculum’?

Polyani, however, argued that when it comes to learning, true objectivity is impossible, since all acts of discovery are personal and fuelled by strong motivations and commitments. Rather than being

The really important aspect of tacit learning, as any apprentice will tell you, is that it’s almost a process of osmosis. You gain more insight from simply being around someone, and sharing experiences with them, than you would do by explicit instruction. There’s nothing new in this revelation: it was, after all, Confucius who said “I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand”. Tacit knowledge is gained most frequently through ‘action learning’, working with others on problems, acting and then reflecting on those actions.

The wisest course of action is to create the right learning environment, culture and context, which brings people together to learn from each other. The old joke that ‘collaboration is an unnatural act between non-consenting adults’ may have had its roots in corporations trying to break down silo mentalities. But if ‘open’ tells us anything, it points to a realisation that we have to understand how people learn when they have a choice (in what to learn, and who to learn with) and bring that into the places where they are required to learn.

The blocking of social media sites in schools – the default position in the US and UK – not only inhibits learning, it does nothing to help our kids develop the digital literacy skills (knowing which information sources can be trusted, how to verify accuracy, etc.) they will need beyond school.

If collaboration is a headache for learning in the workplace, it’s hard to know where to start with schools. First, most schools don’t call it ‘sharing’ anyway – they call it ‘cheating’. Think about it for a moment: the kids who are now in school will be entering a workplace where internal and external collaboration is the work. We prepare them for this interconnected world, by insisting that almost everything they do, every piece of work they submit, is their own work, not the fruits of working with others, because every student has to have an individual, rigorously assessed, accountable grade – if they don’t, the entire examinations system collapses like a deck of cards.

Whilst a systemic obsession with testing deprives our students of the opportunity to learn the much-needed skills of collaboration, there are few such blockages to teachers working more collaboratively. Teaching, however, remains one of the most private professions. Schools and colleges have the freedom to arrange teachers’ and lecturers’ workloads so that teaching and learning can become a shared activity, but rarely exercise that freedom.

Since these aspects of learning are neither valued, nor discussed, schools have little incentive to become the kind of learning commons described elsewhere. That’s why ‘open’ is dependent upon context – government’s insistence on openness has led to schools becoming enclosed, overly focused on data and test results.

“If you have a work culture where bringing your mistakes to the table every week is a normal thing to do, it feels less like failing and more like learning”.

Just as Gap’s managers were afraid that handing over the responsibility for ‘being there’ to staff would result in mass indolence, schools and universities fret that giving more freedoms and responsibilities to learners will result in empty classrooms, missed targets and the curriculum not being ‘covered’.

Yet, one of the longest-established radical experiments in learner freedoms, Summerhill School, founded by A. S. Neill in 1921, has always given learners the choice of what they learn, or indeed whether to attend classes or not. Received wisdom would predict that without strict discipline and highly-structured learning programmes, young children would behave ‘irresponsibly’. The school’s exam results, however, are better than average, and the English government’s schools inspectorate in 2011 deemed Summerhill ‘good with many outstanding features’. The great American philosopher, John Dewey, once said, “Schools should teach everything that anyone is interested in learning”. You’ve got to admit, it’s hard to argue against that as a mission statement.

attempts to make schools ‘more accountable’ for their test scores leave teachers torn between what psychologist Barry Schwartz calls ‘doing the right thing and doing the required thing’. The right thing is to teach students through personalised, flexible methods, according to their needs, interests and aspirations; the required thing is to ‘turnaround’ test scores, by ‘teaching to the test’ or, worse, ‘gaming’ the system.

Successive US federal administrations have sought to improve school standards through high accountability. The pressure this puts upon schools at risk of closure and teachers – with test scores linked to pay rates – is intense. During 2011/12 a series of allegations emerged of inner-city schools in New York, Washington DC, Atlanta and Philadelphia ‘cheating’ on student test scores in order to hit accountability targets. Undoubtedly a case of fear producing wrong figures.

The result of doing the required thing, above the right thing, is what Schwartz describes as a ‘de-moral-ised’ profession. The double tragedy is that, in addition to the pressure put on teachers – 50 percent of new teachers in the US leave the profession within their first five years – there’s growing evidence that the over-reliance on ...

It seems that we could learn a lot about trust from Nordic educators. In 2009 students in Danish schools were allowed to access the internet during final examinations. They could use any sites, but were not allowed to message or email each other. The Danish government argued, with devastating logic that if the internet is so much a part of daily life, it should be included in classrooms and exams. One of the teachers leading the pilot was asked by the BBC what precautions were put in place to prevent cheating. “The main precaution”, she replied, “is that we trust them.” You can’t say fairer than that, can you?

Those that are ahead of the curve, like Google and Zappos, are finding that SOFT is not just good for customer and employee relations, it’s good for turnover, too. Those that are dragging their heels, like the UK and US education authorities, are not only struggling with disengaged and demoralised staff, they are seeing no increase in performance, despite a whole heap of greater accountability.

Because outside of work, school or college, we, the learners, can be in charge, it is ‘free’ time. In the social (and increasingly virtual) spaces, learning isn’t done to us, it’s done by us. We have no compulsory training courses to attend, no national curriculum we’re forced to follow.

So, because we are learning, simply for the love of it, we create a learning commons. And because the technology allows us to, we’ve made it global. With notable exceptions (and we’ll look at them in detail later) most of the organised learning that occurs in corporations and in schools has been distorted by enclosures, separating learning into ‘subjects’ and learners into units of production. It’s the equivalent of erecting fences on 17th-century common land in order to make farming more efficient. Economically, it may have been effective (although some would dispute that), but the sense of common good was lost. Similarly, enclosing learning may have efficiently processed learners and served employers needs during an industrial era, but it’s now an anachronism.

The most innovative learning spaces are open, reciprocal and participatory – learning doesn’t really work as a spectator sport, as any disengaged school kid will confirm.

Is it the educational system that grinds the enthusiasm out of our teachers? Perhaps teachers now expect compliance, and therefore can’t cope if they see their students passionate about their learning? I once watched a teacher eject a student for being too excited about the task in hand. When I asked why he’d done so, he said that ‘If I allow one to get excited, they’ll all think it’s OK, and then it would be chaos!’ Gosh, a classroom full of excited learners – we can’t have that, can we?

But it isn’t just in school where we have issues with passion. The office staff training sessions have become such a rich source of parody (witness ‘The Office’ sitcom staff training episode) that they point to a deep truth: the formal learning environment doesn’t cope very well with either passionate educators or learners. Of course, there are millions of committed, passionate teachers out there in our classrooms – we just find it difficult to value them.

The trouble is, nothing about the industrial metaphor of learning is appropriate for the post-industrial age we’re living in. Apart from a small number of innovative companies, schools and colleges, we seem unable to rethink learning for the knowledge age. In part, this is because much of what is said about the process of education avoids any reference to how people actually learn.

No one can be ‘made’ to learn anything: for knowledge and understanding to stick, we have to have learner intent. The quality of one’s learning is directly related to our desire to learn. This is why progress made in learning socially, voluntarily, is invariably far greater than in the formal, compulsory context.

We can’t motivate learners to learn: many teachers believe it’s their job to motivate their students. It’s not. They can only truly motivate themselves. But a great teacher helps learners see the relevance which drives self-motivation – why learning something will make a difference in their lives.

Engagement precedes learning: learning becomes an uphill struggle without deep absorption in a task, (what the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls being ‘in the flow’ – unaware of time passing). Learning without engagement is likely to be su...

When it comes to learning, informal beats formal: the organisation learning expert, Jay Cross, asserts that between 70 and 90 percent of learning in organisations is informally acquired. When surveyed, there appears to be a consensus among learning and development officers of a 70:20:10 learning ratio at play: 70 percent of learning is gained on the job, through experience; 20 percent is gained through coaching or mentoring; 10 percent is through formal, structured courses. Cross further claims that formal learning is the least efficient: ‘study after study has shown that only about 15 percent of what's learned in a formal setting is ever actually applied on the job’. Similar24 surveys conducted with you...

Recalling information is not the same as knowing: industrial teaching strategies favour retention and recollection, and formulaic solutions to problems, rather than higher-order or critical-thinking skills. I can study the actions of a swimmer, recall the necessary coordination of movements, so that I could be said to know ‘about’ swimming. But I still don’t know ‘how’ to swim. That requires repeated application of such knowledge, until some level of aquatic mastery (i.e. not sinking) is acquired. Schools are under pressure to get students to ‘know about’ a large amount of content, so that it can be success...

An individual’s capacity to learn is constantly changing, and is affected by a wide range of personal self-perceptions: Stanford Professor Carol Dweck, in her book ‘Mindset’, powerfully argues that a learner with a fixed mindset, believing their intelligence is limited, and a product of brains and talent, rather than effort, will learn less well than a learner with a growth mindset who recognises their own potential, and capacity for improvement. How we think we learn – in...

If you’ve ever wondered why you can’t remember much of what you learned in schools just a couple of years after leaving, it’s probably because most of the above list was ignored while teaching you. The process of learning is an intensely personal one and, as much as we’d like...

There’s one further side-effect of the industrialisation of learning: it invariably becomes a corporate activity, carried out for personal, or corporate, profit or gain. So, teachers in schools are now judged solely by their ability to improve test scores. Learning and development managers in corporations are beset by the n...

I’m aware that advocating participation, passion and purpose is all very well, but it will cut no ice with those hardened by the school of ‘deliverology’ unless it can be proven to be more effective, and more efficient. Examples of great learning commons in the formal sphere may still be in the minority, but they are growing, and they are highly successful. In the next few chapters, we will see how creating a social learning environment can make a company a powerhouse of invention, how giving away your intellectual assets can restore a failing company to its former greatness and how schools can propel college and employment statistics off the charts by encouraging students to co-design their learning.

Internationally, student engagement is unevenly distributed. Engagement has dramatically fallen in countries, like England and the United States, where anxiety over ‘international competitiveness’ has led to a deadening emphasis upon high-stakes national standardised testing. In these countries, many kids view schools, not as places of exploration, but as exam factories.

The irony is that student outcomes improve in those countries where a greater emphasis upon engagement goes alongside a lessening of importance on high-stakes testing. As writer Alfie Kohn has noted, ‘when interest appears, achievement usually follows’.35

Sadly, rather than becoming intentional about engagement, too many education leaders waste time working out which lever to pull to force teachers and students to do more, work harder, while teachers waste time coming up with ways to deflect blame. And, at the end of the line, those to whom learning is done waste time pretending to be interested.

There’s another reason why immediacy matters. Research in neuroscience suggests that every time you post a request on Twitter for a particular reference, or news report you missed, and you get an immediate response, you get a little dopamine hit.38 It turns out that finding information that provides a quick solution to a problem helps ‘stamp’ the memory in our brain and ‘attaches motivational importance to otherwise neutral environmental stimuli’. In other words, Just-In-Time learning is more likely to stick, while Just-In-Case learning is Teflon-coated.

If you’re new to video gaming, this might all seem a bit nerdy. Maybe, but you should know that one of FoldIt’s 2012’s puzzles was to identify a folded-protein structure, made by HIV monkeys, which had eluded scientists for 15 years. Scott’s team was able to work it out in 10 days. Does that sound like fun?

Edison maintained ‘I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.’

Learning isn't just the taking in, but it's the application. It's thinking about how we're going to use what we're taking in and apply it in the moment of need,

“So, we don’t make mistakes at WD-40 company. We have ‘learning moments’. We had to start rewarding people for telling us that they’d screwed up. Not that they’d screwed up in a negative way, but that they’d screwed up in a positive way, and that they’d learned something from it.”

Senge is saying that the era of top-down change, driven by a heroic-leader, is at an end; that if institutions and the people who work in them are to survive, then change needs to be cultivated, not driven. Senge argues that new growth comes through personal commitment, not compliance: