
I find this book insightful and interesting. The authors portrayed an exciting vision about the future of education in the digital age. When people think about learning, they think about classrooms. In this book, it depicts the kind of learning that is relevant to the super fast changing world we are in. Here below a few examples:
Peer to peer learning- a community of similarly minded people who help each other learn and meet the very particular set of needs that he or she has. The real learning takes place through comments, looking at how other people solved problems. The ability to draw upon a vast set of resources,to ask questions, and to build on others' work. In the community, everyone learns from one another. A Website called Diabetes Daily - a forum for someone who diagnosed with diabetes who visit the site every day to share their experiences, insights, successes, failures and, on occasion, tragedies. The forum provided information that wasn't available from medical professionals, you learnt what questions to ask your doctor, you can learn how to tell a good doctor from a bad one and learn daily practices for managing the disease. Doctors may provide medical advice, but online communities provide much needed social advice.
Playing to Learn- Children use toys, play and imagination to understand the world as they encounter new places, people, things and ideas. In the adult learning culture, the authors advocated that the same imagination and play apply. A child playing with a new toy and an adult logging onto the Internet, for example, both wonder " What do i do now? How do I handle this new situation, process this new information and make sense of this new world." Through games, we ask productive questions, where the answers we find become part of our information, or can even find better and more interesting questions to solve future problems. Playing involves certain level of experimentation as well and some kind of feedback may emerge out of play that creates learning in itself. The fusion of play, experimentation and questions form a new culture of learning.
John Seely Brown shares in this video about exploring play, innovation and the cultivation of imagination as the cornerstones of learning. Enjoy!