In the first part of this posting, I discussed the coming world of self-aware objects, along with co-mingled realspace and dataspace. I then closed with a short mention of a broken “social contract.” Social contracts deal with the unstated agreement that the individual makes with the larger society to establish and maintain social peace—that is, “I behave by these rules and in return you give me this back.”
I grew up in Detroit, where the social contract was roughly:
“I work for Ford's, they set the work rules, lay me off every August for model changeover, and do overtime when told. In return, I get annual raises, a solid set of health benefits, a paid pension and can pass my job on to my children so they can live the same middle-class life I’ve enjoyed.”
And the educational system reinforced—was in fact an integral part of—that contract.
Today, as we all know, that’s not the deal anymore. Pensions are no longer a benefit; they’re a liability to be shed. Lifetime employment has been replaced by a radical version of “employment at will.” At the deepest level, risk is being shifted from the employer to the employee. That’s the core distinction between defined benefit and defined contribution pension programs.
And we should be OK with that. Remember, we really don’t have a lot of choice. So, if we’re going to get serious about being educators, we have to change our relationship with learners. More radically, we have to support our learners by helping them to shift how they think about the way they make their way in the world. In line with Foucault’s analysis of power, knowledge and their embedment in institutions like social contracts, like lots of other seemingly neutral activities, instructional design embeds a view of the world. In this case, the world view is about power structures, and therefore, it’s about implicitly shared responsibilities.
This view is all well and good, and pretty much well accepted. But there’s a question buried in this articulation: in a rapidly-evolving world, how can I, as an educator, stay ahead of the needs of my audience? How can I even know what problems they confront in job performance, to say nothing of how to help them address those issues in a timely manner? And finally, can any of this be done within the current (albeit broken) social contract? My argument here is that the answer is "no".
So here’s my proposal: we need a new social contract, one that reflects these changed conditions, and mediates our shared responsibilities between the individual and the society and its instruments. Specifically in this context, we need a new view of how learning occurs in the context of the world we live in and we need it starting today.
Simply put, we need a new theory of learning. No current terminology exists for this yet, so bear with me for a second. If pedagogy guides us on how children learn, and androgogy helps us to engage adults in learning in a traditional setting, what can we call the type of learning that is required in a radically speeded-up, decentralized environment—especially one in which the world itself can participate in the experience?
Let’s call it “autogogy” for the sake of this discussion. Nice word…now what does it mean? For me, it means radical self-sufficiency in learning. I, the learner, am closer to the career decisions I confront than anybody else. By the time my learning needs get sent up the system and the solution comes back down, it’s too late to be effective…way too late. I, the learner, need to be the driver and the leader in my personal career learning. I need to own it and I need to make the crucial decisions. Because given the risk-shifting that’s taken place, I’m going to be the one who lives with the consequences.
From the other perspective discussed earlier—the coming of a world populated with self-aware objects—we could call it “nanogogy” in recognition that the learning will be constructed out of hundreds of tiny learning events, not large structured curricula. This is bottom-up, learner-driven, perpetual learning.
And what does this say about the educator to learner relationship? For me, it means that the educator becomes a servant of the learner. It means that educators (myself included) have to think about becoming editors, not leaders. I’m drawn to the newsroom model of learning. In a newsroom, the editors provide direction, organization, and quality control. They don’t make judgments about what an individual reader will find important. They set an overall editorial tone—think about the Wall Street Journal vs. the New York Times—but they report the same basic universe of news.
In the future, I think learning will be consumed in a way that is similar to how news is acquired more and more today: grazing, self-constructed, driven by the consumer’s view of importance. I know this idea bothers people, especially those who focus on the integrity of the learning experience. But “integrity” gets redefined by circumstance. I’m arguing that in the next five to 20 years, the educator’s job will be to provide resources and the meta-skills that allow those resources to be used by the learner, in service of the learner’s individual goals. And the largest and hardest of those skills will be to learn how to take responsibility for our own life as a career, living as a professional, no matter what our job description might be.
That’s a pretty large order, especially for those of us invested in the current order and its power structures. But we’ve got pretty large problems to address, so the remedy ought to match the scale of the problems, don’t you think?
Guest blogger Murry Christensen has 20+ years of experience in solving the people-process-technology equation. He currently works for JetBlue Airways as Director Learning Technologies, where he applies the range of available technologies to the learning and performance needs of the premier provider of low-cost air transport services.
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