Off Course-On Target

What if the Secret to Success is Failure?

A recent NYT article “What if the Secret to Success is Failure?” is long by today's snack food reading standards but served up a VERY full course meal of great food for thought and is well worth your time to read no matter if you are a student, parent, teacher and indeed aren't we all of these simultaneously. 

I'm a huge fan of failure and remain puzzled and curious as to why it has come to be such a negative thing in many societies and communities.  Something to be avoided at all cost.  Maybe it is because I fail so often, many times every day, always have and hope I always will, that I have come to love failure.  What I love most is learning and I figured out a long time ago that learning and failure are inexorably linked and almost synonymous.  No learning without failure and no failure without learning.  Every time something goes wrong or does not work out for me, my first instinct is to ask "What is this trying to teach me?" or "What can I learn from this?" and each time I find the answer my learning goes up significantly.  Part of the reason perhaps that I also go for experiential learning every chance I can.  What I’ve learned along the way is that failure IS the “secret” to success in learning, love and life.

I mention all this for some context as to why this article resonates so deeply with me, along with my years as a high school teacher, a parent and an insatiably curious learner.  Learning is hard and figuring out how to do it well, especially in the more formal setting of education and training is particularly so.  I think we all know this and yet most discussions and programs seem to assume the opposite and come up with overly simplistic explanations of the problem and matching shallow solutions. 

It is therefore refreshing to see this complex challenge being treated with such seriousness and vigor as outlined in this article.  You may disagree with the specifics or perhaps the whole approach the two schools in this article are taking and I hope you will indeed reflect upon your experiences to critically consider their approaches.  However I also think your experiences will have shown you that “character traits” are more than anything else, the underlying factors leading to true success; a happy, meaningful, productive life.

Think about it; whether you are considering a new job applicant, a student, your children, your partner or best of all, the person you see in the mirror, don’t you find that it is traits such as

“zest, grit, self-control, social intelligence, gratitude, optimism and curiosity”

that have most determined your success?  Isn’t it when you have failed to do as well as you know you could in these areas that you have learned the most and gone on to be that much stronger, smarter and successful?

Whatever your answers and thoughts are to these questions, please do give this a read and your careful consideration.  I know many of you who follow my writing and speaking are in the learning, education and training fields and will find this particularly relevant.  Moreover though I think there is much to be learned here for every one of us snowflakes as we too strive to succeed a bit better each day at living a happy, meaningful and productive life. 

I hope you will get as much out of reading this article as much as I did and will give it your thoughtful consideration, talk about this notion of “character based learning” with your friends, family and colleagues and continue the conversation with your own posts, articles, FB updates, Tweets and talks,

Is Fit “It” When it comes to Great Learning!?

In what has become almost a mantra for me, one of the ways I often synthesize my focus on the Snowflake Effect of mass personalization is getting to “just right”; just the right things for just the right person at just the right time in just the right way on just the right medium, in just the right context…………… well, you get the idea. For the past few years what I’ve been finding is that this can all be taken down to a single word and concept; fit.

When you think about it, a good fit is essentially defined as getting it just right, just for you, just at that moment. This could be for something simple like a favorite shirt, or sweater or pair of shoes. You know the ones we tend to choose over all others whenever we can because when we wear them, and often wear them out, they fit us just right and make us feel just right. Often they are not in the best condition, the “fashionable” choice at the time or other factors more commonly used to make such choices. Yet, because our favorites fit so well and make us feel so good we choose them whenever possible. Great fit is also a lot like that comment about great art; I don’t know how to describe it but I know it when I see it. Great fit is extremely elusive and deeply personal It has been no surprise to me then to also observe that this context and concept of fit works very well for many other and perhaps more profound examples such as one’s life style, personal relationships and learning.

Fit for Me

As some of you may know for the past few years I’ve been conducting a personal experiment by setting off on a grand adventure to see the world from the perspective of the world’s oceans by living aboard my sailboat Learnativity.  So I’m typing this up sitting in the shade of my cockpit right now as I’m anchored off the small island of Malo near Neiafu in the Vava’u Group of islands in the Kingdom of Tonga and you can paste the lat/long of 18 39 56.2 S, 173 58 56.2 W into Google Earth or maps to see where that is and if you’re interested you can learn all about that on my Learnativity blog. 

However the reason I mention this is one of my examples of the use of fit.  What has been the biggest surprise to me of my adventures so far is how well this strange new life style and experiences fits me. I don’t come from any ancestral background of mariners, didn’t grow up around boats or the sea, and didn’t have any lifelong dream of sailing nor previous sailing experience. It is all very new and foreign to me. Yet it fits me to a T for some reason; the independence and freedom on one hand, the complete self reliance and dependence on myself I have for everything from navigation to power to water to food and everything in between.  I was guided to it by using serendipity as my guide, listening to my heart and my gut more than my head, and by paying attention to how well things fit as the way to know which way to go, what was working and what wasn’t, what to say yes to and when to say no.

Fit as a way to Better and Greater Learning?

In the case of learning, it seems clear to me that a great fit is necessary for great learning to take place. We learn the best and the most when it is just right for us, just at that time, just in that context. Great learning then seems to also condense down to getting the best fit. What fits you best at any one time won’t likely fit me best. What fits you best today won’t likely fit you best tomorrow because some of the conditions and context have changed. Perhaps this will help you understand why I am so focused, some would say obsessed, for the past many years with the critical need to transform most learning methods from those based on mass production and sameness to ones of mass personalization and uniqueness; the Snowflake Effect.

Think back to some of your most recent moments when you experienced truly great learning of some kind, often very serendipitously in that it wasn’t planned or expected. What made that learning so great for you? What was different about that moment and the many others when it didn’t work? In the literally thousands of times I’ve posed this question to individuals I’m speaking with they initially struggle to explain it yet almost always end up describing how it was just the right choice of words or pictures or experience at just the right time, when they were in just the right frame of mind, etc. In other words, when the learning was just the right fit.

Therefore I’d like to encourage all of us to consider using “fit” in this context and as a way to determine what characterizes great learning. What are the parameters we can use to determine fit when it comes to learning? Perhaps we are best to use things like outcomes and results to measure the learning itself, but these are all after the learning takes place. For me at least, the bigger question is how do we increase not only the frequency of truly great learning experiences for every person on the planet? And for that, the use of fit is extremely helpful.

Exponentially Increasing the Frequency of Great Learning Experiences

One of the more troubling trends I’ve long noticed is that when the conversation of great learning moments comes up, it is a very revealing and rewarding conversation until you ask when you last had a great learning moment or how many have you had in your life. The answers are troubling to me because they are usually many years ago and a number that leaves many fingers unused. Therefore, one of the questions (I have several) that figuratively keep me awake at night and gets me out of bed every morning is how do we change this? How do we increase the frequency of great learning experiences? And incremental increases, while welcome just won’t do it for me because I think it is possible, and I might argue necessary, to exponentially increase the frequency of great learning; from a few experiences in a lifetime to many of them every day, for every person!

How is this even imaginable you ask? The topic of many more conversations to come to be sure, but in short my awareness and attention to finding and determining the best fit has helped me increase the frequency of my great learning experiences. I wanted to share this with you so you can try this concept of “fit” on for size yourself, and see if paying attention to fit and what makes for a good fit, helps you experience more great learning moments? What does fit mean to you in this context? What are its key characteristics? And the list goes on.

Can’t wait to hear back from you in your comments, your writings and our future conversations.

Wayne & Ruby the Wonderdog
Aboard s/v Learnativity
18 39 56.2 S, 173 58 56.2 W
Neiafu, Vava'u, Kingdom of Tonga

Email:    [email protected]
Email @ sea:  [email protected]
FaceBook page for updates @ www.facebook.com/wayne.hodgins
Learnativity blog @    www.learnativity.typepad.com
OCOT blog @ http://waynehodgins.typepad.com
Skype:    whodgins
Twitter:  WWWayne
Text/SMS:  Send (short 140 character) Text msgs via Email to:  [email protected]

The Snowflake Effect on the World of Things

Look around you; anything that isn’t made by nature had to be designed and built by we mere humans and what I’ll be referring to here as “things”. The Snowflake Effect is causing dramatic changes in the world of things as they rapidly transform from being mass produced to mass personalized and in the process, are becoming snowflakes themselves.

In the coming weeks and months, I’d like to explore this very large and influential meta trend of both the Snowflake Effect of mass personalization and specifically the effect on “things”. My interest in doing so is that I believe this is ushering in a new era, what some have referred to as the “Next Industrial Revolution”, and even more so than the “first” Industrial Revolution I believe that this next one will cause and require an even more profound revolution in the world of learning, education and training for all of us.

Flexible manufacturing was one of the initial enablers of this transformation from mass production to mass customization, however this was barely the beginning. With the advent of more and more computer controlled design and machining, and more recently the introduction of affordable 3D printers and scanners, we are seeing an exponential increase in the personalization of individual items which can now be both designed and produced to match the unique context of the individual person and situation for no more and often less cost that previous mass produced things.

The Long Tail of Things

As striking as these changes are and will be, let’s PLEASE avoid our history of believing that each new era will completely eliminate all of what has come before. This is about disruptive innovation not disruptive elimination. We do not want or need every thing to be unique. Large scale items such as airplanes and cruise ships for example will likely continue to be produced in quantity, but even now these items are largely uniquely built to match the individual customer and be adapted to match some specific routes or conditions. Many such large scale items are already being designed and built such that they can be changed over time to match a contextual change, predicted or not. For example, several of the world’s Navies are building their newest ships in such a way that they can be reconfigured to match different contexts of use such as switching from a configuration that is best for a military situation to responding to a natural disaster.

There will also likely be a need for some mass produced parts where large numbers of exactly the same thing is just what we want such as with fasteners like screws, nuts and bolts. For an even longer time yet there will be instances where many people will want to have the exact same thing and there will continue to be fads and hits such as popular books, songs and movies. But these will be at the front end of the Long Tail and small in number. As you move down the exponential curve of the Long Tail, you get to more and more things for more and more people which have less and less in common.

Even if I really like the pen you just showed me and we can “print” one “just like it”, I will often want to modify it a little bit to better fit me. I’ll want it to be a bit shorter or more curved to better fit my hand, match the way I write or a be a bit heavier to match my personal preferences. The same dynamics will play out if this were a coffee cup, a pair of eyeglasses, a pair of shoes, or a chair. In this way there will be an equivalent Long Tail of things and it will be a spectrum with products falling at all points along the exponential curve towards uniqueness. However as we are seeing with the Long Tail effect on music, movies, books and the like, the transition will be such that the volume of objects down at the unique end of the tail will rise dramatically and become the majority in terms of both instances, business and learning.

The Internet of Things

Above and beyond being mass customized and personalized by their design and production, things are increasingly connected, networked and interconnected to each other and to ourselves as we use them. One version of this is often referred to as “The Internet of Things”. A commonly cited example is the way in which home appliances are being connected to each other and the net for everything from monitoring energy use, setting thermostats, timing of when best to turn things off and on. Or where all the items in your fridge are dynamically updating their status in terms of how full they are, their expiration date, peak freshness and so on to help you choose what’s best to make for dinner tonight and what to pick up at the grocery store on your way home. But as we’ll cover in future articles, “you ain’t seen nothing yet”! Start to think smaller and smarter and imagine and prepare yourself for things like “smart” and digital dust, dirt, pixels, locations, ink dots and paint. More on each of this in posts to follow.

Things are Becoming Snowflakes Too

In short products or “things” are going to increasingly be snowflakes themselves; alike perhaps but no two exactly the same. And just like us as unique individuals, as things become more like snowflakes, they too will start to have their own identity, their own networks, their own conversations and even their own “social networks”. Indeed, if you’re paying attention, many already do! One of many future topics we will cover here.

Snowflake Things Need Snowflake People & Learning

However it is the more far reaching and more latent effects of these changes, especially those on how, when, where and what we learn that excite me and motivate me to initiate this conversation with you. If these trends have not already captured your curiosity and fascination as they have mine, then I think they soon will and I hope to help in that process.  We need to seriously and deeply reconsider things such as core competencies and skills required for a world where mass personalization replaces mass production.  We need to rethink and redesign things like learning, teaching, training, content and the like to take advantage of the increasing new capabilities of mass personalization and have have personalized learning experiences be the norm for everyone every day.  As we gain the ability to do such things as copy, replicate, modify and mash up pretty much everything, not just the 2D and digital worlds, as easily as we now do with books, documents, music and video, we will face challenges such as what does original mean, is there a role for such things as copyright anymore and if you can have anything you want at your fingertips in an instant, what DO you really want and more so need?  All these some of the questions prompting me to start this conversation and to cover in the coming weeks and months.

Just as it was the change from an agrarian society to an industrial one that produced most of our current models for learning, education and training, so too will this next era shape us as a society both locally and globally. The revolution in the world of learning, and make no mistake it is truly deserving of this often overused word, is upon us and it is as daunting as it is exciting and powerful. Yet as has often been said, the best way to predict the future is to design your own, and it is my sincere hope and conviction that collectively, we can strategically and serendipitously lead the transformation of learning, training and education rather than have it happen to us. By exploring and better understanding current trends and directions of the Snowflake Effect on the world of “things”, we will be able to bring the power of mass personalization to the world of learning such that each of us experience and help others to experience great learning moments every day.

Seeing is believing 2.0?

Microsoft stock and business may be rather cold but their research work is HOT from what I’ve been seeing the past year. Let me bring but two recent examples to your attention and see if you don’t agree.  These are also more examples for my ongoing quest around “What if the impossible isn’t?” or WITII?

PIVOT

The first is one called MS Pivot which tries to enable us to see the web almost literally as a web rather than just a set of pages.  It works primarily with photos right now and I originally came across the underlying technology over a year ago when they were working on Photosynth, which is also equally worth checking out BTW, here is my previous post with my thoughts of how I see Photosynth technology being used.

As you watch, start to rethink your understanding of what search and filtering are really about and see some of the new possibilities Pivot enables.

SecondLight

The other bit of MS research to bring to your attention today is called SecondLight and for a metadata guy like me, this really catches my attention as a way to enable some truly powerful ways of visualizing underlying data, meta or not.  This one is really a case of where it is much easier to learn by watching rather than reading so check out the video below and you’ll quickly see what this is all about.  The first half of the video will show you what it does and the second half will show you how it works.  I’m pretty sure by the end you too will be excited as you start to imagine the possibilities for use and especially for learning.

Whatever you may think of Microsoft, this is a great pair of examples of the kind of research which major corporations can contribute to and which bode well for our future innovations and discoveries.  I hope that by bringing these capabilities to your attention we can collectively get better at “readiness for the unexpected” an the premature arrival of the future.

Related articles by Zemanta

• An In-Depth Look At Pivot, Microsoft's Newest Data Visualization Tool (techcrunch.com)
• http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2332945,00.asp

Laser, 3D Printer, and an Onion, OH MY!

Laser, 3D Printer, and an Onion, OH MY!

Feb 6, 2010

via blog.makerbot.com

How could I not post a quick note about this one!?  It is the 3D equivalent of time lapse photography.  IN this case a laser scans the growing onion plant every 24 hours and then the 3D printer creates a plastic model and places it on the conveyor to create a series of 3D "snapshots" of the growth of the plant.  What a great example of how new technology can enhance and promote creativity and learning.  What's not to like!?

Crowdsourced manufacturing?

Here is an interesting twist to the whole 3D printing and DIY manufacturing I've been following and writing about. Makerbot is unable to keep up with demand for their very cool $750 3D printer and so they have turned to their customer base and asked them to manufacture some of the parts for them.  Read on and I think you too will see see a whole new dimension of of both the crowdsourcing phenomena and on an even larger scale the beginnings of a new era in manufacturing and what some are calling the next industrial revolution.

Certainly this is all in the very early stages and has a long way to go before this is mainstream, but I think the implications are enormous and NOW is the time for us to begin thinking about how this will affect us and how we will be prepared to take full advantage as it evolves as I'm equally convinced that the rate of this change will be exponential like almost all other change.

As but one example, I am of the opinion that this and other changes are ushering in a new industrial revolution that will be as dramatic a change of our world as was the first industrial revolution and the move from an agrarian society to an industrial one.  One of the most important requirements will be an equal amount of change in the education and training required of the new workforce. Just as it was the demands of the first industrial revolution which drove most the educational and pedagogical models and systems we have still have today and I think we will see this same degree of influence from this next new industrial revolution.

MUCH more to follow ......

Makerbot is Asking You to Help Make More Makerbots

August 17th, 2009 by Aaron Saenz

So here’s a situation we’ve all been in. You just started a new company that builds and sells table top 3D printers. To save money, and be a badass, you use your 3D printers to make parts so you can build more 3D printers. Then, too late, you realize that you can’t keep up with your production schedule because your printer is too popular. Man, if I had a nickel…

Read more

via singularityhub.com

Lego + 3D Printing = Incredible Robots, Competitions & Learning

What could be better than a mashup of several of my favorites: Lego, Mindstorms, 3D printing and learning?! Check out the photos and video below and I thing you too will soon be imagining many more applications and implications.  Note too how, at least in my estimation, this exemplifies a wonderful integration and merging of the information age with the new/next industrial revolution.

Robotic Spider Melds Legos and 3-D Printing

• By Priya Ganapati   February 5, 2010 

Lego’s programmable robotics set Mindstorms is a fun toy for computing enthusiasts but if you really want to take it to the next level, check out Mark Weller’s project.

Weller, a machinist and technician at the McCoy School of Engineering at Midwestern State University, combined milled plastic pieces with the basic Lego Mindstorms set to create a robotic spider that can crawl and turn.

“I wanted to open students’ minds to go beyond ‘let’s put the parts together and program the robot,’” he says. “This project is more than sticking the wheels on a Lego set.” The school uses Lego Mindstorms to introduce freshman students to robotics.

The spider robot’s legs are based on a concept called the Klann linkage. A single leg has a six-bar linkage with a frame, crank, two rockers and two couplers connected with pivot joints. This transforms rotating motion into linear motion.

Weller says he created the spider’s legs from 3/8-inch plastic sheet stock on a 3-axis CNC mill. But it can also be made by a 3-D printer such as Makerbot and RepRap.

As the video shows, the robotic spider moves with grace and turns around with flair, even on a smooth surface.  Miller has posted the details of his Lego spider project and says he hopes 3-D printing enthusiasts will try it out.

Photos: Mark Weller

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• Lego Spider Robot (ubergizmo.com)
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Most Likely to Succeed? Is it possible to predict & hire great teachers?

Most Likely to Succeed

How do we hire when we can’t tell who’s right for the job?

by Malcolm Gladwell December 15, 2008

I really enjoy Malcolm Gladwell's writing and more so his curiosity and how he "thinks different".  I try to read as many of his columns as I can as they find a sweet spot for me of being long enough to explore a topic in some depth and let him tell a good story, yet be short enough that I can read them in one sitting along with the many other articles and posts I'm reading each day.

This New Yorker article focuses on the very tricky art of hiring practices, especially for teachers and exposes a lot of common myths about hiring and spotting of true talent for a given job or task.

You'll need to make it through his initial telling of the challenge in American football he refers to as "the quarterback problem" before you will get to his comparison and coverage of the importance and challenge of how to choose good to great teachers.  However it is well worth your time and I highly recommend reading the full article and see what you think and take away.

 Effective teachers have a gift for noticing—
 what one researcher calls “withitness.”

via www.newyorker.com             Read more

At the risk of spoiling the story for you, Malcolm makes that point that effective hiring practice for complex and critical roles such as teachers takes years and requires observation of the results achieved over this time.  This would suggest an apprenticeship type model and a radical shift from the way we currently recruit, reward and retain great teachers.  To be effective we need to treat each teacher as a unique individual and hire at this same level of uniqueness; one at a time.

Many would therefore probably place this into the "impossible" category but as you can likely guess I'll add it to my "What if the impossible isn't?" list.  And indeed Malcolm goes on to describe at least one example, financial planners, where this is both possible and being practiced.  For me this is yet another example of why we need to treat each situation, each job and each person as a unique individual.  Hence I see this, no doubt through my frosted glasses, as another excellent example of why The Snowflake Effect is so important and how it is affecting almost everything in our world.

Here are some of Malcolm's points which really got my attention:

"with enough data, it is possible to identify who the very good teachers are and who the very poor teachers are. What’s more—and this is the finding that has galvanized the educational world—the difference between good teachers and poor teachers turns out to be vast."

"Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a “bad” school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects.""After years of worrying about issues like school funding levels, class size, and curriculum design, many reformers have come to the conclusion that nothing matters more than finding people with the potential to be great teachers. But there’s a hitch: no one knows what a person with the potential to be a great teacher looks like.""Test scores, graduate degrees, and certifications—as much as they appear related to teaching prowess—turn out to be about as useful in predicting success as having a quarterback throw footballs into a bunch of garbage cans."

"The equivalent of that approach, in the N.F.L., would be for a team to give up trying to figure out who the “best” college quarterback is, and, instead, try out three or four “good” candidates.
 In teaching, the implications are even more profound. They suggest that we shouldn’t be raising standards. We should be lowering them, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don’t track with what we care about. Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree—and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before. That means that the profession needs to start the equivalent of Ed Deutschlander’s training camp. It needs an apprenticeship system that allows candidates to be rigorously evaluated."

"What does it say about a society that it devotes more care and patience to the selection of those who handle its money than of those who handle its children?"

I hope you will take the time to not only ready this article but to reflect upon it and contribute your reactions and ideas.  Is it possible to hire and retain great teachers?  Is it possible to raise the quality of teaching staff overall?  Would this "apprenticeship" type of model work for the teaching profession?

I think my favorite quote from Malcolm's article is:

"A prediction, in a field where prediction is not possible, is no more than a prejudice."

Augmented Identity & Reality = Augmented Cognition

Below is a nice combination of postings from Ewan McIntosh on face recognition based Augmented Reality (AR) apps and some thoughts from David Truss on the applications and implications of this when used in education.

I'm delighted and encouraged by the questions and issues Ewan and David raise as I see the implementation of AR as one of the many examples of exponential rates of change.  I'd also suggest you see through the clumsy use of "screens" and displays such as those on cameras and phones and instead think of these disappearing through the use of eye glasses, contact lenses and implants such that the notion of a screen or a display goes away and everything is just sensory input, visual in this case, to our brains, and what is being augmented is our cognitive capabilities more so that "reality".

Augmented Identity

Augmented Reality (AR) has been around for a while. Fans of Monday Night Football have always had the television advantage of ’seeing’ the first down line conveniently added for their viewing pleasure. A more advanced version of augmented reality can be seen here, where you can see information about all the nearest subway locations in New York superimposed onto your iPhone’s camera view.

And now from Ewan McIntosh I’m introduced to this application of Augmented Reality, possible due to face recognition software.

Ewan says, “…In a schools context this could be seen as lethal.” And then he asks:

“But there are some amazing potential side effects – what would yours be?”

via pairadimes.davidtruss.com

Infinitely Scalable Teaching = Limitless Learning

In order for the Snowflake Effect of mass customization and personalization to succeed when applied to learning, teaching and teachers will need need to scale exponentially.  Imagined within our historical and current definitions and assumptions this would be deemed impossible.  However I’ve had some recent experiences that have convinced me that both teaching and teachers can indeed scale exponentially and I am finding more and more examples of this all around.  Here are some examples of both as I continue on my quest of the question of “What if the impossible isn’t?”

Last year while my sailboat was safely moored in El Salvador, I went ashore for a month to increase my Spanish language skills from a level of zero to a larger positive number and to learn more of the cultures and geography of the surrounding countries. I went to three places—Antigua, tiny San Marcos La Laguna on gorgeous Lake Atitlán in Guatemala, and Suchitoto in El Salvador—and in each location, I enrolled in a “language school” where I spent five to six hours a day Monday to Friday for four weeks, engaged in a on-on-one conversation with a Spanish language teacher. I learned A LOT!  Not only a lot of Spanish, but also a lot about each area, country, culture, the people, and especially about learning. 

Language Learning Dating Services?

I’ve often explained that I think it would be better to call these language schools “language dating services” because what they do is find a good match between two people—not for romantic purposes, but for learning as a teacher and a student. It is VERY effective! Similar to dating services, it is up to each pair to decide how they will structure the teaching/learning relationship so that it is just right for both people in terms of pace, level, goals, focus, etc. In my case, I was most interested in being conversant in Spanish so that in everyday situations I could understand others and express myself aurally. I also wanted to have some ability to read and write Spanish. As a result, I did the same thing with each of my three very different teachers, we had an extended conversation for 5-6 hours each day. 

These were true conversations. They were unplanned and spontaneous with all the serendipity of any great conversation where the conversation wonderfully wanders along unexpected paths as you discover different areas of mutual interest. In my case, this included such things as conversations about the mutual interest in music, particularly what makes for “good music”, understanding the roles of technology in the day and life of average citizens in the different cities, and sharing our mutual love for great food and wine.

Note: I’m using the learning of a new language as the subject here but this same approach works well for just about any application I can think of. 

One of the biggest and best things I came away with was a new sense of how personalized learning AND teaching can scale exponentially and  how my notion of a future society of “Tearners” (Teacher + Learner = Tearner)—where each and every one of us are both teachers and learners—is both possible and already happening. If you’d like to read more about my experiences and thoughts on this form of language learning, please read these postings on my Learnativity blog:

• Learning Spanish, culture, geography and SO much more!
• Adios Antigua; Hola San Marcos le Laguna!

Do It Yourself (DIY) Learning via “Tearners”

One of the essential elements for enabling this kind of limitless learning and teaching is to enable and empower an “expert”—anyone who is significantly better than you are in some domain of interest—to be an effective teacher, often without even knowing they are doing so. Rethinking expertise in this way enables us to tap into the skills and knowledge that others have, which in most cases they are not even aware of. 

In the case of language learning for example, anyone who is a native speaker of a language you want to learn, including and perhaps especially children, can teach you what they don’t even know they know. The trick is in finding interesting, fun, and effective ways to do so. And as you’ll see in the following examples, and as was the case with one of my teachers, they don’t even need to know how to speak your language!

In my search for resources to assist with this type of limitless learning, I have found several good ones, including the book “Language Acquisition Made Practical” by Thomas and Elizabeth Brewster. Kevin Kelly featured this book in one of his “Cool Tools”  postings and you can read this concise review for an overview of the book and its methods. I particularly like Kevin’s typically insightful observation:

“Like realizing that you don't need a degree in anything to build your own house, learning that you can become fluent in another language without a course or classroom is deliciously radical.”

The following is an excerpt from this book and it will give you a better idea of how this works in language learning:

Production of Modifiers

Kino says a sentence with modifiers. You repeat the basic sentence without modifiers.

Kino: "The blue jug with the pretty flowers is on the high wooden shelf."
You: "The jug is on the shelf."

Then reverse roles -- he says a simple sentence and you embellish it.

Kino: "This is a book."
You: "This is a good book about the people of this country."
Kino: "This is a candle."
You: "This is a red candle."

Look around you. You can talk about virtually any object, then restate it with modifiers.

Word/Thing Association Game

By using these sentence patterns you can get extra drill on new vocabulary while talking with people. You can touch an object and ask "What is this?" They may answer, "This is Kefala." You can then touch a similar object and ask "Is this Kefala?" and they will answer positively or negatively.
If you are talking with children, this can become quite a game and give you lots of practice with new words. Children will often catch on, and participate with you in the game. First, you can ask the questions while they answer. Then you can trade roles and let them ask the questions while you try to answer. If you enter into the spirit of the game, everybody can have fun while you practice vocabulary.

 

As is often the case, this type of learning is not a new idea or method and as the authors point out this method was used by missionaries trying to learn other languages without the aid of any formal resources, such as books, curricula, classrooms, or teachers. I’m sure you can see how this method enables a form of limitless learning and why I’m so excited about  it. As you try it out and reflect upon it, I think you will also soon be able to apply most of the same techniques to many other subjects. I’ve used it for example to learn how to do wood carving and how to do whitewater kayaking.

Consider learning by doing and try using this both ways—as the learner the next time you need to learn something or as the teacher when you see a teachable moment to help someone benefit from your expertise.

I’d very much appreciate hearing back from you about your experience.

-- Wayne